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AG’s Miko Matsumura
hosted a meet-up of customers, vendors, and press interested in cloud
computing this week in Santa Clara, California. Miko organized a very
good panel of presenters, including
Michael Crandell from RightScale.com
to talk about cloud infrastructure management, Tom Lounibos from SOASTA to talk about
testing in cloud environments, (there were others but I had to take
myself away for sales calls.)
Cloud computing delivers many benefits to the test vendors:
Cloud computing delivers many benefits to the test vendors:
- Provisioning hardware to generate load just got a lot easier, and much less expensive. Cloud computing environments are used at commodity pricing.
- Cloud computing enables load generation from multiple geographical locations to more closely simulate real world user environments that previously available. For example, run a test from Asia and Europe on RackSpace, from Eastern US with Amazon EC2, and GoGrid in the Western US.
- Cloud computing makes it much easier to provide on-demand testing. For example, PushToTest OnDemand testing reduces costs by avoiding the necessity of making a big committment to a test platform up front.
Things I heard at the meet-up:
Miko says cloud computing helps the little guy to survive being
"Slashdotted", where relatively small Web sites that get a lot of
attention suddenly.
SOASTA customers include Tom told the audience, "We see an enourmous
amount of tests for Sales and Marketing
campaigns and new product launchs, then composite (RSS, CMS.)" Tom's
view is that Cloud Computing is making it inexpensive to test at levels
not previously fiscally possible. For example, Tom indicated the
average cloud cost per test is $3,500, at levels of 15,000 to 200,000
simulated users.Dell, QTrax, GuestCentre, Activision, Hallmark.
Tom talked about Hallmark.com's testing. They only tested to 2,000
users in the past. Last week SOASTA did a performance test of 3,000,000
simulated users.
Tom said SOASTA generates geographically located simulated users by
using multiple clouds: Amazon
EC2 in New York, GoGrid
in western US, RackSpace
in Asia and Europe.
Tom attributes a story to Jonathan Schwarts of Sun Microsystems: The
cost of electricity in Japan has been going up so fast that electricity
now costs more than the cost of the server.
Tom relates benefits of performance and latency testing: Google says
half a second page delay costs them $100M.
SOASTA stats: 500 On-Demand Cloud Tests, 6,500 Hours of testing, 50
Million Global Virtual Users in their cloud about
Seems like a good list of analyst/media companies to show us what's
happening in the Cloud Computing space: Information
Week, Gartner,
and Cloud
Computing Journal.
Michael Crandel on RightScale.com: RightScale has 100 paying customers
($500/month), 100,000 free
users, and has managed 2 million hours of servers.
-Frank
From PushToTest
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