Have you ever had the problem to setup a test environment? Or, even worse, to change the configuration of that environment? At a client I wanted to upgrade the test environment to match the storage capacity with the production environment. We were testing output documentation for customers and the client had a penalty by law of €120.000 for every not send or wrong output document. So we needed all the possible different options in the test database. Even though I had the budget to upgrade the environment, it still took me 3 months to persuade all stakeholders and to get it done! How can this be done better or easier or faster or…? A cloud?

Last April and May there was a perfect example of when a cloud came in useful. There was an ‘ash cloud’ hovering over Northwest Europe. Airlines couldn’t fly from and to any destination that was under the ash. As a result a lot of passengers were stuck on airports or couldn’t go on vacation. And what do most people do in such a case? They call the airline for information. Luckily the airlines were smart, they had a recording on the phone line to check their website. As a result thousands of people were checking their airline websites, which resulted in an overload of these websites. And… they went down.

If these website were cloud-enabled they could have added extra capacity to the site servers to help the overloaded servers and people could still access the sites!

In the beginning of this month IBM Rational had its innovation conference in Orlando, Florida. I had the opportunity to be there. One of the things I had to do was to take a seat in the Cloud Analyst Panel. In this panel I had to give a short presentation for an amount of analysts from the worldwide research firms. In this post I’ll tell you what I had to say.

Demand on the test environment

This is an availability option, but what has this to do with testing? Well, the website testers could have tested for the load and stress on the site. But clouds can help testing also in other ways. They can provide the needed test infrastructure and test tooling. If you look at typical programs, they have a demand on the website certain parts of the year, when the tests are executed. Like for instance Amazon around Christmas or the Tax system (in the Netherlands) in April/May.  This is not only for one program, but also for more programs. But still there is no 100% demand whole year round, although it can happen there is a 120% demand.

Clouds can help! They give you a sheer number of environments for testing, when there is a demand for them. Standardization, virtualization and automation enable the use of clouds to create a multitude of (test) environments, when needed.

By the way: this is not only true for infrastructure, but also for the use of tooling in a SaaS option. This use of ‘software on demand’ creates a greater flexibility for using test tools.

Clouds have a potential for testing

The use of SaaS applications and environments in the cloud have a potential for testing. But we needed to put this in practice, instead of all this theory. We started a pilot project to use IBM services in the cloud, the Development & Test Cloud and their SaaS test tools, to see how it could support testing.

We created the test environment in the cloud and also used the tools from the cloud. Now we could execute the test scripts in the environments and connected them with the test execution and test management tools. Just like a normal project!

Well, what happened? It worked! Of course there are some strengths and some weaknesses.

Strengths of a cloud based test environment

• The set-up of the environment architecture is very fast
• The performance of the current cloud environment is sufficient for a normal- sized project. Performance is scalable – using more or less cloud resources (no figures available yet).
• Using integrated IBM Rational tooling, it was possible to do central management over all the cloud environments.
• The use of standardized test tools (SaaS) helps to cut time on set-up.
• There are system resources available in the cloud for applications and storage, freeing up system resources.
• Data location for storage, servers or applications is, in terms of compliance, traceable in the control panel of the cloud. It’s transparent where services are running and data is stored. Later this summer there will also be a possibility to use separate data (using VPN), for example on your own network.
• Instances can be saved and recovered.

Weaknesses of a cloud based test environment

• A test environment coordinator needs to have technical skills, because they are needed to install and manage some of the cloud services (on Linux).
• There is always a confidentiality risk when important business information is set in a hybrid or public cloud. As it should be, most of the security is left to the user, but tools are limited.
• Back-up is not ‘out-of-the-box’
• Networking is limited; no VPN, firewall, subnets are available. These are needed to control access to the cloud servers.

When we overcame these challenges we can use the cloud for our test environments. With cloud computing it’s possible to create multiple (testing) environments in and flexibly use tools from the cloud. These environments can therefore be used as testing and acceptance environments, so reducing the need for other expensive environments that have to be set up internally and are only used when tests are executed.

1. Raju Arora Says:
   July 7th, 2010 at 06:14

   Hi,
   Saltmarch Media is organizing its third edition of Business Technology Summit 2010 which will take place on 11 and 12 Nov’10 in Bangalore. The summit will features topics like Cloud Computing, Cloud Development, Cloud Case Studies, Soa, SaaS, PaaS and more. For more details log on to btsummit dot com

2. Ewald Roodenrijs Says:
   July 13th, 2010 at 15:01

   Raju,

   Thanks for the information. I’ll look into that.

   Regards,

   Ewald

3. Trackbacks Says:
   February 5th, 2012 at 21:48
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