Functional and stress testing in our cloud age.
Public cloud, Private cloud
and Hybrid cloud streamline our living and working conditions with a set of benefits
including: Agility, flexibility, performance, productivity,
security, scalability, cost savings and more.
Alongside this momentum, Connectikpeople.co recalls that
for those who don’t control the infrastructure, it is indispensable to know the
implementation behind APIs you rely on. In fact, APIs and associated SLAs are
central to the operation of your systems. Follow the age old maxim, trust but
verify, and verify by testing!
Meaning inter alia that, functional and stress testing are henceforth a game-changer. Here are a set of best practices susceptible to help you.
First best practice is to rely on and leverage established
and streamlined Platform to provide the resources to stress test.
Second best practice is that systems are often
complex, with different tiers and services interacting and it can be tough to
predict how they will behave under stress, so use stress testing to probe the
behavior of your system and the infrastructure and services your system relies
upon. Be creative with your scenarios and you’ll learn a lot about your
system’s behavior.
Third best practice is that you should test the rate
of change of the load you apply as well as the maximum load. What that
means is that it’s great to know your system can handle a load of 100K
transactions per second but it’s still not a useful system if it can only
handle these in batches of 10K increases each minute for 10 minutes when a
single news article from the right expert can bring you that much traffic in
the web equivalent of the blink of an eye.
Fourth best practice is that you should test
regularly. If you release each Friday and bugfix on demand, you don’t need
to stress test every time you release but you should stress test the entire
system every 2-4 weeks to ensure that performance is not degrading over time.
Source: Corrie Elston, Solutions Architect (Google
Cloud Platform).
