The Cloud: A Game-Changer for Web Performance Testing

Today in retail, financial services, media, telecommunications and a host of other industries, more and more business is transacted through consumer web sites and mobile applications. With new channels creating spikes in traffic, highly complex system architectures, and internet-savvy customers, websites and web applications must be tested at scale to maximize business results and avoid a catastrophic crash. However, whether due to time or cost or other reasons, upwards of 90 percent of web applications are not fully tested before launching. If testing is done, many times it's with a small percent of expected traffic, which is then extrapolated for an estimation of performance. Cloud computing is changing the game for testing web applications. Cloud testing enables, for the first time, performance testing that complements the lab and accounts for the conditions in a production environment, such as traffic spikes, network latency, firewalls, and other factors. And it can be done far more affordably than traditional testing methods, as part of agile development cycles, and without an army of highly skilled performance engineers. Read less