Cloud Computing is all the hype right now. Few people are doing anything with it, and most people’s understanding of what it means is, at best, nebular or should I say - ‘CLOUDY’. So, let us explore it for you!

Do you have to be sitting on a mountain with a computer amongst the clouds or on an airplane with a laptop? Does it work when it’s sunny! Can u actually type on a cloud computing keyboard? Cloud computing is pretty big and it’s growing bigger by each day. Companies are using it differently based on what they offer.

Let’s say you are a company and you have a website and the website has a lot of short conversations that are exchanged between its members. You start with a few users talking to each other and they start telling their friends about your site … and the friends tell their friends.

You are successful!

But with this success, can come problems. Your equipment can’t keep up with the demand and your service slows down.

A few years ago you would have hosted your website on a computer or server somewhere and when the success kicked in you had to run around and buy brand new servers. That costs a lot and you end up paying both when using and even when not using the server.

At this juncture, instead of success your customers are getting angry and you are paying heavy price in terms of money, time and loss of brand image.

But now you have a better option - ‘Cloud Computing’! You can actually scale up almost instantaneously - on demand … and your customers stay happy too without realizing any low level change. When you need more computing power, you can plug into the cloud and when you are done you can release it back to the cloud. Voila! What else do you need? It works the same way as your gas or electricity needs … When you turn on - you receive electricity from the power grid as much as you need and when you are done, you turn it off. And the meter also stops running … It’s as simple as that!

Now, aren’t you inquisitive to know what cloud has in store for a tester? Oh! It can empower the tester tremendously and yet be so effective in terms of time, infrastructure, cost and overall testing requirements. Come look at how!

Have you noticed a developer getting frenzied at a tester for not being able to reproduce his bug? No amount of VNC access or RDC connections can actually help reproduce the problem at the developer’s physical machine. The tester goes berserk thinking what to do next. Sounds familiar? Cloud Computing is the solution! Share your applications, bug reports, solutions, problems etc. anytime anywhere irrespective of the underlying hardware and configurations.

What about load and performance testing! What if you are testing at a 1 million simultaneous user level? This technology could allow developers or testers to easily and affordably turn any cloud computing environment into a Virtual Test Lab 24×7x365 for load and performance testing of their applications. Now let us tell you how it could benefit you. This sort of a testing in cloud environments is the closest thing to running an application in production minus the worry of negatively impacting your customers. And then of course it’s on demand and scalable as expected. And plus load and performance testing is no longer cost prohibitive.

You can also test multiple architectures, variables, components, and configurations easily and independently. Finally, if you choose to deploy in the cloud, you can push the debugged test environment live in a few small steps. Also, it can find its application in lot many other areas too - Regression testing, Load testing using synthetically generated traffic, Performance testing, Application testing, Testing system components, System integration testing  and so on.

According to the market research firm IDC, spending on IT cloud services is expected to increase threefold, to $42 billion by 2012. It’s certain that over the next five years every testing vendor will try to leverage the cloud. It seems that it would lead to a new generation of testing companies. There’s no denying the fact that cloud computing is going to be the next big thing that’s going to revolutionize the way we consume services.

We at QA InfoTech have been one of the first movers in this area and have been actively using cloud computing services provided by Amazon to do various kind of manual, automated and performance testing. In the coming posts expect more insights into how we use the cloud to provide greater value to our clients.

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