Yesterday, we examined how the new availability of elastic cloud computing has changed load and stress testing for the better. It lowers the cost, increases scalability, and facilitates running tests more efficiently. An article on load-testing.org about load and stress testing got me thinking about how our paradigms in this industry have changed and continue to evolve.

Today, we look at the reasons for why we would want to run tests more frequently and earlier in the software product lifecycle. To borrow a Chicago axiom about voting - test early and test often. It's the new paradigm.

As we begin another week of summer, here are a few helpful links for articles concerning issues of interest to us load and performance testers. We at LoadStorm have been busy the past month with many new customers asking us for help.

I received an email today from Jim Seward, New Media Executive with Version One a document management company in the United Kingdom. Jim said he got some good information from the LoadStorm blog concerning cloud computing for their research, and they produced an article to address the confusion.

A friend of mine that works at CIO.com sent me an executive summary for a survey they conducted on cloud computing in August. The results of the survey show how extensively the cloud will affect our web application world in the near future. On the darker side, the results also show how fear, power, and ignorance are holding many back from taking advantage of the many significant benefits of cloud computing.

Google Apps (previously Apps for your Domain or AFYD) and Gmail has been down for some users over the past day. We have not been affected, but apparently some are having an extended outage with 502 errors.

I am curious about whether the affected users are "Premier" customers who have paid for the service. Also, the reports say that the gmail web client is down, but they do not say anything about IMAP, POP, SMTP services are working.

Testing provider SOASTA received 6.4 million in new funding from several VC funds to pursue automated software testing in the cloud. They are using Amazon's EC2 to generate elastic load, and have completed a 100,000 user test.

Several hours of downtime with Amazon's Simple Storage Service last Friday caused other services that rely on Amazon's infrastructure to have problems. Twitter, Tumblr, SmugMug and others that depend on S3 were down or having problems. This challenges the wisdom of using cloud computing but it is important to distinguish between availability and data loss. In this case there was limited availability but no data loss.