Thanks to Rackspace’s blog for posting this infographic about the impact of cloud computing on our environment. Better efficiency and organization reduces energy and waste. Cloud is good!
So storm your website from the cloud right now. Sign up for a free LoadStorm account and try it out.
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.
I’ve been aware of Gartner for many years because no matter what IT company I worked for, every executive swore allegiance to the Magic Quadrant. Seems like most execs believe in Gartner’s prediction of the future. It also seems to me their predictions are based on quite a bit of historical fact and good research. Well, a few weeks ago they released information on their hottest technologies for 2011.
I’m not surprised that Cloud Computing is at the top. The Amazon Elastic Cloud is what enables LoadStorm to provide the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to load testing tools. We are also developing some specific capabilities that allow load testing from virtual mobile devices. Those two are the biggest focus of Gartner, so I think we are setting the right product strategy.
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.
The cloud. It’s exciting. A panacea? Hardly.
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.
On Tuesday, the Colorado chapter of SIM (Society for Information Management) had a panel discussion on Cloud Computing. I was asked to serve on the panel and thoroughly enjoyed the event.
I could write up a summary, but Julie Bort did a fine job in her article
Cloud computing is cheaper, greener but not yet enterprise ready.
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.
InformationWeek reported yesterday that Microsoft is coming out of the closet with their new “Cloud OS”. It is a version of Windows supposedly written from the ground up for this platform.
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.
At the Web 2.0 Expo, Geir Magnusson delivered his prediction of the upcoming demise of relational systems: “The Sequel to SQL: Why You Won’t Find Your RDBMS in the Clouds.” This reminds me of the old saying that the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. 
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.
A weekend outage plagued Amazon’s S3 service with 8 hours of disrupted service, “elevated error rates”. Their Simple Queue Service, SQS was also affected but the EC2 service was not.
I expect that these kinds of issues with Amazon will disappear, and we remain enthusiastic users of Amazon’s Web Services. EC2 has been surprisingly reliable for us with no downtime in nearly a year of use.
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.