Cloud Testing Again !

Cloud Testing. Well, it's still being talked about, and recently I looked into Microsoft's VSTS features for Cloud Testing.

I found that in VSTS 2013 Ultimate Edition, there is increasing support for running load tests in the Cloud, and Update 4, the most recent I've reviewed, links fairly seamlessly with Microsoft's general Cloud services (also known as Azure). Let's assume you have created a Visual Studio project, recorded web tests and created a load test scenario that uses these web tests. Your test settings file now includes an option to select "Run Tests using Visual Studio Online" rather than running via the local Controller and Agent software built around VSTS. When you run the load test, this automatically selects load test agents from Microsoft's Cloud to run the scripts based on the number of users required.

First you need to create a Visual Studio Online account and login to that before you can run load tests in the Cloud. You can access a dashboard which lists the load tests recently run and navigate into the results. You can also "Download" the results, which saves all the performance counters to your local SQL instance where you can view and analyze load results in VSTS just as usual.

At the moment the location of the load agents is fixed and it corresponds with the location in your Visual Studio Online account. Referring to this FAQ page, you can read about a significant enhancement in VSTS 2013 Update 5 which will allow you to select a Microsoft data centre to run the test from around the world. This means you can see how the actual response times for a web application are affected by the user location. The next enhancement people will be asking for will be a means to configure this in the load test scenario itself. I can see it will speed up testing to be able to have groups of users in the same load test simulated from various locations.

You can find out more about the load test process from Microsoft here.