The next time you hear any IT Department /Organization saying “We are on the cloud” you can think of these manifold benefits they will reap from this strategy –
Cost savings, Choice, and Agility, Reduction of on-site infrastructure, improved data backup services and disaster recovery, Data and applications always available from anywhere and workforce mobility, flexibility, and scalability, competitive advantage.
According to Gartner, by 2020, ‘Cloud Shift’ will affect more than $ 1 trillion in IT spending, thus making cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending. SaaS (Software as a Service) tops the list with 37% compared to other cloud computing service models (IaaS – Infrastructure as a service, Paas – Platform as a service)
Testing in the cloud leverages cloud computing environment, thereby bringing the same benefits that the cloud brings to customers.
Challenges in testing with Cloud environment has been one of the reasons why some organizations are not diving into cloud –
Security: It’s no surprise that security is the biggest roadblock to cloud adoption. Many articles are written on the dark side of the cloud, puts ‘Security’ on top of their list.
Third-party dependencies & Integration:
Most of the time, the cloud applications will consume external API and services. For an end-user, any malfunctioning of a cloud service (hosted by you) will lead to questions raised on the cloud application being accessed. To avoid this, it’s essential to test all the API’s as if they are part of the application itself.
Performance:
Applications running on the cloud run on hardware that may also be hosting other applications, which may or may not be under your control. Ensuring performance and scalability is critical since the end-users always assume that the complete infrastructure is in your control. It’s good to configure monitoring on critical applications to learn about the breakpoint.
Replicating the user environment: The main advantage of hosting on the cloud is to give users the freedom to access from anywhere and however, they want. Testers are expected to know all the possible scenarios in which a user would operate.
On Demand Test/Developer construction: This is very much related to the above point on replicating user environment. Creating a development environment requires specific configuration associated with storage, servers, and network.
Lack of standards: the cloud industry, though is moving fast and evolving technologically, some vendors have yet to implement consistent standards. This may affect testing practices.
Regression testing issues and challenges: The multi-tenancy feature of clouds may cause difficulty in on-demand software regression testing.
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