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December 09, 2008
Has Cloud Computing Found its 'Killer App?'
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Most people talk about putting their applications in the cloud, but SOASTA has a different take. The company’s CloudTest offering brings the power of cloud computing to your application.
Here’s the history: Founders Ken Gardner and Tom Lounibos are Silicon Valley veterans, each having spent around 30 years in the Bay Area, the last 15 if which have been as partners. The duo took some companies public in the ‘90s, and have spent the last eight or nine years building dynamic Web applications. It was during this era they noticed a problem with traditional testing tools.
Not only are traditional tools designed for client-server applications, they also are prohibitively expensive, says Lounibos, who serves as SOASTA’s president and CEO. Solutions by Mercury, Rational and Silk (since acquired by HP, IBM and Borland, respectively) were the industry standards, but you only could use them “if you had the money” -- and that meant for licenses, hardware and people. Most SMBs couldn’t afford this, says Lounibos, and even some of his old companies had to cap site licenses, load testing at most 4,000 users at a cost of around $2 million.
People we’re starting to ask why testing software hadn’t changed to accommodate the increasing move from client-server apps to Web-based apps. Development cycles went from six months to daily, says Lounibos, so he and Gardner built a Web application for testing Web applications. He says SOASTA’s Ajax user interface is fundamental to the solution, and allows for distributed orientations and the ability to match development speed with test speed. “If you move to a one-day development cycle,” he says, “you need to be able to test in that one day, as well.”
Saving Time and Money in the Cloud
The result of this journey is CloudTest, a solution featuring both an appliance-based and a cloud-based approach. The dual-model approach is a great move, says Gartner’s Thomas Murphy, because not everybody is ready to move to the cloud. Having a cloud-only approach can get a company eliminated from certain deals right off the bat, he says, and even Lounibos that many companies large and small will prefer a hybrid approach. SOASTA offers both virtual and physical appliances that he says are ideal for everyday functional testing, and even some light load testing.
But if Web-scale load testing is what you need, the cloud is where it’s at. “The idea of cloud computing began to hit us, well, before it was ‘cloud computing,’ frankly,” said Lounibos. “And now, over the past year and a half, it’s emerged in a very positive way.” In SOASTA’s world, the cloud conforms itself to an application of performance testing, as it symbolizes lots of hardware, and lots of virtual users, distributed in multiple locations. Lounibos says CloudTest is “cloud-agnostic,” able to utilize VMs from Amazon, Skytap or Savvis, or wherever else might be convenient. “[A]ll we really need is physical locations,” he notes, adding that in one scenario, SOASTA is utilizing EC2, GoGrid and Mosso to simulate load from various geographic locations.
What sets CloudTest apart from other cloud testing tools is that users’ applications don’t move to the cloud, but stay right where they are in the user’s environment. With SOASTA’s model, the cloud generates users and sends them to the application. On top of that, Lounibos says, CloudTest monitors application servers, load balancers, firewalls, memory, CPU, etc., and, instead of log files to sort through, SOASTA provides real-time graphs so users can see exactly where and when a problem occurs. A 200,000-user test can generate 50GB of data, he explained, and “The key to the customer is, ‘Can I go live here?’ and ‘What are my concerns?’ and ‘Where are my issues at?’ And the key to getting that critical metric to them is how do you sort through 50GB of information to find the 1MB that’s actually relevant to that issue, to that question. That’s the core, and that’s the secret sauce for us.” Basically, Lounibos added, SOASTA has built a real-time OLAP application for testing.
And if the flexibility doesn’t get customers on board, the cost likely will. Gartner’s Murphy believes cloud computing opens up testing to a wider variety of companies, and to “earlier-stage companies than typically would have been able to afford good, solid testing tools.” People can test 50,000 users with HP, he says, but the cost is huge by comparison -- probably about $250,000 for a load that size. SOASTA costs considerably less, and small companies don’t need to worry about set-up, maintenance or software patching. He adds that while other offerings might actually have advantages in straight-up load testing, SOASTA’s real-time metrics and functional testing capabilities, along with its abilities to get load from across the world and with different operating systems, make a big difference.
“You’re in this world now where the load on your service can grow exponentially, essentially, in a very short period of time if it’s successful,” Murphy says. “Your need to be able to be more thorough about how you test for load is important.”
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