8.6. Performance Testing in the Cloud
Testing for performance can be the most expensive (monetary) type of testing. Performance testing gets expensive when you need to generate load that is equivalent to the traffic Google, Twitter, Facebook and other popular websites gain. If you don't need to generate this type of load, it can be affordable.
The amount of load that needs to be generated determines how much hardware is needed. When you take hardware and software licenses into consideration, before you know it your company could have purchased a fleet of Lamborghinis for each of their employees.
Many companies cannot afford to invest the amount of money required to create an adequate performance testing lab, this is where cloud computing comes in. Services such as Amazon's EC2, allow CPU time and storage to be purchased on demand. This means you can scale your load test very quickly when needed, and then scale down when finished. You do not have the overhead of purchasing all of the servers and bandwidth required to generate massive amounts of load.
Two popular services to test for performance in the cloud are SOASTA (http://www.soasta.com/index.html) and BrowserMob (http://browsermob.com/load-testing).
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