Let us define the Cloud first;
Cloud, other than the ones we see floating freely in the sky, in technological terms is a storehouse that provides shared resources and data to other computers and devices when required.
These Resources may include computer networks, storage, applications, and servers. Cloud enables a user to store their data on the internet using third-party configurations free from location limitation.
It means a user can save its data in different city or continent and still can access it anytime. Cloud also saves enterprise companies from spending money on computer infrastructure. It’s not about the money; cloud also helps companies to get their applications up and running faster. It’s easy to manage and maintain your data on a stable cloud than on your local infrastructure.
Reasons why the world is moving towards virtualization?
- High computing power
- High performance
- Cheap services
- Availability and accessibility.
You see cloud’s benefits in your daily life as:
- You update your mobile applications
- Accessing different type of work docs when you are not in office
- Using social media accounts
- Making online transactions
These are just the simpler what you do and what about the bigger ones?
Cloud is tested against both functional and non-functional requirements.
- Functional Testing: Functional testing that includes system verification testing, interoperability testing, and acceptance testing, ensure that all business requirements are fulfilled and you earn revenue against the quality product.
- Non-Functional Testing: The Non-functional testing that covers accessibility testing, performance testing, security testing, recovery testing, and scalability testing, focuses on web application based tests to validate all outcomes expected from the product. But let’s not forget the challenges associated with cloud. Some important and major challenges are listed below.
So the Challenges of testing a cloud are somehow the same as working in the cloud because of the integration of cloud with different components and environments.
- Security Problem: You always have a recovery and backup plan if your sensitive data is outsourced. But as your essential and important data and services are outsourced then the risk of data integrity and availability of services blow the horns. Testing on the internet is performed in order to expose data leakage. So always have a backup plan before the application goes live.
- Return on Investment Estimation: Although clouds return the maximum of the investment. According to the research, companies have earned more than what they expected from cloud implementation. One intelligent move is to keep your data to yourself if it’s not as beneficial as on cloud than in your hands.
- Service Quality: Critical and important data is clouded by many companies and the question arises on their performance, availability, accessibility, and scalability. Cloud sources scale up and down according to the needs of clients.
- Integration Issues: Application may need to connect with third-party cloud applications. There may be interoperability issues with the applications when integrated with third-party cloud applications. When tester executes the tests on the application then certain scenarios can include different modules involvement which can create the risk of the application crash, network or server breakdown.
- Test Environment Configuration: A proper working environment with specific configurations is required for testing. Test environment configurations include server, storage, and network. The tester needs an environment to execute all possible flows in order to find breakings and crashes.
- Performance Measurements: As previously describes, cloud testing includes the network, database, performance and the available application. Applications on the cloud may have different bandwidths. Lesser bandwidths can badly impact the services being provided across the globe for a specific application. So a tester has to execute such scenarios which can cover the interaction between these components to figure out potential risks such as crash and connection loss.
We can say…
Cloud testing challenges are unavoidable to understand and handle to ensure the secure and effective working of business components and applications on the cloud. It also adds value to the product in terms of earning revenue. Regardless of the crucial challenges, cloud companies would always be one step ahead of others in future.
