SOASTA Brings Cloud Testing Platform To The Masses

The CloudTest Pro appliance, which will hit general availability in March as an annual subscription, is designed to give users performance level testing for their cloud environments, whether public, private or hybrid, said SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos.

The tool tests consumer-facing Web and mobile applications to ensure they can scale to accommodate a massive increase in users, for example 10 minutes before April 13 hits on a popular tax preparation Web site. It integrates heterogeneous clouds and other resources to build a global testing platform.

And while CloudTest Pro is initially designed for businesses with internal testing teams, Lounibos said he foresees managed service providers and other partners offering cloud testing as a service using CloudTest Pro in the near future.

"We have a community of partners forming," he said, adding that MSPs, services companies and consulting firms will eventually be able to offer cloud testing and Web and mobile application performance metrics for their clients using CloudTest's platform. "We're democratizing the whole concept of testing."

SOASTA CloudTest Pro gives testing teams the ability to build, execute and analyze performance tests, and launch tests on a single platform that integrates data center infrastructure and private clouds with external resources including public clouds, Lounibos said. A key ability, Lounibos added, is CloudTest Pro's ability to span enterprise hybrid and private clouds like those built on VMware, Eucalyptus Systems and Cloud.com; and public clouds like Microsoft Windows Azure, IBM Cloud and Amazon Web Services. It also offers support for testing communities like uTest.

Lounibos said the ability for companies to test their cloud capacity and the performance of their Web sites and mobile applications can dramatically reduce downtime and crashes and save companies the millions of dollars a bad Web reputation can sometimes cost.

"The massive resources of ‘the cloud’ have changed the game for performance testing, enabling organizations to test their consumer-facing Web and mobile applications fast, affordably and at scale," Lounibos said. "There's now no excuse for the type of Web site disasters we've seen in the past that cost businesses millions in revenues and perhaps more in reputation."

SOASTA CloudTest Pro lets businesses take control of their performance testing, while also supporting testing in labs and live production environments and from internal and external resources. It also offers real-time resolution of performance issues, Lounibos said.

"From a cloud guy's view, it's the ultimate show of cloud computing's power," he said.

The CloudTest Pro appliance provides test building capabilities that offer patented visual test creation tools to support dynamic content like AJAX, Flash, HTML5, mobile and streaming video; automated, global test cloud provisioning and management; real-time analytics via a dashboard that enables various views and drill-down options for various performance metrics; and access to SOASTA's Global Test Cloud, a massive network of public and private clouds available for test deployment.

"It gives people a much deeper understanding," Lounibos said. "They can test live Web sites and applications.