Testing Considerations

This chapter considers the incremental testing appropriate to assure that application service quality meets expectations when deployed on cloud infrastructure. It begins by framing the context of this testing, then discusses testing strategy, simulating virtualized infrastructure impairments and test planning. Suppliers must design applications to be tolerant of the variations that will be experienced when the application is deployed across different cloud service providers infrastructures. This configuration variability leads one to consider several strategy topics when framing service quality test plans. Best practice is for the service quality test campaign for a cloud-based application to include aspects of most or all of the following test types: service reliability and latency, impaired infrastructure testing; robustness testing; endurance/stability testing; application elasticity testing; upgrade testing; disaster recovery testing; and extreme coresidency testing.