Cloud computing environments are adopted by many organizations nowadays and many other organizations are planning to move their services on the cloud computing environment. Cloud computing saves hardware cost to the organization both in terms of maintaining physical machines as well as system admin teams. It deliver 24×7 availability, flexibility, high efficiency, continuity of business environment via 3DNS, easy collaboration, easy software installation or application upgrade, reduce power cost, reduces site maintenance cost as well as the effort of the service subscriber. This is the reason that the small and medium-sized businesses are already preferably running their business applications and so far these organizations are happy with the services. Many large sized organizations are planning to move to the cloud environments very soon.
There are so many benefits of running the business applications on the cloud environments such as banking services, mobile collaborate apps, mailbox on cloud apps, cloud backup apps, virtual storage drives, etc. but still there are many challenges which come in the way of testers to test an application on cloud environment. Some of these challenges are explained below.
Performance Issues:
As we know that cloud computing is a shared environment where a single Server with multiple CPUs, RAM, and SAN or NAS storage are divided among many users by providing them virtual hosts or IP addresses. All users in a clouding computing environment are ultimately accessing the common resources of a big physical machine. Therefore, at a time if any user is using the resources intensely then it may create the performance issues to the other users at the same time. Therefore, the performance testing results from the NFT team could vary from time to time depending on the load of the cloud environment. This is one of the test challenges in a cloud environment.
Security issues:
The business applications running in the cloud computing environment pose the security risk as compared to running these applications in the local computing environments. This is because the cloud services are often supplied by the third party vendors and business data is present at the outside data center. Though they provide the choice of data backup or disaster recovery environment but to conduct the security testing is still a big challenge as it can be done to a certain extent but not intensively as cloud environment is present with the third party vendor or it may have security testing limitation because of the presence of other cloud stakeholders in the same environment with virtual IP addresses.
Integration Concerns:
A distributed application deals with many different servers which could be on site or off site. In the cloud environment, the distributed application will deal with many different virtual machines which could be onsite or offsite and there could be latency challenges in the integration of these virtual machines. The organization just orders the virtual machines on the cloud without knowing their physical locations but if two machines are located at a long distance then latency issues will be observed and this will cause another challenge from the testing point of view.
ROI Estimation:
Cloud computing environments are known to deliver high ROI but still, they are questionable from the business viability point of view. Such concerns need to be addressed by building confidence with proved results in the cloud environments.
Qualitative Services:
Business is often concerned with the migration of their critical applications on the cloud environment. They have the main concern about service availability, scalability, flexibility, and continuity. Critical business applications are business sensitive and may incur a huge loss to the organization both in terms of reputation and money if the service level agreements with the client are not met efficiently. Therefore, the clouding computing environment needs to provide proven test results in terms of service availability, scalability, flexibility, and continuity.
Functional Testing aspects:
The business application running on the cloud computing environment is required to pass the behavioral aspects of the application along with interoperability testing, system testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing. All of these testings should have completed before any organization could move its business-critical application to the cloud computing environment.
Accessibility and Recovery Testing:
The business application running on the cloud computing environment should comply with accessibility testing where it should cater to the need of users with different abilities. Also, it should not provide any backdoor entry to the unauthorized users by any means. It should offer automatic recovery of the application in case of any power outage or natural calamity. Usually, another cloud environment known as disaster recovery environment is provided to the business user to ensure the continuity of business for any organization. There are many mechanisms such as 3DNS which can trigger the automatic switch between different sites and recovery testing should be conducted to ensure the site-wide switch mechanism.
These are the challenges which the testing team could face while testing any business application hosted on the cloud computing environment. Other challenges that testing team could face are as follows.
- Setting up of the test environment both for functional testing and non-functional testing. The testing environment should resemble the actual cloud environment in order to procure the accurate test results.
- The testers should make sure that they have adequate controls over the middleware, databases, and application servers, file server, etc. on the cloud in order to conduct the end to end functional testing on any cloud environment.
- Application data replication testing should be tested with the help of third-party vendor as replication is not under the control of the tester in case of the cloud environment.
- The tester needs to make sure that there is no leakage of date while testing the business application over the on the internet at cloud environment.
- Lastly, the tester needs to deliver their due diligence to procure the accurate test results which should be comparable to the physical server environments.
Over to you:
The cloud computing environment has many good reasons which can make an organization to migrate its business application on the cloud but at the same time, the testers need to face the challenges and test the application in the best way they can after overcoming the testing difficulties. Have you faced any other Challenges of Test In Cloud Environment, please share in the comments section below.
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