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LoadRunner and the Cloud – It’s here!!

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HP today announced an agreement with Amazon Web Services that enables you to run HP LoadRunner v9.5 in Amazon EC2.  The project is currently in beta, so it’s limited to the East US EC2 region, but does already include pre-built AMIs for your Controller (250 VUs) and any size of Load generator (32 or 64 bit).

It gets better!   For the beta program, HP is waiving all of their license fees!  (Amazon EC2 license/use fees still apply.)

And better yet!  Lots of reasons this is a win-win for HP LoadRunner customers:

  • This makes LoadRunner significantly more available to testers.
  • Using this delivery model, we can expect LoadRunner to be significantly less expensive  AND easier to deploy.
  • Good-bye to  days of needing to own load testing software that you should be using regularly, but in reality may only use during specific phases of your SDLC.  Now you can pay for what you need, when you need it.
  • Also gone are the days of installing and upgrading LoadRunner.  Have you ever tried to download a 1.2GB installer over a slow link?
  • How about realizing that you need to uninstall a previous version before you can install the new one?  Now that HP and Amazon publish AMIs with the software pre-installed, all you need to do is spin-up the images you want and run them.

While my enthusiasm for this development is clear, it should be said that it’s not all, “moonlight and canoes.”

The Controller AMI in the beta program is limited to 250 virtual users.  Since HP hasn’t published their pricing yet, it’s not clear how larger tests will be accommodated.  For now, the beta testing will limit us to mid-sized tests.  Considering the actual technology (LR 9.5) is already stable and known to work well in virtual environments, there is little doubt that this solution will be massively scalable.

You will also need scripts to run in LoadRunner.  For existing or former LoadRunner customers, this is as easy as accessing your scripts from EC2.  For net-new LoadRunner customers, this will require some work.  Thankfully, the script generation environment, Virtual User Generator makes it easy to create simple scripts and there is an extensive community of users and consultants to help you develop the scripts you need.

Be sure to watch Mark Tomlinson’s video where he explains the benefit of testing applications for the cloud in the cloud.  The main benefit Mark demonstrates is the ability to omit your corporate firewall from the test environment.

One BIG benefit of testing in the cloud is eliminating the public network from your test environment:  If you are testing an application in the cloud from your on-premise lab, then you’re subjecting your test data to an unknown world of latency, packet loss and bandwidth limits.  Testing a cloud application from an on-premise lab can produce useless results as they  have no correlation to how your application will actually perform from your end user’s perspective.

Another benefit I would be remiss if I didn’t mention is that Shunra’s integration with HP LoadRunner, Shunra for HP Software already works well in clouds.  Shunra for HP runs inside of LoadRunner and lets you decide what network impairments to test.  You can import your production data, pick from pre-defined settings, or specify ad-hoc values to make each Load Generator emulate a different network location.  By doing this, you can conduct a performance test for all of your end user locations, entirely in a cloud environment, all the while paying as you go.  I may be a little biased, but my argument is that the functionality of Shunra for HP completes the picture for anyone performance testing applications that will be accessed remotely – and who isn’t?

As a techie who started performance testing using a green-screen and writing my own protocol stacks because the applications I was testing insisted on using proprietary protocols, I am excited to see professional quality performance testing moving into the cloud.  Although this innovative solution hasn’t created much new technology, it did make existing technology consumable in the cloud.  This is sure to challenge other vendors  to step up to the plate, making other products and services more cloud-enabled.

What do you think?  Are there any reasons you would not use this capability?  What are some other products or services that you hope will make their way into the cloud this year?


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