SOA in the Cloud

SOASTA, a provider cloud testing, today announced that performance engineers can now build web application tests in Apache JMeter, the most popular open source load testing tool, and run them in SOASTA's Global Test Cloud. Deploying JMeter tests to the Cloud has been a complex, time-consuming and manual process. SOASTA now makes it dramatically easier for the JMeter community to create, deploy, execute and analyze load and performance tests in the Cloud.

JMeter scripts run without modification. Once the test is built SOASTA takes care of managing and provisioning servers and executing the test using their Global Test Cloud, a dedicated platform for load and performance testing. Testing from the Cloud is the best way to test websites and web applications, not only for scale, but also because of the accuracy inherent in external tests using load generated from multiple locations.

"We were excited to hear about and remain keen to use SOASTA's new JMeter wrapper," said Alec Fu, Solution Analyst, Project Management, Zappos.com. "It will allow us to deploy many of our existing scripts on the CloudTest platform without fuss or rework, and more importantly, shows us how, as a partner, SOASTA can be flexible and responsive to our particular tech stack in terms of integration options."

The SOASTA Global Test Cloud eliminates the complexities and extends the functionality of testing from the Cloud for JMeter and CloudTest users and provides:

--  Access to the first Global Test Cloud built exclusively for testing web applications

--  Simulation of small or very large web-scale traffic from a single or multiple locations

--  The ability to simulate global traffic from locations worldwide

--  Automated provisioning to quickly and easily deploy load agents and monitors

--  Integrated application and resource monitoring

--  Integrated real-time analytic engine (aggregation & correlation) for test results data

--  Performance intelligence that combines customer experience with internal resource information and application status all on a single timeline

--  On-demand service where you pay only for what you use (per test hour)

"The value of the SOASTA Global Test Cloud starts with realistic, scalable, on-demand testing which redefines the affordability equation," says Paul Burns, President of Neovise, an IT analyst firm focused on cloud computing. "Then it adds openness and investment protection by supporting existing JMeter scripts. This is a big win for JMeter users who will not only get to reuse their scripts, but also make them far more powerful."

The scale and geographical distribution of the SOASTA Test Cloud is provided using the infrastructure services from SOASTA's partners: Amazon Web Services, CSC, Rackspace, GoGrid, 3Tera, Savvis and LG. As a full-service offering, SOASTA's team of experienced performance engineers provision the complete cloud environment, execute the tests and work with partners and customers in real-time to analyze, fix and tune a site's performance. A self-service option will be available in the 1st quarter of 2010.

"We have always been great advocates of open source solutions and cloud computing at SOASTA. By adding JMeter support to the SOASTA Test Cloud we hope to make it easier and faster for JMeter users to achieve web-scale testing in the Cloud," said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. "We are enabling a new way of testing by leveraging the virtual resources of cloud computing and we're excited to extend the scalability, monitoring and real-time analytics of our platform to a broader audience."

Availability
Support for Apache JMeter users will be available in Q4 2009.