Advantages of testing in the cloud

reasons to consider load testing in the cloud rather than on-premise

If you don't already have machines on-premise or in data centers, there are a few reasons why you might be better off using virtual machines in the cloud instead.

Price. On-premise machines cost significant amounts of money to purchase and maintain. Machines in the cloud means you don't have to pay those costs up front; instead, you pay only for the machines you use and how long you use them.

Feasibility. Depending on how many users you'd like to run or how much load you'd like to generate, it can quickly become infeasible to have as many machines as required. A 50,000 user test on JMeter, for example, would require 50 machines that need to be maintained. On the cloud, you can easily spin up as many machines as you want, and you can spin up more when you need it.

Ease. Each machine would have to be set up exactly the same way, with the right load test tool and scripts installed. After running a load test, there are a lot of results to be analysed, and collating the results across multiple machines would be a pain. Flood does all of this for you-- we show you a real-time dashboard of results as well as taking care of the compilation after the test.

Accuracy. Often on-premises machines are kept in the same place on the same network as the application servers. While this provides for very fast response times, these response times may not be realistic if the average customer could reside anywhere in the world. At Flood, you can start machines in several regions across the world so that you can see more realistic results that you would expect to see from your users in production.

For these reasons, we believe that running on the cloud brings significant value in your load testing projects compared to running on premises, if your application architecture allows it.