Testing Cloud Computing Today with BreakingPoint Elite

Cloud computing continues to make news and it certainly was no different during Interop as you read in my posts from last week. In most cases, however, there is still an absence of discussion around what it takes to test the cloud infrastructure. Pam O'Neal started this discussion with the four considerations for testing the cloud computing infrastructure and Dennis Cox subsequently talked with us about the important testing procedures one should think about when testing the cloud infrastructure.

A follow up conversation with Dennis ensued where we talked in-depth about what people can do today to test the cloud infrastructure and the unique features of BreakingPoint Elite that allow this to happen. The conversation includes the following:

• The inability for load testing tools to scale to proper performance levels when testing a cloud environment.
• Bit-blasting testing tools are not ideal for testing the cloud because they don't use real application traffic.
• The ability to do client emulation at 7.5M concurrent connections and blended stateful application traffic (among other things) does make BreakingPoint a good fit for testing the cloud.
  
• The BreakingPoint architecture (network processor, FPGAs, and more) is a key for allowing high-performance with realistic traffic.
• The most important applications to test with off the bat include database protocols, web-based protocols and more.

Update: Get instant access to BreakingPoint's step-by-step Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology.