With CloudFlex, gone are the days of waiting weeks or months for server admin colleagues to provision a test environment, battling with resource contention, and struggling to ensure accuracy and consistency.
With CloudFlex the end-to-end process is in the hands of the tester.
Learn how you can provision a new test environment in minutes.
One of the hardest parts of managing test environments is changing them, especially when it is necessary to return to previously used ones.
CloudFlex allows environments to be templated and saved for future use. Templates can then be edited and adapted, started and stopped, all within seconds and a few clicks.
The Dashboard provides an instant overview of all your environments.
Highly intuitive interface makes setting up test environments in the cloud extremely quick and simple.
This puts control of the end-to-end process into the hands of testers and removes reliance on server administrators.
New environments can be provisioned in minutes, not the weeks and months that are commonly experienced with traditional infrastructure.
Avoid the risks of the 'pay for what you use' cloud model that can lead to high costs being incurred if not carefully managed.
CloudFlex’s easy-to-use Task Scheduler allows common activities such as starting up, shutting down and backing up environments to be automated, meaning environments are only being paid for when in use.
A typical use case involves a client that has a regular requirement to build test
labs to execute automated functional tests on a dedicated QA environment.
Once the test is complete the test lab can be destroyed.
Here's how you could use CloudFlex to manage a set of Selenium-based test labs:
For the first test:
For a subsequent test with the same test pack the Environment can simply be started from the same template by simply omitting step 1.
When a new test pack is available they simply need to:
After this update is complete they simply follow the same steps as a normal test run (steps 2-4).
Nearly every tester is too familiar with the problem of obtaining suitable test environments. At Intechnica we believe cloud provisioning of infrastructure is the solution. It offers instant set up, flexible scaling, pay-for-what-you-need pricing and the simplest way to outsource support and maintenance. For many test organizations it has the potential to replace “tin” completely, as it is doing in many businesses. Professional Tester coined the term test environment as a service to describe the concept in November 2010.
CloudFlex is a web application designed to make it easy to set up and manage test environments comprising virtual servers running on third-party cloud computing capacity. It provides a single environment used to manage server images, data, security, load balancing and geolocation.
At present it works with Amazon EC2, but its loosely coupled design makes applying it to other cloud providers straightforward: support for Microsoft Azure will be released soon. Useful new capabilities will be integrated as soon as they are made available by providers, so that they can be used with environments already built. Unlike much "cloudware", CloudFlex is not a promise or plan for the future: it’s working and available now.
Whether tin or cloud, the hardest part of managing test environments is changing
them, especially when it is necessary to return to previously used ones. Starting,
stopping and configuring instances in EC2 requires work-intensive and complex command
line operations where mistakes could lead to inaccurate test repetition and missed
defects. CloudFlex replaces these with a clear user interface and
automates the process of switching between environments.
This is achieved by creating environment templates using a simple wizard. All templates are accessed from a single screen and can be edited or adapted to create new ones easily. Any templated environment can then be started and terminated with a few clicks. CloudFlex’s dashboard displays the current status of all instances.
In this example we have considered using cloud to create test environments for an application that is running on tin. This works well for functional and usability testing, although some care must be taken ensure the test environment is sufficiently “like live” to avoid test results differing from those were the tests run on the live site.
Suppose, however, that the site owner makes the increasingly common decision to
use EC2 or another cloud service to host it. Now test environments can be built
which are exactly the same as the live environment in all respects necessary for
the testing at hand. As well as removing any risk of inaccurate functional testing
results caused by lack of realism, this means accurate performance, reliability
and scalability testing can be done by creating additional instances to run performance
testing tools injecting load to the test environment.