Cloud Load Testing Generator Now $1/hour
There’s no doubt that generating load from anyplace in the world at just the push of a button is one of the cloud’s killer applications. Since we first released the ability to generate load from the cloud back in late 2009 people have logged over 33,000 hours of remote load testing from the cloud. And not a crippled cheapo service, either, but full blown, enterprise quality testing with expert technical support backed by a professional services team.
I still get a kick out of running load tests from the cloud, specifically watching Amazon’s EC2 spin up dozens of computers and knowing they’re automatically being configured, and all of the load test data is being sent automagically. The zero config/push button automation is something I’ve always insisted upon, partially from being lazy, but partially from knowing there’s nothing productive about configuring a bunch of details by hand. The part of performance tuning is actually making websites faster, not spending hours configuring tests or setting up load generators.
At $1/hour/load generator the cost of generating load from outside of your network is incredibly cheap. Once you own a Load Tester license, generating the typical 1,000 or 5,000 concurrent user test is only $2-$4/hour extra, and a fairly large 100,000 concurrent user test is only $67. Compare that to the cost of configuring and maintaining your own load generators!
Michael Czeiszperger
Founder, Web Performance