HP brings performance testing to the cloud

With more applications being built for the Web, performance testing is critical to determining the proper approach to scaling both applications and infrastructure. But for many years performance testing was largely a rich-man's game, primarily because of the expense of setting and maintaining a large server infrastructure that can simulate real-world traffic.

Hosted testing solutions make a lot of sense from both the user and provider perspective. Considering the vast computing power available at your fingertips there are few reasons why you would want to own the infrastructure, or not take advantage of the latest offerings from providers both large and small.

To that end, Hewlett-Packard is slated on Wednesday to announce LoadRunner in the Cloud, a new application performance testing suite running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Ironically, HP is extremely late to the game despite having long held the lead in performance testing via its acquisition of Mercury Interactive in November 2006.

A number of companies, including Sauce Labs and BrowserMob have seen a great deal of success with their cloud-based offerings. And each player brings a unique angle to the offerings. Sauce Labs is based on the open-source Selenium project and gives users the option to run the code themselves or consume it as a service, whereas BrowserMob has expanded into offering monitoring in addition to testing.

Overall, performance and other testing via cloud-based services remains one of the more logical, accessible use cases to prove out the cloud as a necessary part of one's infrastructure.

To it's credit, HP has been making some moves into the cloud ecosystem, but there is still a long way to go for any tech vendor trying to usurp Amazon's domination as a provider of cloud infrastructure services.