Case Study

Leveraging the Cloud for load testing

WPA : Performance Testing

Client Profile

Workplace Answers was founded in 1997 on the premise that organizations needed a new approach to train their employees on sensitive subject matter such as harassment, ethics and discrimination. WPA's training courses have been selected by over 1000 organizations including educational institutions, commercial organizations and government organizations to train over 2 million employees nationwide.

Business Situation

WPA[Workplace Answers] wanted services to load their servers to about 40k users and measure the KPIs from both users as well as servers standpoint. They set high standards to mimic production like loads in a time slice of one hour.

Many load testing tools provide master-slave architecture to combat the said problem, wherein the architecture allows us to generate loads from diﬀerent machines. Even though in theory this is feasible over a LAN, in reality when we move over to the Internet, bandwidth available over network & ISP hamper load generation activity thereby providing skewed, inﬂated and erroneous results. In addition to generating huge loads, KPI's on various parameters need to be captured from both servers and load generating machines into a common master machine, which again is a bottleneck when it comes to huge quantity of virtual users in a small time slice.

Solution Approach

Compassites developed a customizable and scalable solution architecture, which is capable of generating any number of load as desired, from diﬀerent geographic locations leveraging the computing power that the Amazons IaaS & PaaSmodel provide.

The solution was implemented by invoking Amazon AMIs of desired capacity from desired geographic locations on the Amazon cloud, which Copies the load test data to one of the controller machines in EC2 instance running on Linux, creates a folder structure to collect the results from various AMIs. The controller machine would then copy the test data to various AMIs and then manage the entire load testing, distributes & manage the load among AMIs over the test run and once the load test is done, it would collect the results and send it back to the Compassites test invoker machine.

Technology Used

JMeter

Benefits and Results