1. 0126365For more information on the Windows Azure platform, please visit: www.azure.com Partner: SOASTAWeb Site: www.soasta.com Partner Size: 40 employeesCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services—IT servicesPartner ProfileSOASTA tests the performance of Web applications. Based in California, the company offers both internally installed and cloud-based testing applications.Software and ServicesWindows Azure platformSOASTA CloudTest“With the Windows Azure platform, we’re able to simulate real-world Web traffic …. we can spin up as many servers as necessary, execute the test scenarios, and return actionable results while the test is running.”<br />Dave Murphy, Senior Vice President, SOASTA<br />SOASTA, a company that tests Web applications, needed access to thousands of geographically dispersed servers to simulate real-world Internet traffic for its customers. Instead of buying its own servers, SOASTA developed a cloud-based testing application that it now deploys on the Windows Azure platform. SOASTA has easy access to servers all over the world under a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The company recently demonstrated its CloudTest® application in a case-study test of Office.com for Microsoft.<br /> Business Needs<br />Businesses that rely on complex, dynamic Web sites to interact with customers need accurate performance data to manage user experiences and plan for peak traffic events. But it can be difficult for companies to conduct accurate simulations of real-world conditions. SOASTA, a California-based firm, offers a range of services to help companies test the performance of Web applications. <br />Traditional testing typically involves software that customers install internally, but this approach is not well-suited for identifying problems caused by scale or distance. To accurately simulate Internet traffic that might encompass millions of users, SOASTA would have needed to establish and maintain a massive physical server infrastructure distributed among multiple countries. This was a proposition that the company and its customers found prohibitively complex and expensive.<br />To solve this problem, SOASTA developed a testing application called CloudTest, which would be delivered through the cloud and wouldn’t need to make use of company-owned infrastructure. However, the company’s requirements were unusual compared to other users of cloud services. “A lot of cloud-services users will spin up servers and keep them up, essentially unchanged, for an extended period of time,” says Dave Murphy, a Senior Vice President at SOASTA. “We might need as many as a thousand servers for a particular testing scenario. But we need them for only a few hours—and we need to bring them up and down quickly and easily to take maximum advantage of CloudTest’s distributed, scalable architecture.”<br />SOASTA was looking for a cloud-services vendor with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, geographically dispersed data centers, and the ability to support a simple, wizard-based process to provision servers for testing scenarios.<br />Solution<br />In 2009, SOASTA began investigating the Windows Azure platform—a set of Microsoft cloud computing services—as a hosting option for CloudTest. It offers a scalable environment with computing, storage, hosting, and management capabilities, and users have access to servers in Microsoft data centers worldwide. “At first, we didn’t think the Windows Azure platform would be a good fit for us because CloudTest is a Java-based application. But the Microsoft team was very willing to work with us and build an API that would let us interact with its servers the way we needed to,” says Brad Johnson, Vice President of Strategic Partners at SOASTA. “Once we had that capability, combined with pay-as-you-go access to servers around the world, we started to see the Windows Azure platform as a solution for our expansion.”<br />SOASTA made CloudTest available on the Windows Azure platform in early 2010. In March, SOASTA was engaged to run performance tests on Office.com, the customer-facing Web site for the Microsoft Office product team. Because of the flexibility and scalability of the Windows Azure platform, along with the powerful, visual test-creation interface of CloudTest, SOASTA completed test planning within three days. The tests—which included simulating 10,000 concurrent virtual users and domestic network latency—took only three hours. SOASTA managed the testing process while Office.com employees observed real-time results returned by an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine that SOASTA developed internally. <br />Benefits<br />By deploying its CloudTest application on the Windows Azure platform, SOASTA can accurately and cost-effectively simulate real-world conditions related to scale, distance, and other external factors that can affect performance. These issues often can’t be measured by traditional lab tests.<br />Wider Geographic Distribution<br />For SOASTA, a major benefit of the solution is gaining access to servers in dozens of countries. “Because the Windows Azure platform includes servers in data centers located around the world, we are in a better position to help our customers understand the effects of a geographically dispersed user base,” says Johnson. Teera Tosukhowong, Senior Test Lead for Office.com, agrees that the ability of CloudTest to drive simulated traffic from worldwide servers vastly increases the value of the performance data it returns. “When testing from within a lab, you can’t realistically measure how server throughput is affected by distance-related delays,” he says. “Without CloudTest on the Windows Azure platform, we couldn’t have measured the site capacity with real-world network latencies or determined whether our load balancer achieves good distribution of inbound traffic.”<br />High Scalability<br />The CloudTest application can also test a range of different traffic levels. “With the Windows Azure platform, we’re able to simulate real-world Web traffic from thousands to millions of users at a time,” says Murphy. “And because of the Windows Azure API and our CloudTest provisioning wizard, we can do it very quickly. As soon as we know a user’s testing needs, we can spin up as many servers as necessary, execute the test scenarios, and return actionable results while the test is running.” Johnson says the pay-as-you-go model is key to making this aspect of CloudTest cost-effective. “With the Windows Azure platform—unlike cloud services from some other vendors—not only can we call up new servers on demand, but we also pay for only what we use. As a result, we can be a lot more agile in response to specific customer needs, and our services are far more affordable than traditional load-testing tools.”<br />Real-Time Results<br />With the flexibility of the Windows Azure platform, SOASTA can use its internally developed OLAP engine to analyze a variety of test metrics in real time. “The main benefit of our real-time OLAP engine and dynamic CloudTest Analytics dashboards is that we can capture terabytes of data in-flight and give customers a clear view of what’s happening as their systems respond to different load levels and other demands,” says Murphy. “This gives them the option of experimenting with remedial actions while the test is still running, which is a lot faster than having to wait for test results, reconfigure everything, and then run the test again to see if your fixes worked.” Vamshidar Rawal, Senior Performance Test Engineer for Office.com, was impressed with the SOASTA performance tests for Office.com. “With CloudTest on the Windows Azure platform, we were able to obtain valuable performance data in a very short period of time,” he says. “For the first time, we were able to test distributed components of our production infrastructure, including our content delivery network. As a result, we are more confident than ever before about our domestic scalability capabilities.”<br />