In entry four of 5 Steps to Ensure Performance, Technical Solutions Director, Joel Deutscher explains why cost is sometimes considered a barrier to performance testing, providing on-demand solutions to save money and implement an effective performance testing strategy.
Step 4 – Save Money with On-Demand Services
One of the primary reasons reported for not including performance testing in projects is 'associated costs'. So why is performance is considered so expensive?
It's the tools. Performance testing tools can be expensive, and while new players in the market have driven costs down, we still witnessed more money spent on tools for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Census than the labour.
It's the infrastructure. Simulating a large number of users requires significant grunt, which can be a large expense, especially if it's not a reoccurring activity.
It's the expertise. Performance professionals are highly skilled and specialised, and like to be paid accordingly.
So how can you reduce the costs of your tools, infrastructure and expertise? On-demand.
If you fall into the 50% of organisations that only conduct performance testing for specific projects, you probably don't need a perpetual tools license, as you can rent them as you need them. Almost every commercial performance tool supports rental models that range from per month, per week or even per day pricing. This can significantly reduce associated costs, especially as the licences are only required when you are running tests, not while writing your scripts. That's right, you may actually only need a licence for 4-5 days over a 5-6 week project.
The value of on-demand tool licensing is extended by on-demand test infrastructure. This may be a role of your own solution, using your company’s private or public cloud, utilising the facilities of service companies that will rent you their servers, or a fully packaged solution such as BlazeMeter, Flood.io or SOASTA.
The ability to spin up and spin 50 load generators as you need them is a clear way to save money, and moves us onto our final barrier, expertise, which is admittedly the hardest one of the three.
While tools and infrastructure can be requested at the click of a button, it's a little harder to say “I need someone to run my tests now, can you have them here this afternoon?”. Surprisingly though, this is a reality, and companies like Planit have been doing this successfully for years.
So next time your teams need to evaluate the performance of your applications or websites, you can request an on-demand resource to execute a test on on-demand infrastructure, using an on-demand tool license. Utilising on-demand services can lower the barrier to entry for performance to be considered in more of your organisation's projects and reduce your exposure to potentially damaging or newsworthy performance issues in production.
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