Cloud Based Load Testing using TFS

What is Cloud Based Load Testing?
It goes without saying that performance testing your application not only gives you the confidence that the application will work under heavy levels of stress but also gives you the ability to test how scalable the architecture of your application is. It is important to know how much is too much for your application!

Working with various clients in the industry, it has been realized that the biggest barriers in Load Testing & Performance Testing adoption are,

1. High infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing
2. Time taken to procure & set up the test infrastructure
3. Finding use for this infrastructure investment after completion of testing

Endurance Testing
To test for endurance, Azure diagnostics is used to begin with, but later started using Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to capture the metrics of the machine under test. Currently Microsoft Load Test service does not support metrics from the machine under test.

 Herez an use case of quote generation engine with an expected fixed user load and ran the test for very long duration such as over 48 hours and observed the affect of the long running test on the Azure infrastructure.

Threshold Testing
Another use case to step load the quote generation engine by incrementing user load with different variations of incremental user load per minute till the application crashed out and forced an IIS reset.

It depicts the threshold testing as above.

There a few limits on the usage of Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service that you can read at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/06/26/load-testing-with-team-foundation-service-launching-preview-and-early-adoption-program.aspx

Dell EMC

Computer-maker Dell Inc struck a deal on Monday to buy data storage company EMC Corp for $67 billion in cash & stock with 19% premium. The acquisition, the year's third-largest in all sectors, top in technology sector.

The deal should help privately held Dell, the world's No. 3 computer maker, diversify from a stagnant consumer PC market and give it greater scale in the more profitable and faster-growing market for cloud-based data services.

The deal will be financed through a combination of new equity from Dell's owners - founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell, its investment firm MSD Partners, private equity firm Silver Lake and Singapore state-owned investor Temasek Holdings - as well as the issuance of the tracking stock, new debt and cash on hand.

Michael Dell, with the help of Silver Lake, took the PC maker private in $25 billion deal two years ago.

Dell first approached EMC in October 2014 following speculation over a deal between Hewlett-Packard and EMC collapsing and Elliott attacking the company, the source said.

Michael Dell then met EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2015 in Davos in January, the source added. Negotiations between Dell and EMC intensified in the last two months.

The transaction is expected to close between May and October 2016, the companies said.  The combined company aims to be a leading enterprise player in the following markets:

• Servers and Storage fro the Enterprise Market
• Virtualization via VMware;
• Converged infrastructure (EMC owns VCE);
• Hybrid cloud and cloud computing
• And security via RSA, which is owned by EMC.

Airbnb Airpal

We know that Airbnb is a popular website for people to list, find, and rent lodging. It has over 1,500,000 listings in 34,000 cities and 190 countries.

Recently, Airbnb  launched Big Data tool Airpal, a web-based query execution tool that leverages Facebook’s PrestoDB to facilitate data analysis by authoring queries and retrieving results simple for users.

Key features of Airpal:

• optional access controls for users
• ability to search and find tables
• see metadata, partitions, schemas, and sample rows
• write queries in an easy-to-read editor
• submit queries through a web interface
• track query progress
• get the results back through the browser as a CSV
• create new Hive table based on the results of a query
• save queries once written
• searchable history of all queries run within the tool

Requirements are:

• Java 7 or higher
• MySQL database
• Presto 0.77 or higher
• S3 bucket (to store CSVs)
• Gradle 2.2 or higher

On keeping with the spirit of Presto, they have tried to make it simple to install Airpal by providing a local storage option for people who would like to test it out without any overhead or cost.

For more detailed information, visit the GitHub page here: https://github.com/airbnb/airpal