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