Load and Performance Testing Golden Age

Back in March we blogged about low cost load and performance testing options. Back in November 2008 we blogged about load testing in the cloud. It is amazing how quickly things can progress when you have very smart people charging the way. LoadStorm has in less than 1 year grown to over 2000 customers. Other cloud based load testing tools are also experiencing a rapid increase in customer base.

Other tool vendors have not kept up. LoadRunner is as expensive as ever. I can’t even recall a single time over the last 5 years I have recommended LoadRunner to a client. Borland had been making nice progress with offering their tools at a reduced price with the Testing as a Service offering. But now that they are Micro Focus, that went out the window. They still offer the service but the prices went WAY up… they are now at the end of line with regards to tools I recommend. (HP LoadRunner doesn’t even get in the line)

So it was nice to see that another company isn’t scared by the cloud based offering. No… in fact they embraced the technology and are adapting. They are displaying the trademarks of an agile forward thinking organization. They are Web Performance. They have adapted their product to make use of the Amazon EC2 cloud. I was already a big fan of the Web Performance Load Tester application. I think it is one of the best out there for load testing web applications. Now that it can be deployed over the Amazon EC2 cloud it just makes them even better. I have a client coming up that this may be a perfect fit for. It will be exciting to see how this moves forward.

It has been almost a year since we at ProtoTest have started to make use of these new, exciting, and lower cost options. We have seen a dramatic spike in the number of customers doing load testing now because the cost is so much less. What you seeing? Have any of you used these tools? What do you like about them? What do you hate about them?