Let's face it, if SOA had not preceded the push towards Cloud we would have had a mess on our hands.
To your point, Cloud and SOA testing are very similar. Both technologies depend on a rich set of interfaces and both technologies insert logic into the message layer. Parasoft SOAtest has been a market leader in this space for years and has evolved to readily handle the complexities of Cloud.
As far as the third party or access issues that are inherent with Cloud, Parasoft Virtualize allows organizations to reduce their dependency on these systems or dependent architectures.
Here is more information: http://www.parasoft.com/virtualize
Wayne Ariola
My pal Dave Linthicum, author of Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, has long been arguing that many of the methodologies, management and governance practices we’ve picked up for service oriented architecture over the years are readily transferable to cloud services.
Same goes for testing protocols. However, Dave cautions that the arrival of cloud formations may require some tweaking in established SOA testing practices.
- Some testing requires control of code and platforms. “Thus, we can’t do some types of testing such as finding the saturation points of the cloud computing platform to determine the upward limitations on scaling, or attempt to determine how to crash the cloud computing system.”
- Testing typically hasn’t extended to off-premises systems.
- There are greater legal implications for cloud-delivered services. “We are testing systems that are contractually obligated to provide computing service to our architecture, and thus we need a way to validate that those services are being provided now, and into the future.”
- Cloud computing is still new. It’s all still a work in progress, and the bugs need to be worked out.
Looking at cloud testing from another angle: Ken Ahrens recently referenced one of my recent posts, pointing out that the cloud itself offers a great testing environment.
