Top benefits of testing websites on the cloud

Nowadays web app development is becoming more and more dynamic. This increases the pressure of releasing the application quickly to market without sacrificing quality. Both Agile and DevOps teams are rolling out upgrading applications versions in very short intervals and or the faster release of cycles QA teams are constantly aiming to discover resources beneficial to them. Luckily they have come up with one such resource which is a cloud for testing website.

Using the cloud testers can perform web application or website testing at a faster pace by eliminating the constraints of on-site development. Executing tests in the cloud helps organizations make testing cost-efficient, and more collaborative with automation and Agile workflows. Testing on the cloud helps in building a high-quality application without spending much time and maintenance costs that too without any compromise in quality.

In this article we will discuss the top benefits of testing in the cloud and why it is important. Before we move ahead to understanding Cloud Testing it is important to first know what cloud computing means.

What Is Cloud Computing

Cloud computing means utilizing the infrastructures like software, storage, servers, databases, networking, and more of a cloud service provider. It involves delivering these services over the internet (the cloud) on a pay-as-you-go basis. In short, it is an internet-based platform that provides various computing services like hardware, software, and other remotely related services.

Cloud services help organizations of all sizes to provide faster innovation and flexible, on-demand resources for users. To utilize cloud services, organizations pay cloud providers as per their requirements which is very cost-effective, because if the company goes for in-house server storage, databases, application, and services, it will cost them a lot. Cloud computing services offer a more efficient way to run an organization’s infrastructure and scale it as it grows or changes.

The cloud provider hosts data and programs to allow for more processing power on users’ personal computers and access cloud-based files and applications from anywhere using any device just with an internet connection. Some of the top cloud providers in the market are, Amazon web services, Microsoft Cloud, Google Cloud

Cloud Computing services

Cloud computing services are highly customized, and different types of cloud computing allow each organization to find the right services for their needs.

There are three main types of cloud computing, they are and 

Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS)

This is the base level of cloud computing. It provides an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, operating systems, networks, and more from the cloud provider through an internet connection. 

Platform as a Service(PaaS)

Platform as a Service is primarily a cloud computing service for developers and programmers. An outside cloud service provider handles all the data, security, and infrastructure systems. Thus provide an ideal environment for creating, developing, testing, and managing applications more efficiently without building and maintaining its own infrastructure. 

Software as a Service(SaaS)

SaaS is a service that delivers on-demand applications managed by cloud providers to its users on any mobile device. Cloud providers are responsible for handling application updates, bug fixing, and other maintenance.  SaaS apps are web applications or mobile apps that users can access via a web browser. It does not necessarily need to have the app installed locally on each user’s computer. They can connect to the cloud applications via a dashboard or API.

What is Cloud Testing

Cloud testing or Cloud-based testing is the process of using the cloud computing resources of a third-party service provider to test cloud-based web applications and quality verification. The purpose of cloud testing is to verify functional as well as non-functional requirements of web applications such as performance, reliability, compatibility, scalability, interoperability, disaster recovery, security, etc.

Cloud-based testing ensures better team collaboration with the users and helps to monitor and track their progress for faster and more efficient workflow with flexibility and scalability. It also enables multiple users and teams to execute tests on multiple devices simultaneously and saves time and the cost of testing. It is performed using cloud-based tools to emulate real-world user traffic load and environments for testing any type of application, and building fully functioning applications.

The Cloud testing platforms allow gain access to cloud-based testing labs services,  multiple devices, and frameworks such as CI/CD tools, debugging tools, etc.

Building and maintaining such an in-house device lab can be cost-draining and time-consuming to set up. Also once the website is ready, it needs extensive testing with increased loads. Cloud-automated testing platforms are already built with these capabilities to support and accelerate scaling.

Types of cloud

There are four main types of clouds, they are private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and Community clouds.

 Public Cloud- This cloud is available to individuals and organizations in a Public environment. Simply it is meant to serve multiple users. The end user does not own them. They are managed by third parties which provide cloud services to the public online on a pay-as-you-go basis

Private Cloud- This cloud environment is only available to a single end-user or a group.

Hybrid Cloud- This cloud combines the facilities of both private, or Public clouds. They are also known as heterogeneous clouds.

Community Cloud- In this cloud, the infrastructure is shared by specific organizations to help some community’s specific concerns or tasks.

Challenges with Cloud Environment

To reap all the benefits of cloud testing it is important that you know the challenges that come along with it beforehand. So that you can combat them to make a move towards getting all its benefits for an easily scalable testing process with a Cloud-based environment.

• The biggest concern of organizations using a cloud environment is security because they are hosting their data in a third-party cloud. And their worry remains about the leak of their confidential data, virus attacks, and fear of theft of application logic.
• Due to the increase in competitive technologies the application are not only hosted on a single cloud rather organizations are adopting multiple cloud models with different vendors. But with that, they have to deal with the challenge of multiple cloud models and maintain security, synchronization, speed, application availability, and scalability.
• Cloud computing is growing increasingly and has now gained so much popularity but utilizing cloud testing tools is still a challenge as testing on the cloud needs skilled experts or resources that are still hard to find.
• some times due to server downtime, organizations have to face a lot of performance issues that affect their profit. And the only way to resolve this issue is to change the cloud vendor. Which is really a big challenge for organizations completely relying on the Internet.

Benefits Of Cloud-Based Website Testing

Cloud Web Testing has emerged as an asset to developers and testers due to the availability of resources, flexible testing environments, cost-saving nature, and many more. It has now become a necessity for enhanced, easy and scalable Website Testing testing. Other than reducing cost and saving time there are lots of other reasons for running website tests in the cloud. To get a thoughtful understanding of why you should perform cloud testing, let’s get started with the benefits of cloud-based application tests. 

Cloud tools and services are easy to use

The cloud is an autonomous system all the testing resources that the cloud shares are included in the service and are alike for every tester. Hence the speed is not impacted by sharing. Also, the testing teams do not require any installation to use the cloud. need to is no installation required to use the cloud. Testers just need to sign in and raise the query to install the required tool to start testing. 

Scalability

One of the most prominent benefits of cloud-based testing is the scalability to run automated tests without setting up each device and testing environments manually. you can scale the number of test environments based on your testing requirements at any time to control the speed that too without bothering installation. Cloud solutions accelerate executing tests in parallel and at scale and provide faster feedback 

Collaboration For Agile Workflows

Using a cloud helps in enhancing collaboration between teams and members of the same team.

Being a developer, tester a QA engineer, if you require any important information, you will get it available immediately on the cloud. If different teams are working on the same app, the cloud makes it easier to review all testing activities including test automation frameworks that were used for executing test cases across all platforms.

This approach reduces errors and facilitates cross-team collaboration which helps in maintaining the schedule and delivering important functionalities and features on time. 

Cost-Effective Infrastructure

Cloud computing services are more cost-effective when it comes to buying, and maintaining, your own testing infrastructure, including testing tools licensing, upgrading frameworks, and many more. The cloud resources are being shared by a pool of users making the use of the testing tools on the cloud more cost-friendly. Additionally, website testing in the cloud charges on an as-used basis, which means paying only for the tool that you use when required. Thus you cut down the expense when you are not using the tool. 

Availability to Shared Resources

Another prominent benefit cloud testing provides is that it allows the users 24/7 availability to access resources irrespective of the device in use. All it needs is a steady internet connection to access the application or required resources for testing from anywhere, anytime.

This helps teams located in different locations across the world to keep up with the rapid changes in the customer environment. Thus, developers can detect real-life traffic situations and debug the defects in real-time at an early stage. This allows enhanced test coverage and ensures better quality testing and quantity in the application. 

Automatic Updates For New Devices And Browsers

When you are testing on the cloud, updates or new any new devices in the market automatically gets added to the cloud. Cloud test vendors free the testers from the responsibility of carrying out upgraded testing framework releases and adding tests for different devices and operating systems. This way it helps the testers to focus on other aspects of the web application without worrying about keeping the configuration of a local test Grid updated. 

Improved Productivity

When using the cloud teams are more productive because the team’s work gets synced by testing the application at any time from across the world. Also using the cloud they don’t need worry to set up environments, maintain platforms, and ensuring that the devices are plugged in and charged. Thus teams get more time for other important activities. This way results are achieved faster and the application gets delivered on the time with speedy execution. 

Clouds enhance Speed

One of the key benefits of moving testing to the cloud is to make things move faster because applications run on local hardware do not provide sufficient speed and efficiency as those provided on the cloud.

Cloud offload the pains of building and setting up testing environments by providing ready-to-use and up-to-date testing environment that would otherwise take a lot of time. This enables the testers and developers to focus on shift testing left and getting faster feedback. Additionally, testing in the cloud also offers the ability to do more in less time by executing a number of tests in parallel to enhance speed. 

Detailed Test Reporting

Identifying and solving issues quickly at an early stage is the secret to successful website testing. If the testing report comes after the process is complete, delays the time to resolve issues. Cloud-based website testing enables team members to collaborate and report on a test in real time.

This allows the team to generate test reports at any point during the application testing cycle. So that problems can be identified quickly and rapid solutions can be made. Another benefit of testing in the cloud is that it offers a consistent dashboard that enables it to extract reports of every tester working under the same organization.

LambdaTest Cloud-Based Automation Testing

Testing on the cloud is an ideal solution for a successful DevOps testing strategy. LambdaTest is one such cloud-based testing platform where you can implement all the above-mentioned benefits of the Cloud to meet today’s continuous delivery demands.

This is an all-inclusive, effortless, and automated cross-browser compatibility testing platform that allows you to instantly build and run both manual and automated tests for websites and web applications in the cloud.

LambdaTest ensures that your web applications work perfectly on each browser, operating system, and device by performing cross-browser compatibility testing on a cloud of more than 3000 real mobile devices, desktops, browsers, and operating systems with their combination. It also provides the ability to execute testing across different locations with different environments.

With LambdaTest you can perform a number of tests including parallel testing, cross browser testing, shift left approach to automation testing, and many more. It can also be seamlessly integrated with multiple third-party tools for CI/CD, bug tracking, instant messaging, project management, and so on.

Some of the remarkable features it provides are faster testing, with better coverage, allows to debug easily without recreating the test environment, customizable reports with text logs, screenshots, video recordings, running tests in parallel across many different test environments to cut down build times, and many more to help you analyze results faster.

LambdaTest also lets you focus on your apps while keeping the test grid up-to-date as new devices get automatically added to the device cloud as they appear in the market.