| By Jason English |
Article Rating: |
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| May 27, 2008 09:45 AM EDT |
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5,557 |
The iTKO SOA Testing, Validation &
Virtualization Blog The practice and technology of Virtualization really has legs - it keeps moving
forward, from hardware virtualization, virtual test beds, to virtual endpoints,
to actually simulating the behavior of the software itself, which we're calling
Service-Oriented Virtualization (or "SOV" if you need a TLA for it).
Now
we are seeing the Performance Lab getting into the action on this practice. For
interconnected apps like SOA and serious enterprise integrations, the guys with
the load testing firepower have tools like LoadRunner and SilkTest in their lab,
but they get left out of the process until very near the end, when an interface
is available. SOV can break that dependency of waiting for "all the moons to
align" before they can get a test window.
The initial uses of SOV were to
allow the development and testing team to regain agility much earlier in the
lifecycle - so they could do their needed functional and regression testing
against Virtual Services instead of constrained live applications -- the
essential services, databases and mainframes in the environment.
But that
same virtualization is perhaps even more valuable in the performance lab, if you can apply serious load testing to it. The
constraints of having a realistic environment and test data to test and develop
against is holding these teams back from finding performance issues much earlier
- so we can gauge SLAs (service levels) at the component level. And in SOA -
where you are dealing with services and underlying systems that are distributed
and constantly changing, replicating that whole environment is incredibly costly
and time consuming.
With a virtual service environment, the performance
team tests the component they are working on with their existing load testing
tools, and virtualize the rest of the system dependencies and data away. Rather
than add hardware and bandwidth, just virtualize all of that, then see if it is
indeed the hardware, or more likely, something in their component or its
response to variable, changing data that is causing the bottleneck.
About Jason English
Jason joined iTKO in 2004, bringing more than 15 years of experience in executing marketing plans, re-engineering business processes and meeting customer requirements for companies such as IBM, EDS, Delphi, TaylorMade, Sun, Motorola and Sprint. As Director of eMarketing and Executive Producer, in2action Consulting at i2 Technologies, he was responsible for i2's outbound messaging during a period of extreme growth, as well as marketing services and working directly with clients to build easy-to-learn front ends to B2B systems. Prior to that, he managed customer experience as an Information Architect at Agency.com. Jason scored and designed several internationally released computer games in addition to conventional print advertising and television commercials.
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