Managed service providers take on load testing
"Technology Insider": When Rick Parkinson needed to do load testing prior to the redesign of his company's e-commerce Web site, he had a choice to make. He could spend more than $25,000 to buy a product such as Segue Software's Silknet and do the job himself, or he could pay about $1,000 per month to a managed service provider (MSP) to conduct the tests for him. Parkinson chose the latter.
His choice was a no-brainer because his company is a start-up with little money to throw around and no time to waste. Parkinson is vice president of technology operations for Cymerc Exchange, a San Francisco online marketplace for used IT gear. Cymerc was founded in late 1999 and the first version of the site was barely on its feet when Parkinson joined last January.
A major relaunch was set for May 2000, but before that Parkinson needed to make sure the new site would provide an excellent user experience. Parkinson figured the exchange's designated users Ñ IT professionals Ñ would not be inclined to forgive a kludgy site. "Our users have high expectations. We needed to make sure our site was robust. And we wanted to make sure it would scale as we grew. Capacity planning was a top priority," Parkinson says.
"R. Parkinson"Having been founded during the brief golden age of venture capital in the late 1990s, Cymerc was awash in funding when it first launched. The company spent lots of money developing and hosting its site in-house. But by the cold pale light of last spring, with the funding picture changed 180 degrees seemingly overnight, Cymerc needed to save as much money as it could. So, shelling out five figures for an automated software testing suite was not an option. "I didn't have the money or staff or time to run an in-house testing service," Parkinson says.
Luckily for him, Parkinson found a plethora of companies that offered load testing and capacity planning services on a pay-as-you-go basis over the Internet. He looked at two in particular: Envive and Mercury Interactive. Both were promising, but Parkinson was taken with Envive's automatic scripting tool, which Mercury Interactive did not offer at the time.
Using the scripting tool, it is a simple matter to create a step-by-step process of different scenarios of how a visitor would use the site. For example, one person might log on to browse through the selection of used Sun enterprise servers available for purchase. Another might use the site to create used-equipment listings. Yet another might log on simply to peruse the abundant IT resources and technical help found on the site. "The script automatically captures the mouse clicks and keystrokes someone would make in each of those scenarios," Parkinson says.
After meeting with a few people from Envive, Parkinson understood how to use the scripting tool and was ready to make a deal. Signing on with an MSP for a service such as load testing is much simpler than contracting with an application service provider for a mission-critical application.
"Their stability wasn't as important to us as it would have been if we were locking in for a long-term arrangement," he says. He didn't bother with a service-level agreement, either, because availability is not as critical. "[Envive] is a start-up. We're a start-up. The relationship is fairly casual. When you're running a load test, it doesn't have to happen at any particular point in time."
Although Parkinson recently signed a one-year contract with Envive, he does not anticipate load testing will be a long-term need, especially because his site has not yet experienced an onslaught of users. There are currently 2,000 registered users with about 30,000 page views per month.
There were absolutely no implementation or integration issues getting the service up and running, according to Parkinson, mainly because there's no interface between Envive's and Cymerc's systems. Once he selects the scripts, Envive runs the tests on its mirrored Web site.
For the moment, Parkinson is quite pleased with the service. The $1,000 monthly subscription fee buys him real-time feedback about where there are application bottlenecks and other problems. Cymerc's in-house staff also keeps a close eye on the system performance through the use of tools such as BEA Systems' WebLogic and Freshwater Software's SiteScope.
Parkinson has also found Envive's load-testing service to be a useful site development tool. "We know how we will have to scale as we add more users," he says.
Network World
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