Accelerate Public Cloud Application Performance Testing with IxLoad and Public Cloud Resources
By A. Joseph Dupre III | The 9.10 release of IxLoad Virtual Edition (VE) brings more resources to accelerate your ramp up on public cloud testing. With the ability to leverage many of the same tests used to validate Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Microsoft Azure as well, IxLoad users can speed application performance testing of the network functions they deploy on top of these clouds.
When moving from one public cloud environment to another, you’ll find that there are many similarities. But there are also unique aspects and differentiators of each public cloud that may impact decisions and the trade-offs required to provide the best application performance for your end users while maintaining the highest degree of security. There is also a learning curve to getting comfortable navigating a new environment, even if you are already familiar with using IxLoad VE in other contexts. Getting up and running quickly with a deployment of the test tool is usually the first milestone a test engineer tries to achieve.
Figure 1. IxLoad | Public Cloud Tutorials playlist on the Ixia Training TV channel on YouTube
The Ixia Training TV channel on YouTube is a great place to get started if you are new to application performance testing of NFVs on AWS or Azure, or if you are very familiar with IxLoad VE for on-premises testing but the public cloud is an entirely new environment for you. There are getting started videos showing the basics of deployment for each of the public clouds that IxLoad supports.
The OpenIxia repositories on GitHub are an excellent place to download and review example templates that you can reference for quick deployment into one of the supported public clouds. For example, there is a repository for AWS of CloudFormation templates that you can use to quickly deploy an IxLoad client instance and one or more virtual load module instances. These examples represent the minimum needed to get started quickly and test engineers can customize the examples to more directly fit their application testing needs or as a reference for incorporating IxLoad into their own testing chains.
Figure 2. Hosted on OpenIxia GitHub, this is an IxLoad CloudFormation template for AWS
Be sure to check out these resources from time to time as new releases of the products come out or a new example gets posted. Keysight encourages you to subscribe to the Ixia Training TV on YouTube to get notified when new content is added to the channel. Also, be sure to reach out to your local Keysight account representative to get more details on application performance testing in the public cloud.