HP has announced that the Community Editions of its’ performance engineering software suite are now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace online store. In addition, StormRunner Load (and LoadRunner), first announced last September to address the needs of Agile development teams looking to apply smarter testing techniques into development, have been enhanced and pre-configured for Azure environments, ‘providing organizations access to cloud-based tools on demand for faster and easier application performance and load testing.’
According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites, which was revised just after HP first released StormRunner Load, the testing market has been ‘steadily maturing’, yet it also continues to evolve as agile practices, mobile computing and cloud platforms complicate matters for testers and test managers. In addition to HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Soasta and Borland were included in the Leaders category, or almost half the 14 vendors that were analyzed in the report.
While recommending HP for those seeking a ‘comprehensive portfolio of integrated products’, Gartner also cautioned that it has become ‘more of a fast follower than an innovator, leveraging partners to fill gaps until the market settles.’ Kelly Emo, Director, Lifecycle and Quality Product Marketing, HP, holds a different view, especially for developers looking to move extremely fast without sacrificing quality.
“You don’t want to see speed at the expense of everything else,” she told IT Trends & Analysis. Emo said the announcements are a couple of examples, the types of opportunities vendors have to put in operation things to support what customers are facing moving to the cloud. “The idea is how do you enable the agile teams… that will enable them to see that performance early in the development cycle.”
Emo said support for Amazon ECS and Helion were included in the original release of StormRunner Load, but HP will continue to expand to other platforms. Initial demand has come from customers grappling with legacy backend systems and the rapidly changing demand for fluid designs for users. “The simplicity of the StormRunner model… really appeal to those kinds of application teams.”
Looking ahead, she said the focus will continue on this integrated tool chain, what HP calls “continuous integrating and testing”. “It’s those integrations where we’re putting a lot of the investments.”
The demand for speed and quality is “absolutely significant,” said Emo. Customers have the quality side down, but they struggle with the velocity. “When you see announcements like this one, it’s all about bringing across the value chain all the capabilities… an example of the kinds of things our customers are asking for and you’ll see more from us.”
In other cloud news from HP, the company announced it has made multiple contributions to the OpenStack Kilo release, including new converged storage management automation and new flash storage technologies to support enterprise-class clouds. A Platinum Founding member of the OpenStack Foundation, HP said enterprises struggle with the ‘all-in-one’ cloud model because they don’t use a single operating system or database software or management tool. “HP’s approach is to support a flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure with open source technologies as its core DNA, and this includes a commitment to supporting OpenStack technology at the storage layer,” said Eileen Evans, HP Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Software, Cloud, and Open Source.
The Fiddly Bits (& Bytes)
The new version of HP StormRunner Load provides increased flexibility for developers to test applications from a wide array of regions provided by multiple cloud vendors, reflecting the complex network of back-end services that typically run mobile applications. It can now generate virtual user loads from HP Helion Public Cloud and Azure regions. Other new features include:
-integration with WebPageTest to show client side single user response time when a back-end application is under load;
-execution of open source JMeter scripts in addition to LoadRunner vugen and TruClient scripts, JavaScript-based TruAPI scripts and HAR file-based scripts – supporting continuous delivery in Agile environments with Jenkins integration;
-additional smart analytics capabilities to identify bottlenecks in real time;
-integration with HP Network Virtualization so network behavior is included in end-to-end testing; and,
-integration with HP SiteScope and New Relic application monitoring software to provide real-time monitoring of application health and performance characteristics during testing.
HP LoadRunner Community Edition is available immediately on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace with HP StormRunner Load Community Edition available next month.
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