Clouds are very popular these days, because they provide a convenient virtual environment for a number of tasks from web hosting to scientific computing. In a cloud you can get a fresh ready to use system with almost any predefined parameters in a matter of minutes without need to purchase hardware and setup the OS. Besides that, clouds usually provide very fast and wide Internet connection. That is why it is usually a very good idea to use clouds for load testing of a web site. This is especially useful if the target site is hosted in the same cloud.

Since WAPT does not require any unusual hardware, it can be easily setup on any virtual system. There is no special license for this type of use. If you have a general WAPT or WAPT Pro license valid for one system installation, you can install the product on a virtual system as well. The only additional requirement is that to observe the license agreement in such case you can run only one instance of the system at a time.

Actually with cloud testing you can go even further. Since WAPT Pro can run distributed tests with multiple load agents and manage the process remotely, you can setup the agents in a cloud (or in many different ones) and manage the test from your local workplace running on your desktop.

The connection between the workplace component of WAPT Pro and load agents is established over TCP/IP protocol. Each agent is waiting for a connection from workplace on a specified port. By default the port number 9475 is used, but you can change it in the Load Agent Manager, if this one is occupied by another process. So, in order to run the remote agents in the cloud environment, you only need to open that port for external connections.

Let’s see how this can be done with a popular Amazon cloud. First, we need to create a Security Group for which we allow TCP and UDP connections to the ports in a range. We use 0-10000 range, which means any port from 0 to 10000. If you want, you can restrict this to 9475 only.

Now we create a system instance where we will install the agent. We use the previously created Security Group for this.

Finally, we add the agent to the list of agents in the WAPT Pro workplace. To do this we should simply specify the IP address of the instance created at Amazon.

Everything is ready now for running the test. When you launch it, the workplace will send all the test data to the agent(s) and will start receiving performance statistics. The target web site will be loaded by the agent(s) running in the cloud.