Tom Lounibos

It's always exciting to be on the front end of a trend.  Some turn out to be short-lived fads while others, such as the electronic distribution of music, disrupt entire industries.  There are some who see cloud computing as a fad. Those who share that view tend to look at the Cloud as if it's an all or nothing proposition; if you can't move your entire infrastructure to the Cloud it must certainly be a passing fancy. But the Cloud is here to stay.  There are many applications, like compute intensive statistical analysis, business intelligence and testing, that are incredibly well-suited for cloud computing.  We're proud to have been first in the Cloud with a commercial testing solution and have been keen observers of the evolution of testing in the Cloud.  What have we seen? First, it's getting more crowded.  The benefits of testing from the Cloud are just too obvious... (more)

Will Social Media Drive Enterprise Cloud Adoption?

The typical enterprise marketing or ecommerce web site requires approximately 5-20 servers to handle daily user activity. They handle traffic from (depending on the type application and profile of the company) between 2,000 and 6,000 concurrent users on a daily basis. However these times, they are a changing, as enterprises around the world begin to experience the impact of incorporating social media into their traditional forms of marketing. Take the incredibly successful TV show “American Idol”, which was one of the first to combine social media with entertainment. Involving the... (more)

Unlocking the Gridlock of Testing from the Cloud

When we started SOASTA it became obvious early on that the requirements for load and performance testing fit the key characteristics of cloud computing: a variable need for scalable compute resources measured in hours, not months or years.  Amazon EC2 was the first to provide a platform that dramatically changed the cost equation for these resources and delivered an elastic API to automate deployment.  As a result, SOASTA was an early adopter of Amazon’s API to reduce the effort of provisioning servers. That experience has proven invaluable as we’ve grown the company.  As an app... (more)

Consumer Websites Must Stop Cheating on Their Tests

Another week goes by and more leading consumer websites crashed and burned, causing losses in both revenue (millions) and, perhaps more importantly, in consumer confidence in ecommerce. This week fail whales were sited swimming in the oceans of one of the world’s largest retailers, a leading children’s toy manufacturer and the industry’s leading online payment processor. PayPal alone (which was down for several hours this past Friday) may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars for itself and the enormous network of retail outlets that rely on them for their financial transacti... (more)

The 2010 Cloud Capacity Surge

SOASTA has held a unique position in the cloud community, allowing us to watch its evolution over the years. As one of only a few enterprise cloud applications, on any given day we may be looking for up to 10,000 cloud servers to simulate millions of virtual consumers for performance testing some of the world’s leading consumer web sites. With this in mind, we have had to be incredibly aware of the supply side of cloud computing. With this in mind, I’m happy to report that 2010 has been a very good year for cloud capacity growth (availability of cloud servers), as well as the ela... (more)