Cloud technology is becoming more complex. This means that thorough testing is more important. Sometimes, the complexity of cloud technology can be overwhelming. This can lead to analysis paralysis for cloud team members. Questions like what to test, how it should be tested, and definitions about success quickly take center stage. Cloud-based testing is possible with a variety of tools. This post will discuss cloud testing and the types of cloud testing. We’ll also discuss six success factors.
What is Cloud Testing?
Cloud testing is a method for testing a solution’s infrastructure using cloud resources. Although this definition may seem a bit confusing at first glance, it will become more clear once we look at concrete examples. This method is used for penetration testing, load testing and stress testing. Let’s take a quick look at each of these tests in order to complete our understanding on cloud testing.
What is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing (or pen testing) is a type of ethical hacking that determines whether an intruder can compromise a system’s security. This is often done with cloud computing to ensure that API’s remain secure. Only authorized users should be able to access them.
All cloud components are created using infrastructure code. Infrastructure as code refers to all hardware configurations being written into files that can be read by the cloud. The cloud compute resources then create the requested resource. One possible penetration test is to access the Git repository where these files are stored. Hackers have many other avenues of attack, not just the obvious one.
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Get started training. The sheer number of hacking possibilities makes these tests crucial. Although security is important, a system can only be as secure as the number of people who can use it. Load testing is our next cloud technique.
What is Load Testing?
Load testing is a method to test whether a system can handle the expected traffic volume. Load testing is similar to stress testing except that it is used to verify that the system can handle unusually heavy loads.
Because of the latency issues associated with cloud integration, load testing in the cloud can be very important. There is a good chance that your cloud application will still require to read and write to resources on-premise. A load test will confirm that these CRUD operations occur within a reasonable time frame. Load testing, which is essential for any production website, is a common practice. In vulnerability testing, we will discuss the last cloud testing technique.
What is vulnerability testing?
Vulnerability testing is a similar process to pen testing but with a different approach. Vulnerability testing does not involve ethical hacking. It uses a variety of tools to scan a system looking for vulnerabilities. These differences should be highlighted as they are often used interchangeably.
Major cloud providers will often have a vulnerability testing suite available for their end-users. AWS inspector is one example. AWS inspector will inspect your entire infrastructure for potential flaws. It will also check that all EC2 instances have appropriate network access. This tool can greatly improve your infrastructure’s security and compliance.
Amazon Inspector might discover that one of your EC2 instances, i.e virtual machines, allows unauthorized access to many ports. It may also discover that one of your S3 buckets has been made available to the general public. Azure also has its Security Center.
These tests are often able to detect a variety of conditions.
