Tech Note: Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for 4D Benchmarking and Testing

PRODUCT: 4D | VERSION: 11.4 | PLATFORM: Mac & Win

Published On: May 7, 2009

Did you ever have a potential customer demand that your application run fast enough with 20 or 200 users, then go back to your office and realize you only have a few computers to test with? Using cloud computing, you can rent computers for extended periods of time, paying just a few cents per hour. This tech note explains how to setup a test environment using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and gives ideas on how to prepare your solution to run automatic and realistic user simulations.

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Commented by Thomas Fitch on May 27, 2009 at 3:16 PM

I've done some testing here using this for different projects and the low price was really amazing. Even with high numbers of clients, if you set up your test harness well beforehand you can get things done for a minimum cost. Obviously, the prices can change based on what Amazon decides, but for what I was doing it turned out to be about $12.50 an hour for 100 instances in the cloud. I only needed a couple of hours after refining my test cases so it worked out very well.

My best advice is build everything locally first and test as much as possible on your local machines. That way you will be sure that everything is how you want it before you start running using the Compute Cloud.