The evolution of software from a simple application running in an isolated system to a multi-node solution in a network and now to geographically distributed cloud solution with hundreds or thousands of nodes, has brought about its own challenges in terms of testing. Testing strategies which works well in one model is not really applicable to others. While many of the tests for a cloud hosted solution can be done by replicating a subset of the actual production environment, some test to be effective need a production like environment.
This could be challenging if the hosted solution is either complex or large. Though one might successfully replicate production environment for testing, it is very difficult or too expensive to replicate end user behavior, as the sample set of users in cloud could be very large. One option to overcome the given problem is to perform the testing in a live production environment. This presentation attempts to bring forth the challenges and possible suggestions for testing cloud hosted solutions in a live production environment.
Video producer: http://www.pnsqc.org/