I'm looking for a SaaS that let me do Stress Test with my own scenarios. I don't want to do them from my local machine because I want the most realistic scenario possible.
Best,
I.
Yes, there are a number of services available - you should probably be searching for "load testing service".
I'll point out the free version of our product: Load Tester LITE. The LITE version provides testing of simple scenarios for free with no limit on the number of simulated users, but the use of our cloud engines to generate the load is not free (you can use your own hardware to generate load, if you like, for free). There are other restrictions as well.
I'd suggest searching for "load testing as as service" and not just "load testing service" (the latter will return some results that provide professional services.)
It really depends on your needs.
I work for BlazeMeter (we're kinda like JMeter on steroids as a service).
We offer both a paid and free tier depending on your needs.
Related
From my understanding, Informatica Cloud, Boomi, Talend, JitterBit are all integration tools which have "Connectors" to connect to servers (and I believe these Connectors in turn call APIs to access the required data). I saw many others but none of them are free although some are open source.
Are there any tools that help you visualize the integration process for free? If not, why not?
Tools like Informatica, Boomi provide drag and drop which show the entire flow.
Talend Open Studio is one such tool. not completely visual but almost there.
There are not many free tools as data storage technologies are constantly changing. It would be expensive for developers to keep up with constantly changing technologies without a source of income.
Developing data integration tools are resource intensive. Why would anybody(any enterprise company) spend so much of their effort and give away for free. Also the provider of the tools have to provide support for enterprise level . P1 means 4 hour response which means building the capability of the support team on par with the developer. All of these cost money and time. The only way to recoup is to sell the finished product and provide services.
I'm using an application that is very interactive and is now at the point of requiring a real analytics solution. We generate roughly 2.5-3 million events per month (and growing), and would like to build reports to analyze cohorts of users, funneling, etc. The reports are standard enough that it would seem feasible to use an existing service.
However, given the volume of data I am worried that the costs of using a hosted analytics solution like MixPanel will become very expensive very quickly. I've also looked into building a traditional star-schema data warehouse with offline background processes (I know very little about data warehousing).
This is a Ruby application with a PostgreSQL backend.
What are my options, both build and buy, to answer such questions?
Why not building your own?
Check this open source project as an exemple:
http://www.warefeed.com
It is very basic and you will have to built datamart feature you will need in your case
What is the most typical structure of business where you want to develop several web services? Should one establish a company for each of them or keep under one? I would like to hear your experiences maintaining such situation, keeping in mind the global focus.
By far the two most critical sets of issues determining the answer to this question are legal and financial (including, but not mainly, accounting). So it's hard to see how this question fits with the intent of this site.
It is advised to provide more background information on the topic. Business plans for SaaS companies can range from large cloud computing service vendors (with integrated solutions) and up to business analytics providers targeting specific market niche.
Business is a bit like programming: Keep It Simple (Stupid). Do not create multiple companies, unless there is a good reason to do it.
If You Planning to use python, you can use Django to build saas application,
this video Build SaaS application in Python django will explain about getting started with Sass.
Thanks
I'm looking for a way to give out preview or demo versions of our software to our customers as easy as possible.
The software we are currently developing is a pretty big project. It consists of a client environment, an application server, various databases, web services host etc.
The project is developed incrementally and we want to ship the bits in intervals of one to two months. The first deliveries will not be used in production. They have the puropse of a demo to encourage the customers to give feedback.
We don't want to put burden on the customers to install and configure the system. All in all we are looking for a way to ease the deployment, installation and configuration pain.
What I thought of was to use a virtualizing technique to preinstall and preconfigure a virtual machine with all components that are neccessary. Our customers just have to mount the virtual image and run the application.
I would like to hear from folks who use this technique. I suppose there are some difficulties as well. Especially, what about licensing issues with the installed OS?
Perhaps it is possible to have the virtual machine expire after a certain period of time.
Any experiences out there?
Since you're looking at an entire application stack, you'll need to virtualize the entire server to provide your customers with a realistic demo experience. Thinstall is great for single apps, but not an entire stack....
Microsoft have licensing schemes for this type of situation, since it's only been used for demonstration purposes and not production use a TechNet subscription might just cover you. Give your local Microsoft licensing centre a call to discuss, unlike the offshore support teams they're really helpful and friendly.
For running the 'stack' with the least overhead for your clients, I suggest using VMware. The customers can download the free VMware player, load up the machines (or multiple machines) and get a feel for the system... Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server is going to be a bit more intrusive and not quite the "plug n play" solution that you're looking for.
If you're only looking to ship the application, consider either thinstall or providing Citrix / Terminal services access - customers can remotely login to your own (test) machines and run what they need.
Personally if it's doable, a standalone system would be best - tell your customers install vmware player, then run this app... which launches the various parts of your application stack (maybe off of a DVD) and you've got a fully self contained demo for the marketing guys to pimp out :)
You should take a look at thinstall(It has been bought by vmware and is called thinapp now), its an application virtualizer.
It seems that you're trying to accomplish several competing goals:
"Give" the customer something.
Simplify and ease the customer experience.
Ensure the various components coexist and interact happily.
Accommodate licensing restrictions, both yours and the OS vendor's.
Allow incremental and piecewise upgrades.
Can you achieve all of these by hosting the back end (database, web server, etc.) and providing your customers with a CD (or download) that contains the client? This will give them the "download/upgrade experience" that goes along with client software, without dealing with the complexity of administering the back end.
For a near plug-and-play experience, you might consider placing your demo on a live linux or Windows CD. Note: you need a licensed copy of Windows for the latter.
Perhaps your "serious" customers might be able to request their own demo copies of the back end as well; they'd be more amenable to the additional work on their part.
As far as OS licenses, if your vendor(s) of choice aren't helpful, you might consider free or open-source alternatives such as FreeDOS or linux.
Depending on if you can fit all the needed services into a single OS instance or not...
Vmware Ace or whatever they're calling it nowadays will let you deliver single virtual machines under strict control, with forced updates, expiration and whatnot. But it sounds easier to just set up a demo environment and allow remote access to it.
The issue here I guess is getting several virtual machines to communicate under unknown circumstances - if one is not enough?
An idea then is to ship a physical server preconfigured with virtualisation and whatever amount of virtual servers needed to demonstrate the system.
Using trial versions of the operating system might be good enough for the licensing dilemma - atleast Windows Server is testable for 60 days, extendable to 240 when registering.
Thinstall is great for single apps, but not an entire stack....
I didn't try it yet, but with the new version of thinstall you are able to let different thinstalled application communicate.
But I guess you're right a vm-ware image would be easier
Most of the work I do is with what could be considered enterprise Web applications. These projects have large budgets, longer timelines (from 3-12 months), and heavy customizations. Because as developers we have been touting the idea of the Web as the next desktop OS, customers are coming to expect the software running on this "new OS" to react the same as on the desktop. That includes easy to manage automatic upgrades. In other words, "An update is available. Do you want to upgrade?" Is this even a realistic expectation? Can anyone speak from experience on trying to implement this feature?
At my company we have enterprise installations ranging into the thousands of seats. If we implemented an auto-upgrade, our customers would mutiny!
Large installations have peculiar issues that don't apply to small ones. For example, with 2000 users (not all of whom are, let us say, the most sophisticated of tool users), tool-training is a big deal: training time, internal demos, internal process documents, etc.. They cannot unleash a new feature or UI change without a chance to understand how it fits in their process and therefore what their internal best practices are and how to communicate that to their users.
Also when applications fail, it's the internal IT team who are responsible. Therefore, they want time to install a new version in a test area, beat it up, and deploy on a Saturday only when they're good and ready.
I can see the value in making minor patches more easy to install, particularly when the patch is just for a bug-fix and not for anything that would require retraining, and if the admins still get final say over when it's installed. But even then, I don't believe anyone has ever asked for this! Whether because they don't want it or they are trained to not expect it, it doesn't seem worth it.
Well, it really depends on your business model but for a lot of applications the SaaS model can end up biting you. It's great for a lot of things but for some larger applications the users are not investing as significant amount up front and could possibly move to something else before you've made any money.
See
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-218408.html
and here
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/SoftwareAsAServiceWhenYourBusinessModelBecomesAParadox.aspx
for more information
One of the primary reasons to implement an application as a web application is that you get automatic upgrades for free. Why would users be getting prompted for upgrades on a web app?
For Windows applications, the "update is available, do you want to upgrade?" functionality is provided by Microsoft using ClickOnce, which I have used in an enterprise environment successfully -- there are a few gotchas but for the most part it is a good way to manage automatic deployment and upgrade of Windows apps.
For mobile apps, you can also implement auto-upgrades, although it is a little trickier.
In any case, to answer your question in a broad sense, I don't know if it is expected that all enterprise apps should make upgrading easy, but it certainly is worth the money from an IT support standpoint to architect them to allow for easy upgrading.
If you're providing a hosted solution, I wouldn't bother. Let the upgrade happen silently (perhaps with a notice that you did it). If you're selling an application that's hosted on their servers, let the upgrade decision be made by a single owner, not every user of the app.