News
Load emulation for better deployment results
- By Jack Vaughan
- January 6, 2004
Perhaps the greatest change in development in recent
years has been the expansion of the application user community via the World
Wide Web. Development targets quite usually today are wide-area network targets.
And networks with seeming ''bandwidth to burn'' can get quite stingy when least
expected.
Developers know that predicting application performance on such networks is
very difficult. In coming weeks, Programmers Report will take a look from time
to time at different methods of predicting how apps will run at runtime in the
networked world.
We spoke with individuals from Shunra Software Ltd., which has a unique take
on the topic. The company recently launched Shunra\Storm Solution Suite 3.1,
which provides load emulation and can connect with a variety of third-party
tools that one can find in a QA lab. Shunra is an Israeli company whose
principals came to the firm's basic network emulation approach after extensive
work optimizing TCP/IP networks. With the company's software, a developer's
desktop becomes a remote-user location enabling the developer to sample the
end-user experience.
Shunra's CloudCatcher software actively records latency and packet loss on
the production network, so new applications can truly be tested. Shunra's
software allows admins to record WAN scenarios. Pre-defined and user-defined WAN
parameters are stored as scenario files in a centralized library. Developers
point and click on a file to activate it on their workstation. A console based
on Visio allows developers to graphically create custom network populations.
Shunra positions this software as an important adjunct to load testing
software such as that from Mercury Interactive and others. ''It doesn't make
sense to just do load testing anymore,'' said Joanne Godfrey, director of
marketing.
Savvy developers long ago unlearned the habit of ''throwing their application
over the wall'' to network and DB crews. But this has not made it any less
palatable to have the network people bring your app ''to its knees'' at deployment
time, or claim your app brought their network to its knees. ''This is a way to
throw network problems at the app under development,'' said Shunra COO Boaz
Grinvald.
For more on this topic, including the White Paper ''My Big Fat Network: What
Every Software Developer Should Know,'' go to http://www.shunra.com/whitepapers_main.php
About the Author
Jack Vaughan is former Editor-at-Large at Application Development Trends magazine.