Framework for testing cloud platforms and infrastructures

Cloud computing, which is a relatively new approach to distributed computing, uses cloud infrastructures that automatically scale to support an application's hardware requirements, and therefore, must have high reliability in order to meet user expectations. To achieve a high level of quality and reliability, cloud platforms and infrastructures must be tested thoroughly. Typically, cloud providers have individual approaches to infrastructure testing, and there are no widely accepted methods of infrastructure testing that are currently available. An important theoretical and practical problem in this area is the development of such methods, including testing application programming interfaces (APIs), which are direct links between the client code and the infrastructure it runs upon. In this paper, an approach for testing cloud platforms and infrastructures is suggested. An intelligent framework is presented, which accelerates testing and provides for parallel development of test cases. This framework is a cloud application, which contains plugins for testing APIs of cloud platforms. A prototype framework for testing Google App Engine has been created to show demonstrated applicability of the suggested approach.