Cloud-based testing also has several challenges you should consider before adopting this practice.
Vendor lock-in — Cloud-based services have little interoperability because public cloud providers develop their own architectures and operating models. It isn’t a problem until you decide to switch vendors and tools. Then, you may face challenges in transferring your data and test configurations.
Lack of control — When using cloud-based services, you can’t control any changes in these services, as it’s the provider’s responsibility to maintain and update them. A provider may force an update that deprecates features you use or may change interfaces, and as a result you will be forced to rework your testing environment.
Security and privacy concerns — Security in the cloud still raises many concerns, as not all cloud-based testing vendors apply reliable encryption and data protection techniques. Some solutions have an option to test in a private cloud, but it doesn’t eliminate concerns about the security of data stored outside your organization’s protected perimeter.
Potential availability issues — While providers guarantee round-the-clock availability of their services, even the least bit of downtime can cause negative consequences to your testing processes. For instance, in 2021, Microsoft Azure went down along with other Microsoft services. As a result, developers and testers across the world couldn’t use cloud services that relied on Azure.
Misleading service-level agreements — Vendors of cloud-based tools provide terms and conditions for their cloud-based services that differentiate the responsibilities of the vendor and the cloud user. Though these terms are necessary, they are often written in a biased and misleading way. Pay close attention to such conditions as data integrity, data preservation and transfer, and time for upgrade notice.
Infrastructure issues — Before choosing a cloud-based testing tool, make sure the provider offers you all the configurations, technologies, and storage you need. It may be difficult to emulate customer environments if you discover that some configurations aren’t supported by your provider. Moreover, creating a test environment that includes all necessary settings and data can be time-consuming for testers.
Hidden costs — Though vendors inform their clients about prices for their cloud-based services, improper use of test environments may significantly increase your costs. In order to avoid hidden costs, QA and DevOps engineers should thoroughly plan their test environments, take into account additional costs such as for data encryption, and monitor the use of cloud resources.
Possible non-compliance — If your organization has to comply with data security laws, regulations, and standards, it’s your responsibility to make sure that cloud-based tools and services you use are also compliant. Searching for compliant tools and verifying compliance can take a lot of time. Also, there’s always a risk that your vendor doesn’t follow security requirements thoroughly.
Simulating live upgrade testing - Cloud testing’s biggest challenge is to ensure that live upgrades do not impact the existing connected SaaS users
Short notice period - Cloud provider give a short notice period of (1-2 weeks) to the existing customers about upgrades. This is a big problem when manually validating the changes to your SaaS application.
You can avoid most of these challenges by defining your requirements for a cloud-based service and carefully assessing a service before signing an agreement. With some issues like lack of control or possible downtime, the only thing you can do is decide whether the benefits of moving to the cloud outweigh the risks.