NeoLoad Performance Automation Reduced AWS Testing Costs by 80%

Background

The company is a leading provider of computer-assisted information and analytics for legal, corporate, government and non-profit organizations in more than 130 countries, with 10,000 employees worldwide. Its information network contains 3 petabytes of legal and news data, with 65 billion documents from 60,000 sources. Each day the service processes more than 40 million documents and 77 million public records, with more than 1 trillion connections across all content types.
In February 2020, Cognizant transitioned the company’s database services to an AWS cloud architecture and shut down its legacy mainframes and servers. With all applications hosted in cloud, they utilized AWS Auto Scaling, which automatically increases the number of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances during higher subscriber activity and then lowers capacity when not needed.
However, the company was concerned about how it was using AWS resources for its performance testing. Either there was no capacity for controllers and load generators when needed, or the company was paying for “extra” resources that were not being used optimally (especially during non-testing hours).

Challenge

The leading global provider of legal and business information/analytics needed to solve two parallel performance related problems with one solution. First, its existing application performance testing tool was not only expensive but was hindering the company’s ability to become more agile, reduce test cycles and promote collaboration between Dev and QA teams. Second, the cost of AWS resources dedicated to testing had to be driven down, automating the performance testing in its CI/CD pipeline.

Solution

Cognizant recommended NeoLoad for its faster and easier test design and maintenance, greater automation capabilities, seamless integration with CI/CD tools and ability to cost effectively optimize cloud resources.

Cloud-resource costs brought under control

When a test is run through NeoLoad, controllers and load generators are dynamically spun up for the test duration and released once the test is finished. The AWS testing resources are automatically provisioned within minutes of executing a test on demand and shut down once the test is complete. With NeoLload, nobody needed to write lengthy scripts to provision machines, manually connect dynamic testing resources to CI pipelines (or) manually change the number of load generators used for a test.
The NeoLoad license was used only when needed, so other teams can use the license to execute their tests.

Automated performance testing integrated into CI/CD pipelines

The company realized the benefits of an Agile/Shift Left approach making it easier, faster and less expensive to catch and fix issues earlier than later, by integrating automated performance testing into CI/CD pipelines. The Performance Team developed a “zero manual effort” solution integrating Git, Jenkins and AWS with NeoLoad.
On build deployment, a Jenkins job is triggered, automatically executing a performance test, with test results shared with stakeholders. No manual effort is required to clone the project for the Git repository (or) to map the load generators to the test scenarios. All results are stored in NeoLoad and can be reviewed anytime during (or) after the test.
Additionally, a second Jenkins job is triggered, creating a new controller in AWS dynamically. The latest NeoLoad project is cloned into the new controller from Git with new AWS load generators created based on the requirements. The test is executed in NeoLoad with the license leased based on the number of users and, duration and unleased automatically after test execution, with the load generators and controller terminated post test completion and test reports are automatically generated to targeted stakeholders’ dashboards.