UXD versus Features – our users speak

We recently launched the Mu Studio Performance Suite. It introduced many exciting new capabilities  including instant access to Multiple thousands of tests on Mu TestCloud, Multiple tracks, Multiple performance engines etc.

While these are certainly very useful features that bring tremendous benefits to the user, what really got users excited and had an emotional impact was not the features but the design (UXD). To me, what’s been really cool to experience is how discussions with new users quietly shift in quality – from ‘do you have more features than the other tool?’  to ‘WOW! You guys have thought through how I want to test.’

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Scaling out Drupal apps with Acquia and blitz.io

We are super excited to announce that Mu Dynamics has partnered with Acquia to bring blitz.io into the Acquia Network. This is immediately available to all Acquia customers to instantly and continuously integrate load testing as part of their Drupal deployment. Load testing web sites used to be a once-a-year, pre-holiday-season undertaking that cost significant $$$, time and resources. Given the complexity of existing tools and solutions, these types of tests could only be run by performance experts. blitz.io changes all of that to make load and performance testing a fun, affordable sport!

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blitz.io: Scaling out Heroku apps for $1/hour

We are super excited to announce that our blitz.io add-on for Heroku is now in GA. This really brings load and performance testing to the app developers in a very easy and affordable way. More importantly, load testing can now be seamlessly integrated into continuous deployment.

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blitz.io: How we use Heroku, AWS and CouchDB

I put together this prezi a few weeks ago as a quick way to describe the internals of blitz.io. This blog is an expansion of this to go into further details on the internals. We launched blitz.io a few months ago to really bring load and performance testing to developers, as part of the continuous integration. Last week we released multiple API clients in various languages to make this possible. We realize that most cloud-based load testing tools are heavy and are geared towards experts and cost significant time and $$$ to do performance testing. With the rise of PaaS, it’s imperative that this type of testing is easy, affordable to the developers and really part of dev and test, not a one off expensive event that happens once a year.

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Continuous Integration with blitz.io

Short blog, this one. At blitz.io we take continuous integration very seriously, in a fun sporty kinda way. In the era of polyglot programmers, we realize that all of us have our own favorites on programming languages for the specific app in mind. With the rise of PaaS and our ability to deploy apps faster than ever, we strive to bring load and performance testing to developers into the CI cycle, in your language of choice.

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blitz.io wins the best CouchDB App at CouchConf

So I head up to the High Sierras for a week switched off from the grid and on the way back stop at a Chinese restaurant for lunch. My fortune cookie says “You will be pleasantly surprised” or some such thing. I kid you not. Turns out blitz.io has won the best CouchDB App at CouchConf and we are super excited about this. While I don’t know exactly the criteria used by the panel, I sure do know that blitz.io pushes CouchDB to the limits in many ways. Beyond just the map/reduce, we use lots of other cool things about CouchDB in production, making blitz.io the first multi-tenant load testing solution targeted at app developers.

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blitz.io: Now a Heroku add-on in private beta!

We are super excited to enter private-beta of blitz.io as an add-on in Heroku. Since the launch of blitz.io a little while ago, we are seeing tremendous adoption by app developers to quickly and easily check the performance of their cloud and mobile apps. Add utility pricing with no commitments to that mix, all of a sudden scaling out doesn’t seem all that expensive.

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Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Testing

Mu Dynamics is uniquely qualified to offer DLP Testing solutions because our ancestry is in Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS).  Our founders and principal architects designed the first IPS at One Secure (later acquired by NetScreen and ultimately Juniper).  Fundamentally, an IPS and the Data in Motion (DiM) functionality of a DLP system perform nearly identical functions in opposite directions.  They act as filters across a network element, determining which data may safely be allowed to pass through and which must be blocked.

This process is complicated by the fact that the data is sent in discrete packets, but the determination of the safety of a particular flow generally requires examining data structures encoded over multiple packets.  A DLP (or IPS) system must therefore reassemble these data structures to allow a comparison to the signatures of prohibited data structures.

This filtering analogy suggests that there are at least four related testing needs: Full Post »

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Mu App Quadrant #2 – Netflix on iPhone & iPad Impacts Operator Networks More than on Android Devices

In our first edition of the Mu App Quadrant, we compared the run-time aspects of the most popular desktop video applications – Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon Video on Demand – and showed that Netflix is not particularly friendly to both Consumers and Operators.

It’s not just the apps – devices matter too!
Operators continue to struggle with the unpredictable growth of applications and the devices used to access them. With millions of people running applications like Netflix, spikes can occur on the network which often leads to disruption of other applications and services.

Recently, Korea Telecom suffered a network outage where a third-party app took the voice-call success rate down to a mere 10% because the signaling traffic generated by the app overloaded its network.
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Creating an Application Mix to Model the Production Network

Video and P2P Rule!
The traffic making up today’s networks is in a rapid state of flux. Just last week Sandvine, in their Spring 2011 Global Phenomena Report, noted that real-time entertainment continues to increase, and within North America represents almost 50% of peak fixed access traffic (much of this of course is due to Netflix). P2P traffic also continues to carve out a sizeable piece of the pie at around 20%. The rest is a mix of voice, business apps, games, Facebook and chat.

What’s interesting though is that the relative amount of traffic that isn’t application-level is tiny – all the stuff that makes networks run like DNS, ICMP, BGP and so on.

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