CapCal - Calibrating Capacity and Performance on the Cloud

I run a professional services team called 'Hemisphere', specializing in very high-volume video delivery and large-scale social media tools. We're based in Auckland, New Zealand, but our clients are all in the United States. At the end of 2009, we were asked to develop a cloud-based (EC2) application for a client that was expected to receive some incredible load. We were frankly skeptical but shown evidence that suggested we could anticipate millions of hits per minute sustained across a short period. As it turned out, our go-live began with 21,000,000 hits in the first 20 minutes. We cast about for perfomance-testing resource so that we could be sure the application we built stood up to the impending tsunami of visitors, and almost everybody said (a) load testing like that had never been done, and (b) load testing like that probably never WOULD be done, because nobody had the infrastructure capable. Then we met Randy Hayes and the team from CapCal. CapCal runs cloud-based load-testing, and Randy was sure their team could pull it off. We wanted to hit three million concurrent users across a test suite of over three hundred highly-spec'ed EC2 Apaches, plus a dedicated memcache farm and a master/slave MySQL implementation. No problem, said Randy. He wondered aloud if it might be the biggest load test in the history of the internet, and we suspect it probably was. We used CapCal's services for a period of about 4-5 months, and I will put my reputation on the line here and now to say that if you are looking for performance testing, you absolutely WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED. CapCal's infrastructure, software, approach and attitude are the best. When we went live, we KNEW we would stand up to the load (and we absolutely did). In fact, CapCal's testing allowed us to finely calibrate how many machines we needed, and ended up saving our mutual client many thousands of dollars in operating expenditure. If you're in the market for these kinds of services, please don't look any further. Like us, you will no doubt find yourself with a long-term performance-testing partner, one that you will confidently and unequivocally recommend to your clients.

We have used CapCal with great success during daily builds to validate that our application's performance is actually improving. Their tool is easy to use and supplies the architect and developers with key metrics to inform code change decisions. We recommend CapCal to all those shops that want to improve the performance of their software.

I've been working with CapCal since the early days and seen great progress in features and ease of use but leveraging the EC2 cloud has been heavenly in cost savings. Performance testing for us and our clients is highly cyclical in nature and on demand. Housing, feeding and caring for our performance test servers to generate production-size load can be costly in all regards (total footprint) especially when they are not in use...waiting for the next build or release. Amazon EC2's on demand resources and CapCal's full featured ease of use tool and support are a great combination for your performance testing needs. Hiroaki Ajari, Aligned Technology, LLC

I found the folks at CapCal very knowledgeable, flexible and easy to work with. The CapCal Control Panel provided the comprehensive platform we needed to accommodate a very comprehensive set of test sessions and corresponding datasets to test our php/mysql web application. With the CapCal Cloud Burst delivery system we were able to effectively simulate thousands of instantaneous/continuous users hitting our development environment. The after-test reports provided us with the guidance we needed to streamline our code. I highly recommend CapCal to anyone looking for a fast, affordable performance testing solution. John Hill, President HIL-TEC

CapCal was able to accommodate our urgent load testing needs while providing the best support of any vendor I have ever worked with. Using the CapCal client tools and working with their support team we were able to create robust test scripts and begin testing within a matter of hours. Unlike other capacity planning companies the CapCal service is available on demand — there's no need to schedule a time or set a predetermined load for your tests. You can run them when and how you want. Results are available in real-time as the tests run. This is in stark contrast to other companies where you must wait for the results. This means you can react to test results and make adjustments more efficiently.