Mu Dynamics launches cloud-based load testing solution for mobile apps and APIs

RED HAT SUMMIT, BOSTON, USA: Mu Dynamics Inc., the leader in validating and testing application-aware networks, announced the introduction of Blitz, the first API-friendly cloud-based load and scale testing solution. Built specifically for developers of mobile applications accessing content through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Blitz helps to optimize those applications for scalability and performance.

"Blitz provides us with the testing solution we need to support our ever-growing line-up of mobile applications," said Calvin Carter, president of Bottle Rocket Apps. "Our projects are mission-critical apps for major brands with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users. We need to quickly determine if they can scale to support heavy usage. Blitz removes the guesswork of predicting performance issues and helps ensure scalability."

With more than 300,000 applications available for the iPhone alone, there is an urgent market need to ensure network-connected applications scale for the number of users accessing it concurrently. Additionally, social media usage in the mobile environment has skyrocketed and the applications available typically use APIs to communicate across various platforms.

Current offerings for cloud-based load testing are repurposed enterprise tools, designed for testing static websites and enterprise applications, and are not affordable for developers of mobile applications or APIs. In fact, in many cases the testing cannot be performed because of the time and cost involved. Blitz takes away these objections with a self-service and affordable solution that any software development team can use.

"Blitz is an important part of our OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering," said Sarangan Rangachari, senior director, Cloud Ecosystem at Red Hat. "Developers who build on OpenShift will need to know that they can quickly test their applications to ensure they scale and perform as designed no matter the number of users. Blitz provides capabilities as part of OpenShift to help accomplish this scalability and performance."

Blitz delivers unique capabilities that enable mobile application developers and organizations delivering APIs (such as Facebook and Twitter) to quickly and efficiently guarantee performance and scalability including:

Multi-Location Load Testing – for location-aware mobile apps, the ability to understand user experience from specific geographic regions around the world is essential. Blitz can run load tests constituting millions of concurrent users accessing the application from multiple continents. Combined with parameterization of API invocations for generating dynamic user data, Blitz accurately recreates mobile sessions from around the world.

API Friendliness – by integrating common development tools to the cloud, Blitz eliminates the expensive and tedious test creation process. Developers can instantly load test their APIs and cloud apps without creating complex test scripts. With its Google Chrome extension, Blitz brings load and performance testing into the development cycle, where the developers can simply navigate to a page on their app and instantly launch a load test.

Continuous Integration – applications are constantly changing with hundreds of updates delivered daily. With continuous integration (through a RubyGem), mobile application and API developers can integrate Blitz into their continuous deployment process. The RESTful API for Blitz also makes it easy to monitor API and application performance from multiple locations.