Load testing requirements | Cloud Platform | Acquia Product Documentation

This page describes load testing requirements for the Cloud Platform infrastructure for different subscription types

Cloud Platform Professional¶

Cloud Platform Professional applications rely on a shared load balancing infrastructure that is used by other customers. Dedicated load balancers are unavailable on such platforms. Therefore, Acquia does not permit unlimited volume of load or stress testing on Cloud Platform Professional in any production or non-production environment. By putting a limit on the volume, Acquia can ensure that other customers’ applications are not impacted by any other application’s development efforts.

If you are on Cloud Platform Professional and require load testing for your application, contact your Acquia account manager to discuss about upgrading your subscription.

Cloud Platform Enterprise with shared load balancers¶

If you are a Cloud Platform Enterprise customer with shared load balancers in front of your production environment, Acquia offers the following options that can enable you to perform load testing, assuming your production environment is not yet live:

Acquia can provide one test load balancer for a single four-hour window. Although there is no charge for this option, you must request this by creating a Support ticket with at least 5 business days’ advance notice. This option is available one time per subscription, and you must configure a custom domain name with your DNS provider and point it to the IP address that Acquia provides prior to the provided window. The load test cannot start before or end after the provided window as it may impact the results of other customers who have also reserved the infrastructure for that day.
For an additional charge, Acquia can provision a pair of dedicated load balancers for a minimum period of one week. To avail this option, you must provide 5 business days’ advance notice. For pricing information or making this request, contact your Acquia account manager.

You can perform load tests on your Cloud Platform Enterprise production environment only if you choose one of these options. This is necessary to ensure that other customers’ live production applications are not impacted by another application’s load testing. Acquia does not permit load tests on any non-production environments on shared staging infrastructure.

Cloud Platform Enterprise with dedicated load balancers¶

If you are a Cloud Platform Enterprise customer with dedicated load balancers in front of any environment, you can perform an application stress test at any time. However, you must first create a Support ticket and get an acknowledgment on the ticket from Acquia Support. With this advance notice, Acquia can notify all the technicians about your load test. This prevents Acquia from blocking that traffic as the traffic would otherwise look suspicious without the customer notification.

When you submit this request to Acquia Support, include the date, time, and time zone of the planned test, and also indicate whether the traffic will be anonymous or authenticated.

If your application is not yet live, you can run a load test on your production environment. After your application is live, use a dedicated load testing environment that duplicates your production environment, so that you get the most accurate results on a non-production environment.

Note

For Cloud Platform Enterprise, the bandwidth on the load balancer maxes out at around 50 Mbps. This is the cap on data for tests that primarily hit several pages with anonymous traffic. If you need more bandwidth, you can use an elastic load balancer, which routes traffic to the available load balancers in a round-robin manner and multiplies the available bandwidth. This differs from the normal configuration where the secondary balancer idles awaiting the failure of the primary.

Cloud Next¶

For applications running on Cloud Next, the options noted earlier for Cloud Platform Enterprise applications apply. However, Cloud Next does not yet support the provisioning of dedicated load test environments that are added to your existing application.

As an alternative, until dedicated load test environments are supported on Cloud Next, Acquia provisions a new temporary application with only a production environment for you to test on for the desired period. To utilize this environment, you must replicate your code, database, files, and PHP settings over the test application. That application can be used for load testing without the risk of the test impacting your production environment. To get pricing information, contact your Acquia account manager.