BlazeMeter, a California-based continuous testing platform company, announced today the launch of the industry’s first platform for continuous testing using the “as a service” model. The new platform leverages cloud and open source technology to bring better testing for DevOps and Agile practices enabling shorter release cycles with higher quality releases.

The new platform provides a large toolset of options for both enterprise and small-medium business models such as a method for delivering scripting and overall test creation, provisioning and resources, reporting, rapid alerts and context awareness, modules, release candidates and integration with version control systems for incremental testing.

BlazeMeter integrates with a multitude of industry-standard DevOps and testing tools such as those from Sauce Labs, Jenkins, GitHub, and New Relic to extend many of the above-listed functionality. This also extends to integration withDevOps tools such as Atlassian Bamboo, configuration and orchestration such as Chef, and many others.

Testing is an important component for DevOps practices especially as apps and development become more complex and expand to cover different systems and hardware. DevOps practices lead to a tighter schedule for development, testing, and release paving the way for automation to ease testing needs as development moves to production.

This is especially true as more companies now see release cycles that could be measured in days (or hours) instead of weeks or months.

For more information on the Continuous Testing paradigm read BlazeMeter’s white paper on the subject.

“This ongoing shift in the industry is forcing developers to adopt agile continuous deployment and integration methodologies and move from perpetual to subscription-based solutions to keep up with the pace of the development cycles,” said Alon Girmonsky, BlazeMeter Founder and CEO.

Reporting: BlazeMeter and Sauce Labs’ testing environments seamlessly integrate into existing reporting solutions such as Jenkins Performance Trend and other open source products. The solutions provide both “pass/fail” trend reports and deep dive reports containing many potential diagnostics. Solutions can also integrate data from 3rd party solutions such as New Relic.

Alerts in case of failures: In the case of a sudden failure while executing in the production environment BlazeMeter is capable of not just throwing red flags to the operations, development, or DevOps team but also collecting all the relevant data and sending it along. The alerting can be tailored to the module or system being tested, as well as the team or person being alerted.

Modules, builds, release candidates, releases and production: Using XML and JUnit formats it is possible to break out different configuration scripts that can be recombined granularly against different modules, builds, and release candidates to provide context-aware testing configuration. As a result, DevOps teams can write and combine test configurations to best fit the needs of the build.

Version control friendly incremental testing: Extending on the above most development teams use version control, forking, and merging in order to develop against known-good production code bases but also need to test.

Developer and DevOps Angle

BlazeMeter rests in a very important niche for development and operations due to its placement for automating testing and reporting across the entire development cycle. Issues do not always arise in sanitized test environments and even pre-production may not always shake out all of the bugs. This means that though many issues might be caught before release, something needs to give users (and developers) a safety net when something goes wrong.

Using an as-a-service platform model, BlazeMeter is instrumenting an automated testing circuit that eases the need for hands-on manual testing (which is still very common) and allows the operations team to do operations and development to do development.

The BlazeMeter product also grows out of a long tradition of open source products that work by providing a UI atop of a text-based configuration system. As a result, developers who are used to products such as JMeter (the foundation of BlazeMeter’s service) can directly edit configuration files as text or use a configuration product to edit them with full graphical, wizard, and UI support. This allows engineers who have different backgrounds so easily work together on the same project.

Overall, BlazeMeter’s approach gives DevOps teams a powerful tool that accounts for a wide variety of engineering approaches and technical knowledge. The strong set of integrations with other industry tools and APIs means that while the product can be configured to work with virtually any setup from a collection of open source products to legacy systems.