Use Cases: Web Services, Large Financial Enterprises
From a 50,000-foot view, business software applications are increasingly evolving toward standardized communication protocols and application-aware infrastructure. The upside in this market transition is more productive software development, but the challenge in achieving high uptime is ensuring that increasingly complex applications share expectations on inputs nd outputs, and maintain suitable response times across these complex and diverse inputs, even when the inputs don’t match the design expectations.
For example, the Mu Test Suite can test whether applications based on the WWW Consortium (W3C) developed Web Services Description Language (WSDL) XML-based language to help Web services customers build a model for describing Web Services. The WSDL defines services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. WSDL specification provides an XML format for documents for this purpose. Mu's solution may also be integrated into WSDL-based laboratory management frameworks. Mu also offers Representational State Transfer (REST)-ful Application support. REST delivers powerful and easy to use “web services” application paradigm for distributed hypermedia systems such as the Web-based applications that are delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS).
Thankfully, the same reliance on standard communications and standardized application infrastructure creates the opportunity or a standardized test infrastructure. Such standardized service assurance infrastructure models the components of the target systems and thoroughly exercises them by subjecting them to unexpected or invalid inputs.
Applying automated service assurance analysis using the Mu solution improves both deployment and development quality assurance by exposing weaknesses that result in costly downtime. Not thoroughly probing software has these risks (leveraging the mainframe concepts of Reliability, Availability, Serviceability, or “RAS”):
- Reliability: Unexpected inputs/outputs crash or mpair application components or systems
- Availability: Unexpected inputs/outputs may compromise acceptable response times for applications and application/system management
- Security: Malicious users may be able to identify accessible reliability bugs and use them to compromise security
The impact of downtime is great…but luckily there is a way to manage the risk of downtime by creating customized cases of millions of service traffic variations using Mu at a minor incremental development cost, so that the application can proactively qualified or “profiled” with the purpose of ensuring robustness against subtle protocol implementation flaws. The result of robustness testing is higher confidence in the uptime promises committed within SLAs.
View a list of protocols commonly used by these customers including F5 Networks.
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