6 Standout Benefits of Private Locations

You might have heard the news already… Gatling Enterprise Cloud has a brand new feature: Private Locations! 

What are Private Locations and how can they help you with your testing strategy? 

In a Gatling Enterprise Cloud simulation, the traffic is generated by Gatling-controlled AWS-based load generators from around the world. This solution works perfectly for many use cases, but not all.
With Private Locations, you use your own locally hosted load generators to produce the simulated traffic that occurs during a Gatling simulation.

Wait, that sounds like Gatling Enterprise Self-Hosted…

It is like Gatling Enterprise Self-Hosted. Mostly.
Rather than installing Gatling Enterprise locally and setting up a Cassandra database to store your stats, your dataviz and statistics are all stored and accessible on Gatling Enterprise Cloud.
In short, Private Locations give you the Gatling Enterprise’s Self-Hosted benefits, along with the flexibility, easy setup, and accessibility of Gatling Enterprise’s Cloud version.

What does this mean for my Gatling Enterprise Cloud account?

Gatling Enterprise Cloud is already great for testing most projects. The AWS-based load generators that Gatling offers around the world can meet most companies' challenges.
With that being said, here are a few of the advantages you can expect if you begin using Private Locations:

Increased Security

Gatling Enterprise Cloud is already very secure. However, due to government and industry regulations or strong IT requirements, some load testing projects prohibit using load generators that aren’t in their own network.
With Private Locations, users can generate all their simulated traffic on load generators they control, eliminating this limitation.

Test without a public endpoint or on a test environment

Gatling Enterprise Cloud has the ability to test applications that are behind a firewall by using our dedicated IPs. However, many applications might not have a public endpoint at all. In these cases, they’d normally have to use Gatling Enterprise Self-Hosted.
With Private Locations, you now have the ability to use load generators located within your local network to test these applications.

Less latency, better response times

The load generators used by Gatling Enterprise Cloud can give you a realistic idea of your application's response times to traffic from around the world. However, any time you’re performing a test over the internet, there’s a bit of noise involved in the test. For most response times this is trivial, but if you have response times of 10 ms or less, this noise can be statistically relevant.
Load generated within your own network avoids this noise and can give you more accurate response times.

What are some of the advantages over Gatling Enterprise Self-Hosted?

As you may have noticed, Private Locations offer many of the features that Gatling Enterprise Self-Hosted has offered for years. Let’s take a look at what use cases Gatling Enterprise Cloud might be better suited for than the Self-Hosted version and where the Self-Hosted version should still be used:

Cloud with Private Locations: Lighter and faster setup

Gatling Enterprise Self-Hosted requires at least 2 Linux-based machines to set up correctly: one to spawn the load generators and one for the Cassandra database.
Gatling Enterprise Cloud is hosted by us on the Cloud and there is no need to set up and host your own database. All you need to do is host one docker container which will spawn your load generators and you're good to go. No other setup or installation is needed.

Cloud with Private Locations: Always up-to-date

It can be tough to keep all of your software up to date and running on the latest version.
As our Cloud version of Gatling Enterprise is hosted by us, it constantly receives updates. If you’re interested in accessing the latest features of Gatling Cloud, it is the place to be.

Cloud with Private Locations: Unlimited simulations

Gatling Cloud’s pricing is based on tiers and minutes, but even on the lowest tier (Scout), we allow you to create unlimited simulations.
For our Self-Hosted version, your license costs are based on the number of simulations and load generators you require. So if you need to create a lot of simulations, the Cloud version is a better choice for you.

Self-Hosted: Unlimited testing

While Gatling Enterprise Cloud allows you to have unlimited simulations, you are limited in the amount of testing you can do by the monthly minutes provided on your plan.
If you want truly unlimited testing on a small number of simulations, Self-Hosted might be the best option for you.

Self-Hosted: Completely private

It’s right in the name, our Self-Hosted version is 100% hosted locally by you. This means that your database, simulations, and everything else are completely under your control. This might be a requirement for heavily regulated industries and organizations with strong IT security policies, or it could just be your preference.
Either way, if you require full control of all data involved in the testing process, Self-Hosted is the right version for you.

What’s coming next for Private Locations

Private Locations are supporting AWS based load generators, as well as Azure and Kubernetes.  We’re looking at adding support for additional protocols soon, like GCP.
If you have a requirement for these or any other types of load generators, let us know so we can ensure they’re addressed in our roadmap.

We’re also planning on changing the way we store your data. Currently, with Gatling Enterprise Cloud, your binaries (the scenario, dependencies, and libraries) are all stored on the cloud.
In future iterations, accounts that use private locations will also have their packages stored privately as well, giving you more control over your security.

Conclusion

So, should you be using Private Locations? That’s completely up to you, and we’re happy to help you with whatever suits you best. Here’s a quick chart to help you find which best meets your requirements.

Once you know which solution is right for you, reach out to our team to start with a free trial. If you’re not sure and would like more information, book a demo or contact our sales team.