You can go about this in a couple of different ways. One is you can bring in people who understand application construction or development, often independents developers and give them tools to help figure out where the application problem is. There are a variety of tools being used in the marketplace to do this that will give a developer some sense of where the response times of these applications. My advice to anyone building applications on these cloud platforms would be that they should look at functional, performance and scalability testing tools.
There are many functional testing tools on the market place as this is a well-established practice - see http://www.opensourcetesting.org/functional.php. In terms of performance testing, a developer should look for a software product that allows them to breakdown response times by domain. This is a must have. For example in the previous Tweetwheel example it would be necessary to determine to breakdown the response times for Tweetwheel.com, the domain for the Twitter API and Google.com domains.
For scalability testing I would look at tools that are easy to use that are easy to use so that you easily can set up load test of 1000 or 5000 virtual users and assess that at that load does your application start breaking down or does it still perform well. You can buy many software or SaaS products, which allow you to do these tests. Of course, I work for a company that provides some of these products – Keynote Systems.
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