Sustainable performance testing: balancing throughput, cost and scalability in the cloud

Cloud adoption is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 85% of enterprises will adopt a cloud-first strategy, driving cloud infrastructure spending to $480 billion globally.  

 But this growth brings new challenges. Up to 30% of cloud spend is wasted due to inefficiencies, and data centres consume about 1.5% of the world’s electricity, a figure expected to rise. 

As organisations shift more workloads to the cloud, performance testing can no longer focus solely on speed and scalability. A smarter approach is needed, which also prioritises cost efficiency and sustainability. 

This article explores what sustainable performance testing means, why it matters now more than ever, and how organisations can transform traditional testing practices into a strategic advantage that supports both technical and business goals. 

What is sustainable performance testing in the cloud? 

Sustainable performance testing differs from the traditional testing approach. Instead of just considering speed, stability, and scalability, it also takes cost efficiency and environmental impact into account. 

Sustainable performance testing is based on four pillars: 

1. Throughput: ensuring your system can reliably handle real-world behaviours and peak user loads without performance degradation. 
2. Cost: optimising cloud resource consumption during tests to eliminate wasteful spending. 
3. Scalability: validating your system’s elastic ability to dynamically scale resources in response to demand, avoiding over-provisioning. 
4. Sustainability: minimising environmental impact through energy-efficient test design, execution and resource management. 

Why you need to adopt sustainable performance testing?  

Unchecked cloud costs and late discovery of performance bottlenecks are risks no organisation can afford. Failures during peak usage can lead to outages that damage customer trust and brand reputation, as well as revenue loss. In 2024, an update to CrowdStrike’s cloud-based security software triggered widespread errors across millions of devices, disrupting healthcare, banking, and aviation services, and leading to an estimated $5.4 billion in losses.  

Additionally, inefficient cloud usage is increasing the carbon footprint, drawing regulatory attention, and putting more pressure on stakeholders to adopt sustainable practices. Research from Morgan Stanley predicts that by the end of this decade, data centres worldwide will emit around 2.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions – a clear sign that we need more environmentally conscious ways to build and manage digital infrastructure.  

 When organisations adopt sustainable performance testing, they can see long-term benefits: 

• Lower cloud costs and higher efficiency: smarter management of test environments reduce cloud expenses without sacrificing quality. 

• Improved system reliability and user experience: by scaling more efficiently, your systems can handle peak demand without crashing or slowing down, keeping customers happy 

• A stronger sustainability story: showing that you care about your environmental impact builds trust with customers, partners and regulators and helps meet growing sustainability expectations 

• Better competitive advantage: organisations that get performance and sustainability right are better prepared for future regulations, more responsive to customer needs and more agile in fast-changing markets. 

Example use cases for sustainable performance testing 

E-commerce seasonal scaling - a retailer preparing for Black Friday testing might reduce environment costs by using auto-scaling cloud instances. Smart use of cost monitoring tools during load tests could inform more accurate infrastructure budgeting. 

Media streaming optimisation - a video platform could link cloud resource consumption to energy data, dynamically rebalancing workloads. By running tests in containerised, auto-scaling environments, they could maintain quality while lowering emissions during high-traffic events. 

Financial services API validation - a bank testing its APIs might shrink environment provisioning times from days to minutes through automation, reducing cloud costs while maintaining throughput and coverage. 

Key challenges, considerations, concerns 

 Sustainable performance testing sounds great in theory, but putting it into practice is where most organisations hit roadblocks. Here’s where things often get tricky: 

Test environment complexity 
Building test environments that accurately reflect production while avoiding resource waste is challenging. For example, a retailer preparing for a busy shopping period might want to simulate traffic from across regions and devices. But spinning up all those environments can use more cloud resources than necessary. If they’re not careful, they end up with systems running longer than needed and waste thousands on short-lived test data. 

Measuring sustainability 
Energy usage and carbon output are difficult to pinpoint when your cloud provider only gives generalised reports. This makes it difficult to accurately make decisions based on the data and report your sustainability metrics confidently. 

Cross-functional alignment 
Engineering teams want fast testing cycles to stay on track. Finance wants to keep cloud spending under control. And the sustainability lead wants to reduce emissions. If these teams aren’t aligned, it can lead to delays and unclear priorities. It takes shared goals and good communication to find the right balance.   

Skills gap 
Most IT teams know performance testing, but fewer know how to factor in cost or sustainability. Getting the right capabilities across teams is key here. 

Evolving tools and standards 
Sustainable performance testing is still an emerging discipline with rapidly developing best practices, tools and frameworks. You need to prepare to be agile. 

Prepare your organisation for sustainable performance testing 

Sustainable performance testing is no longer optional, it’s becoming more and more essential., 

To prepare, technology leaders should: 

• Pilot sustainable performance testing on critical systems and measure outcomes 

• Invest in cloud-native testing and cost monitoring tools with sustainability features 

• Encourage cross-team collaboration between DevOps, finance and sustainability stakeholders 

• Train teams on cloud cost optimisation, green IT principles and automated test environment provisioning 

Contact us today to schedule a free assessment and start your sustainable performance testing journey. 

Struggling to accurately measure your sustainability data? Read our how-to guide: How to build a data foundation for effective sustainability reporting