We have platforms for app development. Now comes a new platform specifically for load balancing and testing.

BlazeMeter, out of Israel, launched today with the unveiling of its service and $1.2 million in Series A funding from YL Ventures.

Blazemeter is based in part on JMeter, the Apache-based open-source project.

BlazeMeter is designed for developers and quality assurance (QA) professionals. It is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) but only for its infrastructure. The BlazeMeter app itself differentiates from the core AWS service, which developers and QA often now use for load balancing and testing.

AWS has become a haven for load balancing and performance testing but it has a certain degree of complexity and limited capabilities, said Alon Girmonsky, BlazeMeter’s founder and CEO in an interview yesterday.

He said you can do load testing on EC2 with 50 to 100 servers but beyond that it gets increasingly complex to scale.

“It (AWS) is limited in scaling,reporting and reliability,” Girmonsky said.

JMeter has been a tool of choice for developers with more than one million downloads. But it is not automated and can be complex to deploy. With AWS as its infrastructure, BlazeMeter is using JMeter to provide what it says is unlimited testing capacity, real-time reporting, analysis and recommendations.

Users define the resources required for load tests, including number of load engines, geographic origin and bandwidth strength. Customers pay on a self-service system.

Applications will become increasingly complex with shorter development times. There will not be the resources or manpower needed to configure tens or hundreds of servers for testing the volume of apps that will tax enterprise shops. Automation is key and it’s why IDC calls it a market that will approach $2.6 billion in the next two years. Competitors to BlazeMeter include Gomez and HP LoadRunner.

I’ve noticed a number of new companies abstracting complexities to provide core cloud-based services. Many of these services rely on AWS for infrastructure but differentiate at the application level to provide a richer user experience.

It’s this new network of apps that are ushering in a second generation of cloud services.  Their role is significant and will increasingly take market share from traditional technology giants.