How Akamai Assures Zalando of a Successful Cyber Week

Zalando is a leading European online platform for fashion and lifestyle. Founded in Berlin in 2008, they bring head-to-toe fashion to over 49 million active customers in 25 markets, offering clothing, footwear, accessories, and beauty products. Their assortment of international brands ranges from world-famous names to local labels.

The Zalando platform is a one-stop fashion destination for inspiration, innovation, and interaction. As Europe’s most fashionable tech company, they work hard to find digital solutions for every aspect of the fashion journey: for their customers, partners, and every valuable player in the Zalando story. Their vision is to be the starting point for fashion and a sustainable platform with a net-positive impact for people and the planet. We are delighted that such an innovative company has chosen to work with Akamai.

Load testing for success

In the run-up to large-scale retail events such as Cyber Week, it is essential for Zalando to prepare for a variety of scenarios with thousands of test customers. This helps them to ensure that their customers can enjoy the online shopping experience they have grown to love. Load testing for months before this kind of event prepares their infrastructure and ensures that it can meet a surge in demand that the new hot trend in sneakers or hoodies can create. During Black Friday, for example, load can increase up to 50 times on certain back-end systems!

Unlike other organizations, every team within Zalando contributes its own user journey for load testing. This makes the process rather complex, and it is essential for them to have a robust tech infrastructure in place. And this is where Akamai comes in with CloudTest. Our solution helps Zalando plan for peak traffic performance by performance testing their environment safely and at scale to identify areas that need strengthening.

Speaking about the collaboration with Akamai, Heinrich Hartmann (Head of SRE at Zalando) said, “Load testing is essential to set us up for success, and I remember the days before we implemented the Akamai solutions that enable it. We all waited with bated breath, hoping that our platform would deliver without major problems. Now we can have much higher confidence that we can meet demand, thanks to our robust testing. Akamai makes this possible, and they not only install the tool but also provide comprehensive trainings that are watched by hundreds of engineers across our workforce.”

Find out more about Zalando.