Peak events — such as retail sales, major sporting matches, music performances, or newly released video content — can often cause so much of a strain on sites and apps that user experience suffers or, in the worst-case scenario, doesn’t happen because of a crash. CloudTest allows you access to load testing tools for production or live environments that use thousands of cloud servers to simulate peak traffic scenarios, putting your site or app under full load to stress test how it will perform. It will enable you to identify any issues prior to your big event, helping to ensure go-live goes as smoothly as you had planned.
Real-time load testing at scale
Validate your readiness for fluctuating traffic with CloudTest, a highly scalable load testing platform. Identify bottlenecks in code, networks, and databases through a visual UI while simulating real-world scenarios with precision. Offered as a fully managed or self-service solution, CloudTest supports websites, apps, APIs, and CI/CD processes.
Prepare environments for predicted or sudden traffic spikes
How CloudTest works
Features
Set parameters, variables, and validations, or reuse and combine tests without code
Drag and drop test cases. Configure virtual users, geographic origins, repeats, ramp-ups, and pacing — with just a few clicks
- Test production volumes from global locations that reflect your user base
- Adjust loads during testing or simulate promotions and outages, all with real-time analytics
- Gain insights from custom, single-view dashboards that merge analytics with data from third-party monitoring tools
- Choose a fully managed service provided by our performance experts or a self-service solution
CloudTest Use Cases
Here are a few common business cases that CloudTest can help solve.
Validate readiness
Plan for traffic peaks
Get access to professional load testing
Validate readiness
Prevent an unnecessary outage by validating the readiness of your sites, apps, and workflows. Whether you need to test the operational readiness of a new application, the ability for your site to handle inconsistent traffic levels, or how your workload and delivery infrastructure are working, CloudTest quickly and easily identifies bottlenecks in live or production environments.
Plan for traffic peaks
Get access to professional load testing
If full end-to-end performance testing is a challenge, if you have short timelines, or if you don’t have the resources or infrastructure needed to conduct testing at a high level, use Akamai as a load testing software as a service vendor. Our expert load testing professionals will work with you to fully understand your testing requirements, conduct all your load tests, and deliver metrics to show how operationally ready your environment or infrastructure is to go live.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
CloudTest On-Demand is a load-testing software as a service, managed by Akamai and supported by our world-class performance engineers who have vast experience in large-scale production testing. This service enables organizations with limited time and limited resources (software, equipment, people, or expertise) to execute global load and performance tests. Our load experts will also provide guidance around scope of user journeys and test scenarios, conduct collaborative testing sessions, and deliver comprehensive reports.
CloudTest is a licensed tool that allows you to conduct realistic tests from the cloud, including testing all devices and browsers, distributing traffic realistically around the world, and performing real-time in-memory analytics. You can create tests quickly with no coding required.
CloudTest is CDN-independent and can test multiple CDNs (including Akamai) simultaneously, producing comparisons of how they perform under load.
CloudTest runs on a highly distributed platform and our carrier and cloud provider relationships enable us to test expected load across geography as well as vendor (e.g., Rackspace Dallas vs AWS Midwest).
CloudTest typically operates with the following sequence:
- Break/Fix: At lower testing levels, CloudTest will uncover a majority of the Break/Fixes and bottlenecks, including functional breaks (i.e., Is it working?).
- Duration: During longer events (e.g., a long sporting event), some issues won’t be revealed, even under peak stress; they will only become visible under duration. For example, a memory leak problem might not be revealed until hour three of an event.
- Peak: At lower testing levels, a write-read works, but under big load, you begin to see processes and users start to queue, which has a cascade effect. At higher load over a longer time, CloudTest tests “Is it functioning?” and “How well is it functioning?” to help identify where and at what levels performance bottlenecks emerge.
CloudTest recommends adjusting the virtual user ramp for each user based on their own unique average users or expected users, but a general rule of thumb is:
- Start at 0
- Move to 2,500 virtual users for 3 to 4 minutes
- Next, depending on your average user base, move into the tens of thousands of virtual users for a length of time (that period will depend on your particular testing situation)
- Finally, depending on your user base (or anticipated user base for a peak event), move into the hundreds of thousands virtual users for a length of time (again, that period will vary for each business). We recommend testing 2x to 3x the anticipated load as insurance.
CloudTest can mimic different device and player profiles (e.g., Roku, AppleTV, JW Player, DIY) and conduct dynamic bandwidth shifting to find your workflow’s ideal adaptive bitrate point for the best viewer experience. CloudTest results can provide guidance on ideal chunk sizes, how content can potentially be transcoded for different network conditions, choosing the right frames per second (fps) to minimize the rebuffering, and giving a seamless viewer experience. CloudTest can help you test/script HLS, HDS, and CMAF segments to test the workflow of the app and simulate users with concurrency to address the audience size.
Like other providers, CloudTest creates virtual users (VUs). But unlike others, we create VUs on the servers that will be used during go-live, rather than headless synthetic users. That way, CloudTest can measure actual HTTP requests, for example.
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