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Getting Ready for the Big Event

2Getting Ready for the Big Event

You’re a broadcaster getting ready to live stream a major sports or entertainment event, or the season

premiere of a highly anticipated new series.

Or you’re a retailer gearing up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales, featuring new product

lines and already-popular products at discounted prices.

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of viewers and customers will be using your web and mobile

apps simultaneously. How will those apps, and the content delivery infrastructure behind them, perform?

What if you get twice as many users as you’ve ever had before?

What if they’re all logging in to access their accounts at the same time?

Will they have adequate download speed and app performance wherever they may be?

Will all of them have the engaging customer experience that they seek and you strive to deliver?

In short, will your technology perform under the pressure of popularity? If the answer is “no,” the costs

are high. Viewership goes down. Customers defect to other sites. Advertising and transaction revenue is

reduced. Brand perception suffers. It’s bad PR, especially if dissatisfaction spreads quickly on social media.

Customers are doing more business and consuming more entertainment online. They expect a great

experience — no delays, rebuffering, or reloads — no matter how busy your technology infrastructure is.

Your delivery technology must be so good that it’s invisible, because when it’s noticeable, you’re in trouble.

So, will your technology perform under the pressure of popularity? The most common answer is, “We

don’t know, but we’re hoping for the best.” Why don’t people know? Because they haven’t tested their

entire delivery infrastructure under realistic conditions. They’d like to, but it’s very difficult to do right.

So uncertainty is the rule.

Enter CloudTest — the scalable, customizable, global platform for comprehensively testing, validating,

and optimizing web and mobile content delivery and customer experience. With CloudTest,

enterprises can test workflows and infrastructure realistically and in time to make adjustments. Think

of CloudTest as an insurance policy — on behalf of your customers, your advertisers and business

partners, and your enterprise’s biggest events.

3Getting Ready for the Big Event

Too Many ShortcutsComprehensive and realistic testing has multiple dimensions, and it’s hard to put all the pieces

together, so organizations often take shortcuts:

• They test under limited or simulated load and extrapolate the results because they are afraid to

test under peak load in their production environments

• They generate the load locally or from a limited number of sources, never reproducing the

geographic distribution of the customer base

• They test individual technology components but not the end-to-end workflows

• They test only a few user scenarios, never representing the variety of devices, navigation paths,

and customer experiences

Akamai practice manager Gareth Lynn underscores the

last point: “Customers rarely use a system exactly the way

it was designed. Their online journeys are seldom straight

through — click, click, click, job done. Three or four common

user journeys may cover 90% of the traffic, but they need

to be realistic; the objective is to have the capacity and

flexibility to provide high performance to all customers.”

Our senior product manager, Joachim Hengge, recaps

the pitfalls of incomplete testing: “If the simulated load

represents too few viewers or customers coming in from

too few points of the compass, you can’t be confident

when the event goes live. Same story if you don’t test

all the activity together. Perhaps you can handle 50,000

simultaneous users, but how about 5,000 simultaneous

logins? You can’t realistically load test in a lab.”

If the simulated load represents too few viewers or customers coming in from too few points of the compass, you can’t be confident when the event goes live.”

“

4Getting Ready for the Big Event

Solving for RealismCloudTest takes no shortcuts. Utilizing Akamai’s distributed global network, the platform:

• Scales up to generate peak loads and safely test them in production environments

• Sources traffic from anyplace in the world, representing a concentrated local user base,

a globally dispersed one, or any pattern in between

• Performs fully integrated tests, evaluating end-to-end workflows with all their technology

components, discovering bottlenecks and likely points of failure

• Generates traffic that behaves like customers, including the devices and media players they

use, so customer experience — not just technology capacity — is put through its paces

What components are we talking about? You name it. Networks, of course. Servers and encoders.

Web and mobile apps, services, and APIs. Background databases. VPN interfaces and encryption

algorithms. Everything that is part of the end-to-end, all-the-way-to-the-customer content delivery

and interaction workflow.

How far can CloudTest scale? Akamai solutions architect Ron Thompson has the numbers: “Our biggest

test to date was 1.5 terabits of data. Not long down the road, 5 terabits or 10 terabits should not be a

big deal. Because we can leverage outside resources — Amazon, Google, Microsoft — with on-demand

capacity, it’s very safe to do production-level testing. We’re not overloading local resources.”

A Complete PlatformCloudTest is not just a tool but a comprehensive platform, with real-time measurement, advanced

analytics, and visual dashboards for managing tests in progress and interpreting results. Conventional

tests have to restart when a component fails, often in the next day’s time window. With CloudTest,

a failed component can be isolated and the test continues. In fact, components can be pulled on

purpose to test failover procedures. The video encoder or payment processor fails. Can the backups

kick in and keep up? Where do we need more failover capability?

Akamai solutions engineer Bhavana Mallikarjunaiah summarizes the capabilities: “We can simulate

practically any level of anticipated capacity, distributed across any anticipated set of geographies and

respective entitlements. We can do it in production, without limiting ourselves to narrow,

5Getting Ready for the Big Event

late-night ‘test windows.’ And we can test the interplay among features and functions, isolate the

break/fixes and continue with the rest of the testing.” That adds up to the most realistic and accurate

testing environment available.

Test EarlyWe’ve solved for realism, but there’s still the matter of timing. Lynn explains: “Too many organizations

test too late in the event preparation process or, even worse, test to troubleshoot after something’s

gone wrong and it’s too late to rescue the customer experience. They think early testing is too much

work. But it’s more work if you leave it until too late.”

He recommends integration and load testing (in addition to component testing, which is standard

procedure) throughout the lifecycle. “Start testing — and customizing the tests for maximum

realism — early, when you still have plenty of time to reengineer the system for greater resilience

and performance.”

Help NeededRealistic, integrated, peak-load testing is difficult for even a

technologically sophisticated organization to do on its own.

There are lots of testing tools available, but assembling them

and getting them to work together coherently is extremely

challenging. That’s why testing tends to be partial and

piecemeal. But if you can’t be complete, you can’t be

confident in the results.

CloudTest is a complete and proven platform. Its technology

and staff do the heavy lifting of assembling the network traffic

and configuring and customizing test parameters. The staff

brings experience and expertise — across the full range of

business situations and testing challenges. With the

CloudTest managed service, the team is working for you —

and in the process, raising the expertise of your organization’s

technology staff.

Test the interplay between features and functions, isolate breaks/fixes, and continue with the test — against virtually any size or kind of audience.

6Getting Ready for the Big Event

Learn Your LimitsSome organizations take a binary approach to testing before the big event. Does it look like the

technology will work — yes or no? They’re settling for far too little. The ambitions of testing should be

much higher. Not just “Does it work?” but:

• How well is it working?

• How good can it be?

• What are our specific practical constraints?

CloudTest enables test teams to gauge performance thresholds and establish early-warning indicators

of capacity limits and possible failures. Event staff can then anticipate both how to ward off failures and

what to do if failures do occur.

Maximize Your ValueCloudTest does more than raise the chances that your big event will succeed. It raises your confidence

that you understand the technology environment and workflows, that you have done everything

possible to engineer for performance and resiliency, that your event staff is prepared with contingency

plans, and that you have optimized the experience of your customers.

Lynn advises: “Always test thoroughly — even when you have Akamai’s global content delivery network

working for you. We’ve never done a performance test that found everything operating perfectly.

There’s always room for modifications and tuning. You always learn how to perform better.”

CloudTest does more than prepare your enterprise for the big event. It maximizes the insights and

benefits from the testing you do.

CloudTest can scale to the largest and most realistic loads, but it also serves localized, lower-load

use cases. For example, a broadcaster was launching a sports streaming service in Italy. CloudTest

generated realistic test load from within the country, customized for the viewing patterns and device

preferences of the local audiences.

7Getting Ready for the Big Event

Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps, and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access, and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics, and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world’s top brands trust Akamai, visit akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter. You can find our global contact information at akamai.com/locations. Published 07/19.

It helps to be creative in anticipating customer scenarios. A few years ago, a major retailer’s site crashed

a half hour into their Black Friday sale. They had tested for the expected user sequences. What they

didn’t anticipate was customers logging in and filling their shopping carts in advance, then all returning

at once to confirm their purchases and collect their shipping codes.

A Tale of Two Tests CHARACTERISTIC SHORTCUTS REALISM

Load Limited and simulated Peak and real

Source Locally generated Distributed as needed

Focus Individual components Integrated workflows

Variety Common scenarios Customer behaviors