MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SOASTA®, Inc., the leader in cloud and mobile testing today announced a set of retail performance testing best practices being leveraged by many top consumer-facing websites as they prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These two days kick off a season of promotions and marketing campaigns intended to drive consumers to online shopping destinations. Last year, retail sales over Thanksgiving weekend set a new record, with sales up from $45 billion to $52 billion according to the National Retail Federation. Leveraging the Akamai Intelligent PlatformTM, SOASTA helped support this success, testing the website performance of six of the top 10 U.S. retailers, including two of the four highest-traffic sites, as reported by comScore. A detailed whitepaper of these best practices is now available HERE.
"SOASTA CloudTest is ideally suited to test consumer-facing websites. Working with Akamai, many of our mutual customers have leveraged the best practices to prepare their production sites for the holiday traffic, while protecting the experience of current online users,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “Optimizing for peak traffic loads, whether it’s for the London Olympics, the Mars Curiosity Mission or the holiday shopping season is a real-time, iterative process that must take many variables into account. Following a set of best practices is the only way to drive consistently good results."
Ensuring a web property can handle peak traffic is a complex endeavor. Many companies realize that the only way to have complete confidence in their site is to test the production environment. Testing in the lab is significantly different from production testing in terms of hardware, scale, configuration and activity at any given time (batch jobs, shared services, etc.). The complexity of today's applications makes extrapolating results from lab tests inaccurate and misleading. Including third parties such as ad networks or syndicated content further complicates matters. In addition, the majority of online retailers use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to optimize their performance. Akamai is the market leader in the site acceleration and content delivery space, and their solution is currently being utilized by many SOASTA customers. To assure the satisfaction of mutual customers requires a thoughtful testing approach that leads to accurate results, without impacting end users or site metrics.
SOASTA's CloudTest is a leading choice of retailers and other consumer-facing websites, particularly those working with Akamai. CloudTest includes key features required for testing CDNs such as the ability to monitor results in real-time, fine control over the ramp and volume of virtual users, and the ability to generate traffic from multiple geographic regions. These and other technical capabilities most accurately reproduce the large-scale distributed user patterns that make CloudTest an approved approach for Akamai customers. In addition, depending on the objectives for the specific load test, SOASTA CloudTest delivers a full range of lab-to-production performance testing to ensure great website performance, from capacity and stress to failover and soak tests.
“SOASTA's CloudTest meets the full set of rigorous requirements to ensure website scalability for our largest customers,” said Lelah Manz, Chief Strategist, eCommerce at Akamai. “The combined services will allow retail customers to offer a seamless experience with the highest level of service to their customers.”
The SOASTA CloudTest Platform is the world’s largest platform for testing the performance of web and mobile applications at scale. Available in a range of options, from the free CloudTest Lite to fully managed On-Demand services, CloudTest’s patented visual test creation, automated test server provisioning, and real-time resolution allow testing teams to execute performance tests with unparalleled speed and agility, whether testing internally or from the cloud.
For more information, visit www.SOASTA.com or download the “Retail Best Practices” white paper HERE.
About SOASTA
SOASTA is the leader in cloud and mobile testing. Its web and mobile test automation solution, CloudTest, enables developers, QA professionals and IT operations teams to test with unprecedented speed, scale and precision. The innovative product set streamlines test creation, automates provisioning and execution, and distills analytics to deliver actionable intelligence faster. With SOASTA, companies can have confidence that their applications will perform as designed, even in peak traffic. SOASTA’s customers include many of today’s most successful brands including American Girl, Chegg, Gilt Groupe, Hallmark, Intuit, Microsoft and Netflix. SOASTA is privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. For more information about SOASTA, please visit www.soasta.com.
SOASTA is a registered trademark of SOASTA, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Other product or company names mentioned may be trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.