Akamai CloudTest Reviews

We use this solution mostly for generating loads for a couple of our retail clients, especially for holiday readiness. We want to get our system up and running to get ready for unpredicted loads. So, we use it more for load testing.

In terms of improvement, I think integration of these tools with the leading EPM tools would be good. It would help to seamlessly integrate to Dynatrace or AppDynamics to understand what the profiling looks like when generating a load.

CI/CD integration, the pipeline itself, still needs to be improved.

Resource consumption also needs to be worked on. When we generate a thousand or two thousand concurrent users, we need to optimize the load generator resource utilization. This is because you need multiple servers in order to generate heavy loads. Other solutions like Gatling take much lower resources compared to that by Akamai CloudTest. For instance, you would need three different instances of typical 8-core 16 GB to generate 2000 concurrent users from Akamai CloudTest, but you would need half of the capacity with Gatling. 

I've been been using this solution for 3.5 years.

It's a stable solution.

There's a bit of difficulty with scaling when I want to generate 10,000 concurrent users. For medium capacity, it works very well. If you are using an extreme user load, then I think the location of the load generator needs to be looked at more.

We have 15 to 20 people using this solution in our organization.

We have interacted multiple times with technical support. We have had a few tickets open, and the responses are quick. I would give them a rating of eight out of ten.

Positive

We used Micro Focus Performance Center and BlazeMeter.

We switched because we had a client who was heavily on Akamai. So, the client opted for Akamai because the security model was enabled. They got a very good offer with bundling based on the solution, and CloudTest was part of that particular bundle.

Apart from that, Performance Center requires a lot of resource capacity versus that for CloudTest. So, in comparison to Performance Center, which was on-premises, CloudTest is more on the easy side because the entire solution is on the cloud. You need not worry about maintaining low instances. That's another reason why we switched because we really wanted to get away from the maintenance effort.

Yet another reason has to do with skillsets. I believe for Performance Center or BlazeMeter, you need Java as your core development skill, if you really want to customize your scripts. However, for CloudTest you need JavaScript, and JavaScript is quicker and easier to learn and be hands on.

The initial setup was very easy.

We have a yearly license, and I would give it a rating of three out of five.

Get yourself familiar with what the needs are. Go ahead and look at the Gartner chart. Look at the challenges and who is dominating this particular space in terms of load. If you're looking at server performance, then definitely CloudTest can be a solution for you. Also, if you don't want to spend time setting up the solution on-premises, then CloudTest is good because it is quick. It takes a moment to get the license, and on the very next day, you can get started on load testing.

From my own experience, if you're talking about load testing and performance testing then definitely you should go for CloudTest. Because when we compared CloudTest with Performance Center, cost wise it was a better solution. It is easy to use as well, and you can definitely get an automation engineer or a performance engineer with very little exposure to any programming or scripting language such as JavaScript. I would definitely recommend this solution and would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.