Akamai CloudTest Reviews

I use the solution in my company for load testing. You can say that it is used on the API and then for web page-level load testing.

The most valuable features of the solution are that it is user-friendly and offers live monitoring, which gives you more data. On the fly, you can create custom dashboards and have response time breakup between your core HTML and non-HTML areas, like CSS.

Extending the same cloud tool to make it app native so that it can help with device performance testing towards HTTP requests and responses. If you can have a front-end tool like Google's Core Web Vitals, it would be great. If you have some integration with Google's Core Web Vitals, it would be great.

I want the tool to have IP spoofing because whenever you do load testing, you will have a little bit of static IP based on a particular load generator. If we have an option of just making the real-time scenario, like having IP spoofing, and the range of IPs dynamically gets changed with the request just to mimic the real-time user behavior, then it would be a good improvement. Having integration to APM tools, like Dynatrace or AppDynamics, the way we have in the load tools, would be good.

I have been using it for eight to nine months.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Around 30 people in my company use the tool.

The solution's technical support was good. Based on the SLA, the support team has reverted back to our calls, and they have been quite helpful. There has been no hassle to get the support.

We use Akamai CloudTest and an open-source tool like Gatling.

The product's initial setup phase is very simple because it is a SaaS tool. You don't need to take care of any configurations. You just need to just subscribe to it, and then you can start using the tool.

The tool's price is at an intermediate level. When you compare it with other enterprise load testing tools, it falls under the average category.

Gatling can be a competitor for Akamai CloudTest. Gatling has both enterprise and open-source versions. Gatling is way cheaper than Akamai CloudTest.

The tool's very first benefit is zero maintenance. You need not take care of your controller or load generator, so there is zero maintenance. The second benefit of the tool would be in the area of user management. You can create multiple projects and then have them assigned to different workspaces or different teams. You can have your scripts uploaded in a structured way. Whenever we have any issues, depending on the severity, we get a response from the support team, which saves time. The tool is very user-friendly, so you can save a lot of time in terms of your preparation activities.

The tool is in isolation. If you need some help with scripting, we write some prompts and get the required custom code from OpenAI or Copilot, but not the integration.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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.

Our primary use case is to do performance testing and load testing to determine which applications we release on the market to end-users. Before they go to the production environment, we perform a couple of tests to determine the threshold or maximum capacity our backend can handle. So we look at the capacity of our infrastructure and see if our backend can expand, how much it expands, where it goes, how it scales and if it impacts the response time. We can test all these features using Akamai CloudTest.

Since we run a lot of marketing campaigns on our products, we don't have the exact user capacity requirements. After running the load test we can determine the capacity our backend can handle. Based on that, we can make sure that our infrastructure is optimized. It helps us to cater to on-demand capacity and load, which helps to keep in mind the response time or the performance of applications for the end-users. We don't move it during peak hours, because our response time in applications become slower and unresponsive, or they simply behave differently. 

Akamai Cloud Test provides detailed analysis during load and performance testing which helps in determining different components of our platforms and external integrations with other vendors needs optimization (i.e.) it highlights exact API call with request, response, error, TTFB to identify root cause of failure which in turn helps in improving time to resolution and prioritize change requests.

Akamai cloud test integration into our current CI/CD pipelines (i.e.) identify and resolve the issues during the sprint phase which helps in delivering an absolute product and reduces time to market/release.

I would say the solution is stable because we don't use it every day. We only use it when we have a load test or when we have new versions of applications going out. The stability depends upon how the integration and setup are done. For every new release and every new change, a few things need to be tweaked but it is not something very complex.

The solution is scalable. 

We looked at a couple of other applications like Apache JMeter, Gatling, and a few other low-cost open-sourced applications, but with those applications, you need to have a complete setup or complete integration in the backend. The scalability becomes a problem and that is why we didn't choose them. These solutions also didn't give us a real user experience and parameter tweaking with open-source was not possible. With Akamai CloudTest all of this is quite easy and possible to perform.

The level of support is quite good and the integration is also very flexible because the solution has modules of integration and you can use their public cloud and you can integrate the backend. The initial setup was not very complex as it is based on the niche. 

It all depends on what you're looking for, but this solution is exactly what we need for performance testing and load testing of this. We never have to panic during campaigns, because I usually don't know what's going to be the response. Thanks to the testing that can be done beforehand, I know what to expect from other vendors. This is the response time I expect from them. My rating for Akamai CloudTest is, therefore, nine out of ten.

The agents on the cloud have been extremely valuable for us.

The test clip should be more user-friendly.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. For the field test, we have over 1,000 users. As of right now, we don't plan to increase usage.

Out of five, I would rate the technical support of the solution at two or three. Sometimes it's a challenge because we face delays.

We did previously use a different solution. It was the client's decision to switch to Akamai Cloudtest.

I wouldn't say the setup is straightforward. I would say more it's between straightforward and complex. To circumvent due diligence security issues, we were forced to use a more extensive sort to record test clip. That's the only challenge we faced.

We use the public cloud version of the solution.

I would rate this solution six out of ten.

Soasta CloudTest is an integral part of our performance testing strategy and key in generating load across geography.

This is an awesome performance testing tool for web based applications, able to generate load multiple geographies, dynamic ramp-up to any levels of virtual users.

Before moving to Soasta CloudTest, we had a performance testing tool deployed on-premise environment. Other than high licensing cost, this tool has limitation in simulating real user experience to generate load in different geographies, hence, reliable performance test results. 

Soasta CloudTest has added flexility in performance testing plan, achieving at low cost.

One of the challenges with Soasta is availability and quick access to their technical support documentation and on-call support. Hence, it was a challenge to acquire knowledge during tool adoption stage. Soasta CloudTest is a cloud hosted tool, hence, initial setup would need whitelisting to access on-premise application under test. 

It's a manual process to whitelist respective internal IPs in coordination with web operations team to access Soasta. Availability of any standardized tool from Soasta will make setup process easy.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Running cost is very low.

• Cloud load agents on-demand integration with AWS

The cloud-based load test is a realistic load test.

The UI gets stuck sometimes; pulling huge load test data takes time and the UI often gets stuck.

I have used it for 3+ years.

We sometimes encounter stability issues, but they are not severe.

We sometimes encounter scalability issues.

Customer service is great; quick to act on everything.

Technical support is 8/10.

I have only used CloudTest and I consider it a very powerful tool.

I haven’t used it outside the CloudTest training. It is an option for Performance testing taken into consideration by my company.

I couldn't say, as I haven't used it outside the training or applied it to any project yet.

The solution was easy to set-up and much more easy and intuitive to build performance tests. Also, in my opinion, scaling the grid was easier to set-up than JMeter, for example.

The solution was easy to set-up and much more easy and intuitive to build performance tests.

In my opinion, scaling the grid was easier to set-up than Jmeter, for example.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

I had a strong support during training. The trainer had a very strong lecture about the product, making it easier to use and to understand the core features.

The solution used by my employer was JMeter, mainly because it is open-sourced and a lot of engineers already used it or know how to use it. I found CloudTest to be a solid alternative with a more intuitive design. Use of Amazon cloud is also a strong-point as I see more and more products using the cloud. I sure hope to have the change of using CloudTest more often on one of my projects.

Considering that I have worked in VM environments for quite some time now, setting up was fairly straightforward and easy. Once the VM setup is in place, the rest of the setup is a piece of cake.