Ten years ago, Tom Lounibos was asked what would happen if his SaaS application suddenly had a large spike in traffic. Would his site crash? Would user response time crawl to a halt? Would his site handle the increased workload without a glitch? In truth, he had no idea; he couldn’t afford the high cost of traditional performance testing to find out. From this personal experience, SOASTA was born.
Meanwhile, Amazon launched a limited public beta of its EC2 compute product during the summer of 2006. The company, much better known for selling books online, decided to leverage its operational prowess and extra compute capacity to turn the concept of Cloud Computing into a reality.
In a very real way, SOASTA and Amazon grew up together: SOASTA with its game-changing performance testing application CloudTest, and Amazon with its game-changing Cloud Computing environment EC2. Together, they are helping companies like Intuit answer the crucial question of whether their Web sites can withstand huge increases in traffic, and generate the information necessary to optimize their architecture and implementation.
SOASTA CEO and Founder Tom Lounibos introduces SOASTA
Why all the Fuss about Performance Testing?
So why has performance testing become such a hot topic? After all, most Web sites probably haven’t gone through any rigorous testing, and the Internet still keeps displaying away.
Many companies use their Web sites for sales and marketing purposes. In fact, a company can spend millions of dollars creating engaging content and running promotional campaigns to draw users to its site. Unfortunately, if the site crashes or response time crawls, all that time, energy and money could be wasted. Worse yet, public perception of the company could be seriously downgraded. It’s akin to running an expensive campaign to bring hungry patrons into your restaurant, and then not bothering to serve them.
Most of us who watched the 2010 Super Bowl probably recall Denny’s Free Grand Slam breakfast commercial. What many of us don’t know is that 59 million people hit the Denny’s Web site during a four-hour period as a result of the ads. Before Denny’s launched the Super Bowl campaign, the company had no idea traffic would spike more than 1700 percent.
And it’s not just controlled promotions that might flood a Web site. In this era of social media and viral marketing, site traffic can be extremely unpredictable. Create a piece of content that lights up the tweets, and you could see site traffic burst way past original expectations. When the “Avatar” movie trailer came out, for instance, about 2 million people hit the site to be among the first to get a glimpse.
Traditional events can also spin up the site traffic. For example, not many people send a Hallmark.com Valentine’s Day e-card on Feb. 13 or 15 (unless, of course, they want to find themselves sleeping in the proverbial relationship doghouse). Likewise, more than a few of us wait until the last minute to file our taxes.
Prior to working with SOASTA, the largest number of concurrent users Intuit had ever simulated for TurboTax was 4,000. Talk about waking up to a public relations nightmare if the Intuit site crashed at 10 pm April 15, and thousands of people missed filing their taxes on time because of it. And, yes, many more than 4,000 people wait until the last minute to file their taxes online.
In response to this potential threat, SOASTA worked with Intuit over a 33-day period, eventually simulating 300,000 concurrent users on Intuit’s production site, while 25,000 people were actually online filing their taxes. This process gave the Intuit development team the data it needed to fine-tune the site, and confidence in its ability to handle the load. And, yes, April 15 came and went without a glitch.
Tom Lounibos talks about SOASTA's experience running on Amazon EC2.
Enter Soasta on Amazon
Of course, you don’t simulate hundreds of thousands of users on a few servers sitting under your desk. Large tests require hundreds or even thousands of servers for short bursts of time – a complete economic non-starter in the pre-Cloud Computing era. Enter Amazon EC2 to the rescue.
For SOASTA, the decision to partner with Amazon was simple. Actually, SOASTA started running on EC2 three years ago. And over that time period, SOASTA’s engineers have gained a tremendous amount of confidence in Amazon’s ability to deliver the compute environment necessary for SOASTA to run its load and performance testing solution. Because Amazon has mature APIs that provide elasticity fast, SOASTA’s product is solid and can be ready to simulate massive traffic in a matter of minutes. And Amazon continues to innovate, helping SOASTA to continue to augment its product offering as well.
The result? You can wait until the last minute to file your taxes using TurboTax with the confidence that when you hit the submit button, Uncle Sam will hear from you on time. Likewise, you can send your Valentine’s Day e-card on the 14th with confidence that your loved one will get the message.
And if you run a business where stability and performance of your Web site is critical to the continued success and growth of the company -- but you have no idea where your site’s breaking points are -- you can look to SOASTA, running on Amazon, for your must-have answers.
Tom Lounibos, CEO for SOASTA, brings more than 30 years of experience building early stage software companies, leading two companies to successful IPO's. Tom is a regular speaker at both Cloud and testing events, and has become a leading advocate in using the Cloud to empower individuals and accelerate changes in how applications are built, tested and deployed.
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