VTastic: Akamai Innovations for Distributed System Testing by Jack Wadden, Akamai

Akamai Technologies’ CDN platform is a complex, highly-integrated distributed system consisting of over 200,000 servers in over 120 countries.. Processing over 3 Trillion web requests per day, the Akamai platform regularly serves over 30Tbps of traffic to end users around the world. Setup and maintenance of Akamai integration test environments involves a significant investment of hardware, time and subject matter expertise. As a result, these environments are a scarce resource. Using Opennebula, Akamai has developed a system for saving and cloning multi-node integration test environments on-demand. The system is succeeding and has the potential to revolutionize Akamai’s approach to software development and testing. After exploring Akamai’s platform architecture and testing challenges, we will describe the key innovations that enabled the Vtastic solution, challenges we faced in implementing a reliable system, and future capabilities the system can offer.