Large Scale Load Testing Amazon.com’s Traffic on AWS

It’s 4am and you don’t know it, but you’re about to get three times the traffic you were expecting. Is your service ready to handle it? Systems are only as scalable as their weakest component. Large scale load testing in production is the best (and surest) way to ensure that services can truly scale to the unexpected and Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help you.

Load generator itself can be difficult to scale, expensive to run on hundreds or thousands of hosts, challenging to keep the data secure, and time consuming to develop. The Amazon.com retail site is one of most heavily used sites in the world, and has to be ready for anything, at anytime. How do you design a load test for this in record time while keeping it cost effective? Well, you use AWS! Come learn Best Practices on how you can use Amazon SQS, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and Amazon DynamoDB to design horizontally scalable large-scale load tests that can simulate the load that millions of users are putting onto your site. We met a tight schedule and did it under budget thanks to AWS and you can too!

Event: AWS re:Invent 2013