How Do You Break the Olympics Website? Throw a Cloud at It

How do you make sure the official Olympics website can handle the millions of people who will suddenly bombard its servers when the Games kick off this coming weekend?

You get help from the cloud.

In effort to ensure that its site — www.london2012.com — can juggle traffic from an estimated 1 billion people over the three short weeks of the games, the London Olympics Organizing Committee turned to SOASTA, a Mountain View, California, outfit that uses cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure to simulate traffic to websites and other online applications inside the world’s businesses.

The company’s engineers spent six months working with the committee to simulate traffic not only to the Olympics website but across the many mobile apps that tie into it. But the process was far simpler than it would have been just a few years ago, according to SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos.

The difference is that in 2012, you can so easily tap into EC2 and other services that provide instant access to a theoretically unlimited number of virtual servers. Without leaving your desk, you can hoist software onto virtual machines running inside data centers across the globe, using these servers to simulare traffic from almost anywhere.

“In the past, to do the kind of testing we did with the Olympics Committee, you had to spend weeks setting up hundreds — if not thousands — of servers, and you would have spent millions of dollars just trying to do one test,” says SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos. “With cloud testing, you can simulate 100,000 users within a few minutes. You can get the data from those tests in a matter of minutes. And you can do it for a fraction of the cost.”

The result, says Lounibos, is that the London Olympics website is probably better tested any Olympics site in the web’s short history. “Before this, you probably wouldn’t even run the tests,” he says, pointing to the extreme costs of testing without the help of the cloud.

Of course, the flip side is that with the rise of the mobile internet, these tests are more important than ever before.

Known as CloudTest, SOASTA’s testing tool taps into 17 cloud services around the world, including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure as well as similar services from IBM, the Texas-based Rackspace, and smaller outfits such the San Francisco-based GoGrid. In testing the Olympics website, the company simulated activity from servers running everywhere from the United States to Europe to Hong Kong, hitting the site with traffic from as many as 500,000 virtual machines at any given time.

According to Lounibos, SOASTA has ensured that the site can handle traffic from as many as 1 billion people over the course of the games. But not everyone is so sanguine.

Yottaa — a Boston-based outfit that helps companies monitor and improve the performance — says that the official Olympics website is woefully unprepared from the coming onslaught of traffic. Judging from the company’s outside examination of the site, Yottaa CEO Coach Wei says that the size of the images, JavaScript files, and other content at london2012.com is far higher than you see on the average website, and that loading each page requires far too many round trips. All this, he says, will cause big slowdowns when the traffic starts to hit.

“In general, the performance of the site is way below average,” Wei says. “If they don’t make changes and the traffic increases by 100 times, it will have real problems.”

Wei sees much the same problem with the Olympics website run by NBC, which — at least here in the States — will likely get far more traffic than london2012.com. You can certainly argue with his assessment. But any dispute is easily settled. Or at least it will be in about five days.