Akamai and testing

When your site uses Akamai, your users connect directly to their closest Akamai server to reach your website. Akamai then contacts your application server to fetch the website, applying any rules you have configured before returning the page.

This means that the first part of your site infrastructure isn't managed directly in code - it's managed via an admin panel.

As a result of this approach it's rare to have automated tests for behavior, meaning it's easy to have seemingly-innocuous changes accidentally subtly break important parts of your sites performance or SEO in ways that are hard to notice.

To counter this risk, REA group wrote a suite of automated checks using rspec; the akamai-rspec gem contains matchers extracted from these checks. We run these checks daily and notify our on-call rotation when they fail.