Industry
eCommerce
Annual Revenue
$1.4B
Use Cases
Load Testing
Regression Testing
API Observability
Overview
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IHG Hotels & Resorts selects Speedscale as their “one-stop-shop” for test environments and data
- Industry: eCommerce
- Annual Revenue: $1.4B
- Use Cases: Load Testing, Regression Testing, API Observability
Company
IHG Hotels & Resorts is a multinational hospitality company that manages over 6,000 hotels in 100 countries. Their diverse portfolio of properties includes leading brands like Holiday Inn, Kimpton, Crowne Plaza, Intercontinental Hotels, and more.
The challenge: Setting up dev and test environments was labor-intensive and caused code coverage blindspots
IHG Hotels & Resorts had a leadership initiative to explore ephemeral environments and next-generation testing strategies as part of their cloud migration to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The directive focused on improving their developer experience and productivity by scaling environments for their load and functional testing. By removing developer roadblocks, the idea was they could improve the quality and speed of their deployments.
The team was using a plethora of testing tools—including Akamai CloudTest, ReadyAPI, WireMock, as well as big, intricate staging environments—and were struggling with the time-consuming nature of setting everything up. The problem was exacerbated when it came time to scale the number of test cases.
“Every time we tried to stand up a test, we’d have to build an environment to match production or build out the functional test environment configs, which defeated the purpose of leaving our code intact before deployment. It involved a lot of labor”
Plus, the tests would often error out, requiring even more human intervention. When this occurred, the team wasn’t able to tell how much of their software they were actually testing, resulting in huge test coverage blindspots.
They needed to be able to understand how much of their app was tested, while minimizing organizational friction and manual work in their testing processes.
The search for easy-to-spin-up environments
Because test environment configuration became such a heavy lift for the QA and development teams at IHG, DK began the search for an easier way. Specifically, he wanted the ability to quickly spin up ephemeral environments (or “bubble environments” as he calls them) and then shut them down when they were done – no large staging environments required.
“We wanted to move away from having to manually manage large environments and write tests, and instead focus on the functionality and performance of our software. That’s why Speedscale’s approach to automating environments, tests and data with actual, sanitized traffic was so appealing.”
Finding a “one-stop-shop” for their testing needs in Speedscale
DK was introduced to Speedscale from a colleague’s recommendation. What initially caught his attention was the ability to use Speedscale as a “one-stop-shop” for their testing needs. This allowed them to consolidate core testing capabilities, like load testing and API mocking, into a singular tool instead of managing multiple solutions.
They were further sold on Speedscale’s automated, traffic-driven approach, which would eliminate manual test authoring, standardize processes, and generate more consistent test results.
From a strategic perspective, Speedscale’s container-first focus on Kubernetes aligned nicely with their ongoing migration to Amazon EKS.
DK and the IHG team were also very impressed with the extensive experience of Speedscale’s founding team.
“The Speedscale founders and core engineers all have a strong engineering background. They have the scar tissue from their past DevOps experiences, and it shows in how battle-tested and well-thought-out the Speedscale product is for developers.”
What sweetened the deal though, was Speedscale’s support, flexibility, and willingness to work closely and collaboratively with the IHG team.
During onboarding, Speedscale converted many of IHG’s existing tests into Speedscale assets so that they could get up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible. In the coming months, they plan to consolidate and transition their remaining tests to Speedscale and reduce the number of non-production environments they’re using.
One of their key goals and use cases for Speedscale in the near future will be to make their third party booking integrations more robust by ensuring they can failover or time out gracefully.