Sporting events aside, the Olympics are a testbed for new technologies, especially when it comes to matters of scale. As millions of fans worldwide check out results, it simply must be able to handle the load. What follows below is the story of how they’re testing the Olympics web site performance in preparation for the event itself.

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.

via How Do You Break the Olympics Website? Throw a Cloud at It | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.