While it's not required, you should thoroughly test your Download Delivery property on the ​Akamai​ edge network. By testing, you can make sure that all existing content functionality is preserved.

• If you've set anything incorrectly, you could break various functions on your site or application.

• Download Delivery should increase the performance and availability of your content. By testing, you set a baseline for increased performance, which may let you improve content delivery even more.

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If you have existing testing procedures for application and content releases, you should also follow them when testing edge network content delivery.

Set up for testing

To prepare for testing, you need to complete a few tasks.

1 - A custom edge certificate needs to be on staging

By default, ​Akamai​ pushes a new custom certificate ("cert") to the production network to help speed up renewals. We recommended that you push it to the staging network for testing. If you didn't do this, your cert may already be on the production network. If this is the case, you can't move it to staging until it's up for renewal.

You can check the provisioning status of your certificate:

1. Access ​Akamai​ Control Center, login with an admin-level user and go to ☰ > CDN > Certificates.

2. Select the Active tab. Look for your certificate in the table based on the domain you included as the Common Name in your cert:

   • You found it. Your cert is live on production. You can't use it for testing. See The cert is already on production for next steps.
   • You didn't find it. Your cert may not have been pushed to production yet. Continue to the next step.

3. Select the In Progress tab.

4. Locate your cert in this table, based on its Common Name.

5. Check its In Progress status:

   • You see Yes under Always test on Staging before deployment. Your certificate is deploying to the staging network. If you see under Deploying to Staging, it's finished.
   • You see No under Always test on Staging before deployment. Continue to the next step.

6. Click No under Always test on Staging before deployment.

7. Set Test Certificate to Yes and click Submit. When the cert is available on staging, the person set as the Administrator Contact for the cert will get an email.

The cert is already on production

If this is the case, you can force early renewal, or you can create and apply a new custom certificate.

2 - Activate your property on the Staging network

To perform actual testing of your Download Delivery property, you need to activate it on the Staging network in ​Akamai Control Center​.

1. Select the appropriate ​Control Center​ account using the drop-down in the top right.

2. Access Property Manager configurations associated with the selected ​Control Center​ account. Go to ☰ > CDN > Properties.

3. Filter the results of the Property Groups table by inputting the desired Download Delivery property name in the Filter by Property or Hostname field.

4. Click the Property Name.

5. In the Manage Versions and Activations content panel, click the applicable Version <#> link to access it for testing.

6. Click the Activate tab. The Property Manager Activate window opens.

7. Click Activate v<#> on Staging. The Staging Network Activation window opens. Set these options:

   • Fast Activation. To speed up activation, make sure this is set to On.
   • Validation Messages. Error, warning, and information messages are carried over. If you still have any error messages (), you need to correct these. Click Cancel at the bottom of the window, then select the Edit tab. Click the <#> Errors <#> Warnings <#> Notes tab at the bottom of the page. Review each Error message and resolve the issue. Click Save and then click the Activate tab to come back to this process.
   • Override block of hostname moves. ​Akamai​ applies a temporary block on a hostname that's been moved, in order to check its validity. Enabling this skips this temporary block. For example, this would apply if you've just moved your property from another account. Note that this can increase the number of hits to your origin server.
   • Notes. You can include a description of this version's activation.
   • Notify via email. This defaults to the email address set for the active ​Control Center​ user. You can change it or add more. Separate multiple addresses with a comma (",").

8. With Fast Activation, your property should be ready in the Estimated Activation Time listed. This can be as quick as three minutes. Now, you can:

   • Monitor the Activate tab to track progress.
   • Click Activation Details to review settings and information regarding the Property.
   • Wait for the confirmation email. Any email set in Notify via email will get an email when the activation is complete.

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These are just the basics

To learn more about activation on ​Akamai​ networks, check out How activation works.

3 - Point your browser to edge servers

Temporarily set up your local browser to target an edge server to access your property.

1. Select the appropriate ​Control Center​ account. Use the top-right pull-down in the header to select the account.

2. Access Property Manager configurations associated with the selected ​Control Center​ account. Go to ☰ > CDN > Properties.

3. Filter the results of the Property Groups table by inputting the desired Download Delivery property name in the Filter by Property or Hostname field.

4. Click the Property Name.

5. In the Manage Versions and Activations content panel, click the applicable Version <#> link to access it in the Property Manager Editor.

6. In the Property Hostnames content panel, locate and make note of the Edge Hostname.

7. Append -staging to the edge hostname you noted. Using the example from the previous step, the edge hostname would now be:

   www.techpubs.com.edgekey-staging.net
   

8. Look up that hostname's IP address, and copy it to your clipboard.

dig www.techpubs.com.edgekey-staging.net

dig AAAA www.techpubs.com.edgekey-staging.net

nslookup www.techpubs.com.edgekey-staging.net

9. Open your local hosts file in a text editor. Based on your operating system, you may be able to find your host file as follows:

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The above paths are only examples of where this file might be found. Please see the relevant user documentation for the location of the Hosts file for your selected operating system.

10. At the end of the hosts file, add an entry for the actual domain to your website that includes the edge hostname's IP address (which you found in Step 8). Using the examples in this procedure, this could be:

    1.23.45.78 www.techpubs.com
    

11. Save and close your hosts file. All requests from your computer to your domain will now go to an edge server.

    • This applies to your local system, only.
    • To undo the redirection to the edge server, remove the new entry from your hosts file.

4 - Check your connection to the edge

Verify that you've properly pointed your system to our edge servers to begin testing.

Making a request to ​Akamai​​ staging edge servers adds the HTTP response header X-Akamai-Staging. The value sent with this header is ESSL for requests to the staging network. (It's EdgeSuite for HTTP requests.)

After your browser points to the staging edge servers, make a test request against the new property configuration on the staging network, and then check for the X-Akamai-Staging response header to see if the response is coming from the staging network.

1. Close all browser windows, reopen your browser, and clear the browser cache.

2. Go to a page you want to test.

3. Access Network and make a request to the page.

   • Chrome. Right-click (Command+click on macOS) in the browser window and select Inspect. Click the Network tab. (You may need to click >> to reveal it in the toolbar.)
   • Edge. Press F12, and then press Ctrl+4 to open the Network utility.
   • Firefox. Press Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows) or Command+Opt+E (macOS). This takes you to the Network tool.
   • Safari. If necessary, select Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then enable Show Develop menu in menu bar. Select Developer > Show Web Inspector and select the Network tab.

4. Click the first file listed.

5. Take a look at the response headers. If you see either of these entries, you know your request is going to the staging edge server:

   • X-Akamai-Staging: ESSL. This indicates you're on ​Akamai​'s Enhanced TLS network.
   • X-Akamai-Staging: EdgeSuite. This indicates you're on ​Akamai​'s Standard TLS network.

6. Check for the X-Cache entry.

   HTTP/1.1 200 OK
   Server: Apache/2.4.9 (Unix) OpenSSL/1.0.1-fips
   Last-Modified:Wed, 26 Jun 2022 18:28:37 GMT
   ETag: "1234-5a678b9012c34"
   Accept-Ranges: bytes
   Content-Length: 13162
   Content-Type: image/gif
   Cache-Control: max-age=603241
   Expires: Mon, 14 Apr 2022 16:48:38 GMT
   Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2022 17:04:37 GMT
   X-Akamai-Staging: EdgeSuite
   X-Cache: TCP_MEM_HIT from b128-48-122- 38.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (AkamaiGHost/6.15.0.3-12528292) (-)
   X-Cache-Key: /L/12345/678910/1a/orign-example.com/images/samplepicture.gif?234567
   Connection: keep-alive
   

7. Use this table to interpret the results.

5 - You're ready to test

Test your content just as you would if you were testing it via your origin server.

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When testing, use your actual domain for requests—don't use its edge hostname. Edge hostnames are applied automatically by your DNS to reroute requests to the ​Akamai​ edge network.

1. Check key functionality, such as logging in, playback, and so on.

2. Once you're satisfied that your property works, remove the hosts file entry you added and then save it.

3. On macOS 10.6 and later, flush your DNS cache again with the dscacheutil -flushcache command.

Check out ​Akamai​ Test Center

If you'd rather not use the manual process we discuss above, you can access the Test Center interface in ​Control Center​ to help with testing.

What is Test Center?

Test Center is a testing tool that checks the effect that configuration changes will have on your web property. It helps you ensure that your changes aren't behaving unexpectedly before you activate them in production. It helps prevent issues caused by misconfiguration and insufficient testing and increases your confidence in the safety and correctness of your changes.

The application lets you run two types of tests:

• Functional testing. This lets you check if the configuration changes work as expected.
• Comparative testing. This lets you compare the behavior of your hostnames between the current and new configurations.

It was designed as an addition to your existing tests and workflows, and not as their replacement. It's available as a user interface in ​Akamai Control Center​ and as an API.