KloudBuster version 7

How good is your OpenStack data plane or storage service under real heavy load?

KloudBuster is a tool that can load the data plane or storage infrastructure of any OpenStack cloud at massive scale and measure how well the cloud behaves under load where it matters: from the VMs standpoint, where cloud applications run.

Accessible to anybody with basic knowledge of OpenStack, installs in minutes and runs off the box with sensible default workloads in a fully automated way. CLI/REST or Web User Interface.. you pick what works best for you.

Feature List

  • Neutron configuration agnostic (any encapsulation, any overlay, any plugin)

  • OpenStack Storage backend agnostic

  • Real VM-level performance and scale numbers (not bare metal)

  • Punishing scale (thousands of VMs and enough load to fill even the fastest NIC cards or load any storage cluster with ease)

  • Data plane with HTTP traffic load:

    • Can load the data plane with one OpenStack cloud (single-cloud operations for L3 East-West scale) or 2 OpenStack clouds (dual-cloud operations with one cloud hosting the HTTP servers and the other loading HTTP traffic for L3 North-South scale testing)
    • Real HTTP servers (Nginx) running in real Linux images (Ubuntu 14.04)
    • Can specify any number of tenants, routers and networks
    • Can specify any number of HTTP servers per tenant (as many as your cloud can handle)
    • High performance and highly scalable HTTP traffic generators to simulate huge number of HTTP users and TCP connections (hundreds of thousands to millions of concurrent and active connections)
    • Overall throughput aggegation and loss-less millisecond-precision latency aggregation for every single HTTP request (typically millions per run)
    • Traffic shaping to specify on which links traffic should flow
    • Can support periodic reporting and aggregation of results
  • Storage load:

    • VM-level Cinder volume (block storage) or Ephemeral disk file I/O performance measurement using FIO running inside VMs (not bare metal)
    • Supports random and sequential file access mode
    • Supports any mix of read/write
    • Supports fixed load (e.g. 1000 IOPs/VM) or highest load measurement (KloudBuster will increase the load until latency spikes)
    • IOPs, bandwitdh and loss-less millisecond-precision latency aggregation for every IO operation (typically millions per run)
    • User configurable workload sequence
    • Support for creating cinder volumes with custom volume types and associated QOS specs
  • Supports automated scale progressions (VM count series in any multiple increment) to reduce dramatically scale testing time

  • Highly efficient and scalable metric aggregation

  • Automatic cleanup upon termination

  • Regular expression based cleanup script (OpenStack Resources Cleanup)

  • KloudBuster server mode to drive scale test:

    • from any browser (KloudBuster Web UI)
    • or from any external programs (KloudBuster REST API)
  • Aggregated results provide an easy to understand way to assess the scale of the cloud under test

  • KloudBuster VM image pre-built and available from the OpenStack Community App Catalog (https://apps.openstack.org/)

Diagrams describing how the scale test resources are staged and how the traffic flows are available in Architecture.

Scale results are available in json form or in html form with javascript graphical charts generated straight off the tool.

Examples of results are available in Gallery.

New in Release 7

  • The KloudBuster Docker container now includes the KloudBuster VM image for easier setup (no more need to install/uplaod the VM image separately)
  • Supports more recent OpenStack releases with newer API versions (Newton, Ocata)

Limitations and Non-Goals

  • Requires Neutron networking (does not support Nova networking)
  • Only supports HTTP and storage traffic in this version

Unlike some other scaling test frameworks, KloudBuster does not attempt to:

  • Provide a scale test framework that works across different cloud technologies (OpenStack + AWS + Google Cloud + …) - we are only focusing on OpenStack
  • Provide a scale test framework that is flexible and programmable to do everything - we just focus on opinionated and well targeted performance and scale areas with sensible use cases and available in a fully integrated and easy to consume packaged format
  • Replace bare metal and domain specific native performance and scale frameworks (line level traffic generators, ceph specific performance and scale tools…)

Contributions and Feedbacks

If you are interested in OpenStack Performance and Scale, contributions and feedbacks are welcome!

If you have any feedbacks or would like to contribute, send an email to openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org with a ‘[kloudbuster]’ tag in the subject.

Licensing

KloudBuster is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”). You may not use this tool except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

KloudBuster VM images contain multiple open source license components:

Although the VM image includes a binary copy of the FIO code, it does not include the source code used to build it. In accordance to the GPL V2 license related to the inclusion of binary copies of FIO, the source code used to build the FIO binary copy was not modified and can be found directly at https://github.com/axboe/fio or can be obtained by email request to the maintainer of KloudBuster.