Rally is tool & framework that allows one to write simple plugins and combine them in complex tests scenarios that allows to perform all kinds of testing!
Rally is intended to provide a testing framework that is capable to perform specific, complicated and reproducible test cases on real deployment scenarios.
Rally workflow can be visualized by the following diagram:
Rally documentation on ReadTheDocs is a perfect place to start learning about Rally. It provides you with an easy and illustrative guidance through this benchmarking tool.
For example, check out the Rally step-by-step tutorial that explains, in a series of lessons, how to explore the power of Rally in benchmarking your OpenStack clouds.
In terms of software architecture, Rally is built of 4 main components:
There are 3 major high level Rally Use Cases:
Typical cases where Rally aims to help are:
Automate measuring & profiling focused on how new code changes affect the OpenStack performance;
Using Rally profiler to detect scaling & performance issues;
Investigate how different deployments affect the OS performance:
- Find the set of suitable OpenStack deployment architectures;
- Create deployment specifications for different loads (amount of controllers, swift nodes, etc.);
Automate the search for hardware best suited for particular OpenStack cloud;
Automate the production cloud specification generation:
- Determine terminal loads for basic cloud operations: VM start & stop, Block Device create/destroy & various OpenStack API methods;
- Check performance of basic cloud operations in case of different loads.
