Rally/Updates

January 22, 2014
Hi stackers!

We are happy to announce that we have completely redesigned our Rally documentation in ReadTheDocs. The docs have now received a simpler structure and have become much easier to get through!

One of the nicest new things is 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.

Since our previous update, there have been many interesting updates in Rally:
 * Rally now has a Network Context class that enables easy Neutron network management.
 * Input task files now can be written using the jinja2-based templates syntax. Very useful if you want, say, parameterize the image name used throughout your complex input task file.
 * Rally scenarios have been 100%-covered with docstrings. That means that now the rally info find  command will always output a complete piece information about whatever you ask it.
 * New benchmark scenarios include thos for Cinder (list_volumes, list_snapshots, extend_volume), Nova (cold_migrate)
 * We have moved the directory with samples in our repository to the root level: now it is rally/samples instead of rally/doc/samples (and so much quicker to get to).
 * Rally is on the way to being Python 3 compatible. We have added a Gate job that checks Rally in Python 3 and have produced lots of patches that fix incompability issues. Few changes are left to make Rally fully Python 3 compatible.

Current work includes new benchmark scenarios (Mistral, Murano), new success criteria (SLA) and a lot of refactoring in scenario runners, Rally API etc.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better!

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=kilo&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned!

Regards, The Rally team

December 15, 2014
Hi stackers!

Let us share with you our recent accomplishments in Rally:
 * CLI improvements:
 * The rally info command (which is a kind of built-in Rally reference) has been enhanced in such a way that it now prints detailed explanations of main concepts used in Rally whenever you type something like rally info BenchmarkScenarios or rally info SLA. We've also improved the output formatting so that now it is much easier to get through.
 * The rally task list command now supports filters. You can filter the task list either by deployment (using the "... --deployment " parameter) or by status ("... --status ")


 * New benchmark scenarios:
 * NovaSecGroup.boot_and_delete_server_with_secgroups: creates a number of Nova security groups with rules, then creates a Neutron network with one subnet, finally boots a VM with created security groups, lists the created resources and performs cleanup.
 * CinderVolumes.create_nested_snapshots_and_attach_volume: creates a volume, its snapshot, and then (recursively) a volume from that snapshot. The recursion depth can be set by the user through the --nested_level parameter.


 * Other improvements:
 * Work on Trove support in Rally has been started with the integration of its client;
 * New hacking rules are there to provide better codestyle throughout Rally.

Current work is centered aroud code refactoring (both major, as in the benchmark engine or the contexts, and minor, as introducing some syntax sugar via decorators to mark deprecated stuff and scenario samples). We also constantly work on expanding our scenario base. Last but not least, we're about to merge the Network Context class that enables easy Neutron network management.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better!

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=kilo&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned!

Regards, The Rally team

December 1, 2014
Hi stackers!

It's been a while since our last post here, and we've done quite a nice job in Rally during November. Let us share with you new things about Rally:
 * Autogenerated HTML benchmark reports in Rally (which can be created by the "rally task report" command after a benchmark task has completed) have been improved further within the last month. As of now, the report page contains an overview table, detailed informations about whether SLA (service-level agreement) checks were successful and also detailed error logs, if any. Rally reports have become a wonderful tool indeed to analyse the benchmarking data as well as to share your results with others!
 * Similar improvements have been made for HTML reports generated for the Tempest cloud verification ("rally verify results --html --output_file "). New enhanced report pages have improved styling and refactored JS code.
 * We have changed the way context classes in Rally should be declared. Having introduced a new @context decorator, we've made it much easier and also more readable.
 * There is a new "servers" context that allows you to create temporary servers before benchmark scenarios start and use these servers for testing inside these scenarios.
 * New benchmark scenarios in Rally include those for Nova live migrate and also a Cinder stress scenario.
 * Command-line interface improvements include an ability to refer deployments not only by uuid but also by name. Please note that the syntax has changed a bit so now you have to supply the --deployment parameter to commands like "rally use deployment" (instead of --uuid).
 * There has been some major refactoring of the most critical parts of Rally code: the cleanup mechanism and the "users" context code. We are sure that after refactoring, this code has become both cleaner and less error-prone (as well as very pluggable in the case of cleanups).

Current work includes further code refactoring (e.g. in the Benchmark engine part), further CLI improvements (e.g. for the "rally task list" command) and also new benchmark scenarios (e.g. for Murano). We are also going to introduce a possibility of building Rally images for Docker.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better!

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=kilo&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned!

Regards, The Rally team

October 27, 2014
Hello stackers,

much time has passed since our last update and we are happy to announce that we are moving towards making our first official Rally release! Our active recent contribution to Rally has enabled us to make a significant progress. Here are the highlights of the novelties in Rally:
 * We have completely redesigned the auto-generated benchmark report page so that it looks now even nicer than before and is much more easy to navigate. Besides, further improvements of this HTML report page are on their way to being merged soon.
 * Rally now has an extended support of plugins: in addition to writing custom scenarios, the plugin mechanism now enables to extend Rally with new context classes/scenario runners without actually contributing to the Rally master branch.
 * The work on extending the support of OpenStack projects in Rally has been conducted for Heat and Sahara.
 * CLI improvements: the command-line interface gets more and more user-friendly over time: recently, it has begun to support detailed informations about correct commands usage in case of a failure. The "rally info" command has also been improved so that it now supports misspellings handling. Finally, there has been some work on bash completion, which hasn't been completely finished yet.
 * Test code improvements: we have greatly proceeded in out continuous work on unit/functional test coverage improvement. We also have moved all the tests into a special tests/ directory so that the test code is now organized in a more neat way. We also have removed the ./run_tests.sh script for the sake of using the tox command to launch the test suite.

In the nearest future, several interesting refactoring patches are going to come to Rally. To be more specific, there will be a vast change of the benchmark engine and cleanup mechanisms.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better!

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=kilo&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

September 26, 2014
Hello stackers,

here is a brief overview of what has happened in Rally recently:
 * We have refactored the code responsible for atomic actions processing in Rally benchmarks. Let's remind you that each benchmark scenario in Rally consists of a series of atomic actions, whereas the running time of each atomic action is measured in the same way as that of the whole scenario. After refactoring, we now ensure that Rally doesn't skip atomic actions that failed and distinguishes different runs of two atomic actions with the same name (see an example of how a typical results table could look before and looks after refactoring).
 * Another direction of refactoring was the SLA code; it has been modified so that now SLA results are stored in the DB along with other benchmarking data.
 * Check out a nice user story about VMs boot performance in Nova with Rally. It shows how Rally can be used in practice to catch reals bugs and improve OpenStack performance.
 * We work hard on achieving 100% test coverage in Rally: last week, additional unit tests for contexts and scenarios have been merged.

Our current priorities are further refactoring steps, including those in critical parts of Rally (e.g. temporary user creation and cloud cleanup code); we also strive towards making Rally bug-free and continuously issue different bugfixing patches.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

September 15, 2014
Hello stackers,

there has been much diverse and useful contribution to Rally recently. Let us highlight some interesting updates in our project:
 * Rally is on its way to support of benchmarking OpenStack clouds using ordinary user accounts that already exist. Rally lacked such functionality (it only supported benchmarking either from an admin account or from a bunch of temporarily created users), which posed a problem since some deployments don't allow temporary users creation. There have been two patches that prepare the code for this new functionality. It is going to come very soon - stay tuned.
 * We constantly improve our gate jobs (jobs that run a test suite for every patch pending review in Rally). Recently, we have introduced a nice aggregated results page for that gate job (see an example). It now makes it very easy for developers to navigate through the results of tests agains their patches to Rally.
 * We have added a new "volumes" context which makes it possible to create cinder volumes in the benchmark environment and use them later in the actual benchmark scenarios.
 * Much work has been accomplished on the overall code quality improvement. We have both made several code refactoring patches and introduced several new test suites (say, functional tests for CLI).

Current work centers around introducing benchmarking with pre-created users as mentioned above; much work is currently devoted to new benchmark scenarios as well. Also please note that there will be soon an important update on Rally ReadTheDocs page, which will make it much easier to navigate and get through, especially for newbies.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

September 1, 2014
Hello stackers,

over the past week, Rally has been extended with the following features:
 * Rally now offers a pretty simple feature request mechanism. Everyone who is interested in adding new functionality to Rally now can share his ideas in a standartized format (see an example). All you need to do is to write down your feature request in a separate rst-file in the doc/feature_request folder and submit it as a patch to Rally (if you are unsure about how to do this, read our "How to contribute" tutorial).
 * We added a new benchmark scenario for Cinder quotas creation/deletion.
 * Designate support in Rally has been extended so that it is posisble now to set up Designate quotas.

There is pretty much work going on this week, including the introduction of benchmarking with existing users (in addition to those created temporarily, which was the only option before), and also improvements in the plugin mechanism, so that it will be possible now to write plugins for runners and contexts. We do lots of code refactoring and will do even more in the upcoming weeks.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

August 25, 2014
Hello stackers,

here is a quick overview of what has been added to Rally recently:
 * Rally now supports Designate, which is a DNaaS service for OpenStack (providing REST API for domain/record management). Several new bechmark scenarios for Designate have been added as well;
 * In the CLI, we have added a new command called rally info. It is a essentially a special search engine embedded into Rally, which, for a given search query, prints documentation for the corresponding benchmark scenario/deploy engine/... as fetched from the source code. Thus you can learn about different Rally entities without leaving the Command Line Interface. For usage samples, see this link;
 * We have extended the SLA output which indicates whether a benchmark has passed some set of predefined success criteria with customizable messages;
 * We have performed a range of nice optimizations:
 * Reduced gate jobs runtime;
 * Code clarification in the context manager;
 * Gates tests fixing.

The main work directions for the next week comprise further improvement in the contexts mechanism (both the algorithm of context creation and new context classes), further optimizations (e.g., multithreaded objects deletion) and also code refactoring (e.g., of that for tracking atomic actions in benchmark scenarios)

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

August 4, 2014
Hello stackers,

below you will find the most recent updates in Rally:
 * The periodic scenario runner has been refactored and renamed, as of now, to rpc (runs per second). Note that this renaming also affects task configuration files that use that runner type. The runner itself now has been reimplemented with the multiprocessing.Process class (instead of multiprocessing.Pool), which potentially decreases memory usage on large iterations and reduces errors.
 * A nice optimization to the chart generation code ensures that the Rally plots will be rendered fast in browsers even for tasks with a huge number of iterations completed.
 * New benchmark scenarios include those testing the Nova server resize operation and a set of benchmarks for Sahara group node templates.
 * We continue extending our gates with nice features. A new one are the SLA checks that add information about whether benchmark scenarios pass a set of success criteria (see an example)

Many interesting improvements are on their path to being merged to Rally. Among them, let us mention the "rally info" command, which prints descriptions for different entities in Rally to the console, further work on the Rally documentation which gets cleaner and cleaner, and also a set of new context classes, including those for generating images for VM benchmarks, as well as for creating Neutron networks.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

July 17, 2014
Hello stackers,

here are some recent updates in Rally:


 * Results of scenario runners are now stored asynchronously. This is precondition for such further features like piecemeal storing of results to DB (to reduce RAM usage), or progress displaying.
 * Add check if required services are available before starting the scenario. This is realized by adding services validation to scenarios. Also this patch includes new validation mechanism.
 * Ability to cancel task by keyboard interrupts is availiable now;
 * Add base to provide interation testing;
 * A lot of of patches to improve unit tests coverage.

This week, our work continues with such main novelties as adding support for Keystone API v3, adding context classes for avoiding vm creation if tenant has no network and prepare an image that will have installed the required programs, mechanism to provide rally as a service, code refactoring in context manager to make code more clear.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

July 07, 2014
Hello stackers,

here is the update for the last weeks. From all the work we've completed we would like to highlight the following:


 * New benchmark scenarios:
 * Benchmark to validate a keystone token N times at service endpoint that allows to check effect of caching related to tokens;
 * Scenario for benchmark Neutron ports.


 * Add nova floating ip management in VM scenario, before this patch the VM runcommand scenario used the fixed ip to ssh connect to the instance, this could only worked if fixed ip range was directly accessible with was the case in very limited deployments.
 * Add image context class that allows adding images to each user for benchmarks, also this patch provides scenario which tests glance image-list command;
 * Large update of documentation that simplifies its index structure and headings, extends the 'Benchmark' page with info from the "Main concepts" and adds some introductory text on Deploy & Verify parts;
 * Add service-level agreement checking that allows to add section in task configuration that contains the criteria of success, e.g "less then 5% of failure rate", or "faster then 5 seconds for one iteration";
 * Use oslo.db module and remove rally/openstack/common/db.

Current work includes such interesting novelties as context semantic validation, periodic runner refactoring, "rally info" command which prints descriptions for different entities in Rally, checking if required services are available before starting the scenario and refactoring of validation system, continue work on "stress" runner.

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us make Rally better.

Source code for Rally is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/stackforge/rally You can track the overall progress in Rally via Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?release=juno&metric=commits&project_type=all&module=rally Open reviews for Rally: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+rally,n,z

Stay tuned.

Regards, The Rally team

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