Rally/UpdatesJanuary2014

January 27, 2014
Hello stackers,

we are happy to share our recent updates in Rally:
 * We've done a very nice job on improving the command line interface for Rally. This has been done through several separate relatively small enhancements, which have resulted together in an overall much more positive user experience while using Rally. These improvement comprise:
 * The rally use deploy command which allows to specify the deployment we are working with only once and thus there is no need to write down the long deployment id string every time we want to launch a benchmarking task(https://review.openstack.org/#/c/68395/);
 * The ability to create a deployment from the environment variables, if they are specified (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/68347/);
 * More useful deployment-related output from CLI after a deployment has been created (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/68766/);
 * The deployment check subcommand which verifies that keystone endpoints are reachable and prints user-friendly information on that (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/68901/).


 * A new feature, namely the validators, has been added to Rally. The validators are essentially checker methods that can be bound to different benchmark scenarios and are called by Rally before the actual benchmarking starts to check whether the resources needed by that benchmark are available etc. (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67157/);
 * There has been a huge work on refactoring the benchmark engine code to improve its quality and make it more object-oriented (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/68593/). This work is going to be continued during the next weeks;
 * The FUEL client for Rally is now ready to use (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/59943/). This work is going to be followed by the FUEL deploy engine, which is currently in progress (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/61963/).

The basic plan for this week consists of the following tasks:
 * We are about to finish the implementation of benchmark launching with predefined users (instead of the temporary ones generated automatically by Rally). This work laos includes a set of changes in the Dummy deploy engine, which now is going to accept as its input not the single set of endpoints with administrator permission, but a list of endpoints that can be all with ordinary user permissions - in that case, these endpoints will be used instead of temporary users during benchmarking (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67154/, https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67643/, https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67710/, https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67720/);
 * The work on the stress execution of benchmarks is going to be completed as well. It will, however, differ a little from the originally planned one: instead of creating a separate execution option in the input config, we will just extend the already existing continuous and periodic ones (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/63055/).

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us making 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=all&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

January 20, 2014
Hello stackers,

here are the updates in our project that deserve to be mentioned in the first place:
 * Rally now supports the automated documentation generation using Sphinx. The docs are generated from the docsrings in the code (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/66092/);
 * It is now possible to perform Rally installation from DevStack (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/65765/). This has been implemented using the so-called devstack extras;
 * We continue to put lots of effort in refactoring both the source code of Rally and its unit tests. During the past week, we have improved the workflow of the cloud endpoints returned by deploy engines in our system (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/66277/, https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67276/) and improved the code readability for the deploy engine unit tests as well (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67275/, https://review.openstack.org/#/c/66838/).
 * Last but not least, certain work has been accomplished concerning the Rally CLI: we've enhanced the CLI output while working with cloud deployments (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/66314/) and fixed a bug related to the "task detailed" command (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67830/).

The main directions of our current work are as follows:
 * Providing Rally with a REST API: an extensive work is being conducted both on the server side (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/66788/, https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67346/) and on the python-rallyclient (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/66919/);
 * Making Rally able to work with a predefined set of users while launching benchmarking scenarios; this is particularly important when the user does not want to pass the admin user credentials to Rally, but has a set of predefined users which he or she would like to use for benchmarking. Several patches that implement this are ready for review (for reference, see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/rally/+spec/benchmarking-with-predefined-users)
 * Enhancing Rally with the so-called validators - special methods checking that certain conditions hold for the cloud before starting benchmarking it. These validations can include the checks for availability of certain resources in the cloud, making sure that the volumes are of the desired size etc. We aim to support fully customizable user-defined validators (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/67157/).

We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us making 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=all&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

January 13, 2014
Hello stackers,

we've recovered from the New Year holidays and already accomplished a range a tasks. Here are some recent updates in Rally:
 * Benchmark scenarios for Cinder have been added to Rally. Those include creating/deleting volumes, as well as just volume creation: recall that those volumes will be deleted anyway at the end of benchmarking by the benchmark engine cleanup mechanism (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/61833/);
 * Benchmark scenarios for Keystone have been added to Rally. Those include creating/deleting users, as well as just users creation (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/64329/). The Keystone cleanup mechanism has been implemented as well (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/64220/);
 * Refactoring of both the source code (DummyProvider: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/62934/, Benchmark engine: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/64131/) and the unit tests (tests for Nova benchmark scenarios: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/64294/, removing duplicate tests for benchmark engine: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/64128/);
 * Improving the CLI output: modifying the outlook of tables (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/62840/) and performing somewhat more consistent logging (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/64446/).

This week we will start implementing the REST API for Rally, as well as a python client for it. Besides, there is still much work to do regarding the new deploy engines and server providers mentioned in previous reports. We encourage you to take a look at new patches in Rally pending for review and to help us making 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=all&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