1. Introduction

1.1. What is the reason for writing this?

Cloud computing is a complex and evolving process. Its definition can be as simple as:

a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies (IT Glossary: Cloud Computing)

At the same time it may require a separate article to explain what cloud computing is. There are several characteristics which can describe the system, called cloud: on demand, scale, elasticity, and as a Service. All these characteristics are areas of interest for scale and performance testing.

All documentation pieces you’ll find here are the summary of knowledge and experience gained by various people from different companies, that aims to share the ideas of how we can evaluate, analyse and test OpenStack cloud performance, including the very infrastructure basics.

As a community we want this knowledge to become publicly available to allow OpenStack developers, QA engineers and operators to have a unified way for their projects and products evaluation and the best recipes for doing this.

1.2. Who will be interested in this?

Cloud operators, software and quality assurance engineers and any person who takes active part in either OpenStack development or its usage.

1.3. Who is contributing to this guide?

Short answer: The OpenStack community.

Longer answer: performance engineers from various companies, cloud operators, OpenStack project developers, etc. We all are part of the Performance Team. Therefore, here you can find test plans and methodologies that were written keeping in mind all of these groups of people, their interests and experiences.