Glossary¶
Warning
Unfortunately, our glossary is not full, but the Rally team is working on improving it. If you cannot find a definition in which you are interested, feel free to ping us via IRC (#openstack-rally channel at Freenode) or via E-Mail (openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org with tag [Rally]).
Common¶
Alembic¶
A lightweight database migration tool which powers Rally migrations. Read more at Official Alembic documentation
DB Migrations¶
Rally supports database schema and data transformations, which are also known as migrations. This allows you to get your data up-to-date with latest Rally version.
Rally¶
A testing tool that automates and unifies multi-node OpenStack deployment and cloud verification. It can be used as a basic tool for an OpenStack CI/CD system that would continuously improve its SLA, performance and stability.
Rally Config¶
Rally behavior can be customized by editing its configuration file, rally.conf, in configparser format. While being installed, Rally generates a config with default values from its sample. When started, Rally searches for its config in "<sys.prefix>/etc/rally/rally.conf", "~/.rally/rally.conf", "/etc/rally/rally.conf"
Rally DB¶
Rally uses a relational database as data storage. Several database backends are supported: SQLite (default), PostgreSQL, and MySQL. The database connection can be set via the configuration file option [database]/connection.
Rally Plugin¶
Most parts of Rally are pluggable. Scenarios, runners, contexts and even charts for HTML report are plugins. It is easy to create your own plugin and use it. Read more at plugin reference.
Deployment¶
Deployment¶
A set of information about target environment (for example: URI and authentication credentials) which is saved in the database. It is used to define the target system for testing each time a task is started. It has a "type" value which changes task behavior for the selected target system; for example type "openstack" will enable OpenStack authentication and services.
Task¶
Cleanup¶
This is a specific context which removes all resources on target system that were created by the current task. If some Rally-related resources remain, please file a bug and attach the task file and a list of remaining resources.
Context¶
A type of plugin that can run some actions on the target environment
before the workloads start and after the last workload finishes. This
allows, for example, preparing the environment for workloads (e.g.,
create resources and change parameters) and restoring the environment
later. Each Context must implement setup() and cleanup()
methods.
Input task¶
A file that describes how to run a Rally Task. It can be in JSON or YAML format. The rally task start command needs this file to run the task. The input task is pre-processed by the Jinja2 templating engine so it is very easy to create repeated parts or calculate specific values at runtime. It is also possible to pass values via CLI arguments, using the --task-args or --task-args-file options.
Runner¶
This is a Rally plugin which decides how to run Workloads. For example, they can be run serially in a single process, or using concurrency.
Service¶
Abstraction layer that represents target environment API. For example, this can be some OpenStack service. A Service provides API versioning and action timings, simplifies API calls, and reduces code duplication. It can be used in any Rally plugin.
SLA¶
Service-Level Agreement (Success Criteria). Allows you to determine whether a subtask or workload is successful by setting success criteria rules.
Subtask¶
A part of a Task. There can be many subtasks in a single Task.
Task¶
An entity which includes all the necessary data for a test run, and results of this run.
Workload¶
An important part of Task: a plugin which is run by the runner. It is usually run in separate thread. Workloads are grouped into Subtasks.