Rally Gate Check

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ceilometer/+spec/rally-gate-check

Rally provides support for what it calls rally-gate jobs. These automate a set of non-voting, custom benchmark scenarios that effectively make it possible to observe the performance impact of changes. Ceilometer’s overall performance is the result of complex interactions in several systems, automating benchmarks of these systems will save time and provide useful information.

Problem description

At this time there are no generally available automated benchmarks for Ceilometer performance. Both developers and deployers would appreciate knowing if code changes will improve or damage performance.

Proposed change

A non-voting gate check job will be created to run a set of benchmark scenarios against each Ceilometer patchset. This job is controlled through multiple changes:

  • A rally-scenarios directory in the Ceilometer code tree containing a ceilometer.yaml file that describes the Rally scenarios to be used in the job.

  • An addition to projects.yaml that adds rally-jobs to the jobs list.

  • An update to zuul layout that adds gate-rally-dsvm-fake-ceilometer to the check list of the openstack/ceilometer section.

Rally includes a suite of pre-built scenarios which can run against Ceilometer. At the moment these primarily interact with Ceilometer over the API. This is not a requirement. Scenarios can do as much or as little as required and can be added as necessary as plugins in the rally-scenarios directory. As long the code is properly decorated by Rally code, the scenarios can be measured.

Initially this change will implement the basic structure for doing benchmarks, using simple API tests to flesh out and confirm the setup.

Once confirmed, additional scenarios will be created to measure:

  • Latency in polling and notification agents (getting samples into the pipeline).

  • Latency in ingestion (getting samples into the data store).

These latter measurements will require more complex scenario code that is responsible for creating and destroying VMs, volumes and other resources.

Scenario code which proves effective should migrate from plugins to the Rally codebase to allow general use.

Alternatives

Alternatives include:

  • The Rally team is automating performance checking to gather historical performance data to share with projects. This serves a similar but not identical purpose to the changes propsed here: it would help to evaluate the improvement of Ceilometer at large but not specific changes.

  • Use the Rally job as an experimental job, only run when a “check experimental” comment is left in gerrit.

  • Once this initial spec has been implemented and the principles involved validated in the ceilometer context, it may be worthwhile to implement what are called “SLA checks” via Rally. These allow a check job which can fail based on a severe degradation in performance. These are not being done now to first gain experience with Rally as well as to compartmentalize work in actionable chunks.

Data model impact

None.

REST API impact

None.

Security impact

None.

Pipeline impact

None.

Other end user impact

Some end users may be able to use the benchmark information to make decisions about how they configure their installations. It seems unlikely, however, that they will want to review this data from gerrit.

Performance/Scalability Impacts

These tests will provide a safety net to guard against degradations in performance and provide data to identify which changes have caused issues if there is degradation.

Other deployer impact

None.

Developer impact

As features are added, the Rally scenarios may be insufficient and need to be updated. Ideally the scenarios will be high-level enough that this will be rare. When they are not it will be up to the feature developer to update the Rally scenarios and, as necessary, add Rally plugins.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

chdent

Other contributors:

boris-42, rediskin, sileht

Ongoing maintainer:

chdent

Work Items

In addition to the steps listed in the Proposed Solution section above the major chunk of work is in selecting and/or creating the necessary Rally tasks. Rally itself includes many sample scenarios and runners and includes a gate check in its own tree which includes several Ceilometer checks that may be used as starting point.

Future lifecycle

As stated in “Developer Impact” new features may require new scenarios.

Dependencies

  • Rally.

Testing

The proposal adds a new (non-voting) gate job which will act as its own test.

Documentation Impact

None.

References