# Measuring the Performance of our OpenStack Cloud

DevFeed: [Measuring the Performance of our OpenStack Cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/measuring-the-performance-of-our-openstack-cloud-20398.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://target.github.io/cloudpunch>)

Author: Target Brands, Inc

Published: 2017-06-20T05:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Target](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/target.md>)

Topics: [openstack](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/openstack.md>), [Performance Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/performance-testing.md>), [Cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cloud.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [HTTP](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/http.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Command-line interface](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cli.md>), [Linux](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux.md>)

Tags: [cli](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cli.md>), [cloudpunch](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cloudpunch.md>), [configuration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/configuration.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [http](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/http.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [linux](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/linux.md>), [openstack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/openstack.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [performance-testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance-testing.md>)

## AI overview

This article describes Target's effort to measure performance in its private OpenStack cloud. It evaluates Rally and KloudBuster, finding that Rally focuses on API testing while KloudBuster supports HTTP and storage tests but lacks sufficient extensibility, configuration, and stability. The authors therefore decide to create their own flexible performance framework.

## Source excerpt

Here at Target, we run our own private OpenStack cloud and have never been able to accurately measure the performance of our hardware. This lack of measurement prevents the evaluation of performance improvements of new hardware or alternative technologies running as drivers inside OpenStack. It also prevents us from providing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to our customers. Recently we have been striving to improve our OpenStack service which led us to talk to our consumers directly. One of the major feedback points provided by talking with our consumers was the performance of the OpenStack cloud was lower than expected. Because we have not measured the performance of our cloud in the past, we have been unable to know if new hardware or configuration changes improves consumer-facing performance. With our new OpenStack environment builds we focused on changing this. But first we needed a tool to do the job. Searching for a Tool The first tool we looked at was Rally. Rally does performance testing of an OpenStack cloud. However, Rally focuses on the OpenStack API only. It is mainly used to test functionality (via Tempest) and stability of the API under large amounts of load. Rally does contain a resource to boot an instance and run Linux CLI commands via user data. This was tested as a way to provide the staging of instances to run performance software. However, starting the software on each instance at the same time and collecting the results from said software was difficult and not viable. Because of this, we deemed Rally was not suitable for our needs. The next tool we looked at was KloudBuster. KloudBuster is a tool that does performance testing inside an OpenStack instance. At the time of writing it provides two sets of tests: HTTP and storage. The HTTP test uses a traffic generator to measure requests per second and latency between instances. The storage test uses FIO to measure read/write IOPs and bandwidth. KloudBuster does what we were looking for, measuring