arschles / megaboom

A Distributed HTTP Load Generator, based on rakyll/boom and Kubernetes (Work in Progress)

megaboom

Megaboom is a Distributed HTTP Load Generator, based on Kubernetes. It is an HTTP server meant to be run inside your Kubernetes cluster, behind a Service, and it runs Jobs that invocate the hey CLI (formerly called boom, hence the name of this repository) to generate load.

Alpha Status

This project is still in alpha, and is missing a few major features:

• Reporting the success/failure rate of ongoing jobs - currently, it's expected that you introspect each Pod to get individual boom command output, or use your own monitoring/metrics system to see status of your application under load
• Cleaning up after itself - currently it creates a megaboom job in the default namespace. You must delete that job before you make the next HTTP request to megaboom. Do the deletion with kubectl delete job megaboom
• CI infrastructure to run tests and automatically build images - currently, there are very few tests, and the current Docker image has not been pushed anywhere. You have to build it yourself and push to your own registry.

Usage

This server must run inside a Kubernetes pod. It's recommended that you run this server in a pod managed by a Deployment, and then run a service in front of the replication controller. There is a Helm chart available for you in this repository. Install it with the following command:

helm install megaboom -n megaboom ./chart/megaboom --create-namespace

Making Requests to Megaboom

Megaboom starts a (simple) HTTP server, which you make requests to via an HTTP client (e.g. curl). The helm command in the previous section installs a megaboom service in the megaboom namespace, and installs a separate "debug pod" to which you can log in and make these requests.

You can also issue requests to this server using Kubernetes port-forwarding or proxying if you'd like. The debug pod does not have curl installed by default. The first time you open a shell on it, execute apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl. As long as that same pod exists thereafter, you won't need to reinstall curl.

Open a shell on the debug pod and run the following curl command:

curl -d '{"num_runners": 50, "num_requests": 20000, "num_concurrent": 2000, "endpoint": "https://gifm.dev", "namespace": "megaboom"}' http://megaboom:8080/job

This request will return a Job ID. Copy this down, and use it to delete the job later:

curl -XDELETE http://megaboom:8080/job/<job_id>