logikone / legion

Tools to spoof extra minions for testing salt

Legion

The legion tool is used to make more fake minions at a lower cost than can be done with a minion swarm.

Legion works by telling a minion to just pretend to be many more minions, it is simple in that the minion still runs the remote execution command that is sent to it, it just then sends returns for multiple minions back to the master.

Legion can be used in combination with minionswarm for a double punch of scale.

Keep in mind that Legion will create a dedicated thundering herd issue. Since Legion can spoof literally hundreds of thousands of minions on a single system it can seriously bog down a Salt Master. Make sure that you are patient starting things up and give your master the time to process the heavy load.

Installation

pip install -e .

Usage

It is recommended to use with a local master and auto_accept: True. Otherwise, you'll have to manually accept loads of keys as the hoard starts.

Start with 5 minion processes each with 10 legions

legion -m 5 -l 10

To see all the flags so you can create hordes of minions to test against with varied grains, versions, and OSes etc.

Recommendations

• Set your master to auto_accept: True
• Clear your minion keys before restarting the legion: salt-key -D
• Legion was designed to do 5000 minions on one system. However, after 100 legions per swarm minion, it falls apart. So it is recommended to get to 5000 to do legion -m 46 -l 110. Note: this takes about 20 minutes to startup that many minions (5106 minions).

Dedicated Setup

Turn on legion in your minion config:

legion_fakes: 100
return: legion

Next run a couple of remote ex commands to tell the minion to use legion to make fake keys and caches:

salt \* legion.keys

Then on the master (unless you turn on open_mode):

salt-key -A

Then activate the caches:

salt \* legion.cache

It will take a while to populate the keys and cache as it is serial and makes the master do a pillar generation for each minion. Watch the master log for the storm to pass. But when it is done you can run salt commands to your heart's delight and get tons of returns:

salt \* network.interfaces