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Benchmark and Validate Kubernetes HTTP Services

Benchmark, and validate an HTTP service inside a Kubernetes cluster using the load-test-http experiment. The experiment is run inside the cluster. The HTTP service may be externally exposed or local to the cluster.

Before you begin
  1. Try the basic load-test-http tutorial.
  2. Ensure that you have a Kubernetes cluster and the kubectl CLI. You may run a local Kubernetes cluster using tools like Kind or Minikube.
  3. Deploy the sample HTTP service in the Kubernetes cluster. 
    kubectl create deploy httpbin --image=kennethreitz/httpbin --port=80
kubectl expose deploy httpbin --port=80

Launch experiment

Launch a load-test-http experiment inside the Kubernetes cluster. Note that the HTTP URL in this experiment is http://httpbin.default, which refers to a hostname inside the Kubernetes cluster, specifically, the httpbin service in the default namespace.

iter8 k launch -c load-test-http \
--set url=http://httpbin.default \
--set SLOs.http/latency-mean=50 \
--set ready.deploy=httpbin \
--set ready.service=httpbin \
--set ready.timeout=60s
Kubernetes experiments and iter8 k

Notice the iter8 k launch invocation above. Many Iter8 subcommands like launch, assert and report come in two flavors, one suited for experiments that are run locally, and another suited for experiments run inside a Kubernetes cluster.

For example, iter8 launch executes local experiments and iter8 assert enables assertions on the results of local experiments; similarly, iter8 k launch executes Kubernetes experiments and iter8 k assert enables assertions on the results of Kubernetes experiments.

Notice also the additional options ready.deploy and ready.service which allow you to specify Kubernetes Deployment and Service resources that should be checked for readiness before proceeding with the load test. ready.timeout specifies how long it should wait for the resource to be ready.

Assert experiment outcomes

Assert that the experiment completed without failures, and all SLOs are satisfied. The timeout flag below specifies a period of 120 sec for assert conditions to be satisfied.

iter8 k assert -c completed -c nofailure -c slos --timeout 120s

View experiment report

iter8 k report

iter8 k report -o html > report.html # view in a browser

View experiment logs

Fetch logs for the Kubernetes experiment. 

iter8 k log

Set parameter values

All the parameters described in the basic usage (iter8 launch) of load-test-http are also applicable for the Kubernetes usage (iter8 k launch) of the load-test-http experiment.

Cleanup

Delete all resources pertaining to this experiment from the Kubernetes cluster.

iter8 k delete
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