*Quentin Hamard is one of the founders of Octoperf, and is based in Marseille, France. * Octoperf is a full-stack cloud load testing SaaS platform. It allows developers to test the design performance limits of mobile apps and websites in a realistic virtual environment. As a startup, we are attempting to use containers to change the load testing paradigm, and deliver a platfrom that can run on any cloud, for a fraction of the cost of existing approaches. In this article, I want to explain how we achieved affordability and portability by leveraging Docker containers with Rancher as our container management platform. The elimination of the development costs associated with having to tightly integrate with multiple cloud architectures and platforms was critical to building a flexible product at a price point that would be compelling to development teams of any size. We started developing our product late in 2014. The objective was to release a product quickly without compromising the product quality. To make that happen, we had to rely on open-source technologies that we knew well to get things done in our target timeframe. We made some mistakes along the way and in this article I’ll walk through those, and show how we learned from them and eventually delivered the platform we had envisioned. Octoperf is the evidence of our resiliency and commitment to excellence. Docker and Rancher paved the way to our success. Let’s start with some of the things we didn’t get right the first time.

Round 1 - Lessons Learned About What Not to Do

We tried multiple options and methods under our initial premise of being quick to market with a high-quality product. We tried one approach, then another and before we knew it, the iteration wars were in full swing. I’ll highlight a few of the approaches we tried below: Amazon CloudFront + S3 Front End with Tomcat on Amazon Beanstalk Back End – our first approach was to try using the full AWS stack to build out our platfrom. However, as we quickly realized, with this approach we were tied to Amazon and would have had to develop a new instance of Octoperf for each cloud structure our customers might be using. We were not portable, and we were not cost effective. Apache Mesos Cluster – Our next approach was to try using Apache Mesos. Mesos seemed like a good solution, but in the end, it had two major challenges. First, the setup was complex and required a ton of continual fine tuning, and second, it required a large management infrastructure, which was expensive and had to be implemented on every cloud we wanted to support. Mesos was close to what we were trying to do, but the overhead and cost didn’t work for a company of our size. SH Scripts – We tried using SH scripts to launch services like Apache Mesos, Singularity, but we found these scripts were unmaintainable in the long run and were painful to write, read and test. The attempt to develop and maintain these scripts was costly. If you’ve seen the movie “Hellraiser,” you know the effect that can have on you. The bottom line here is that it is a royal mess to deal with. Having a few scripts is manageable. Once you get into the dozens of scripts needed to run services, Jmeter, and the lot, it’s like having acupuncture done on your entire scalp and face … yeah, painful. Developer Environment - With our initial AWS/Mesos/Scripting appraoch, we had a huge problem creating developer environments for our team. Our scripts were based on Amazon metadata available on the EC2 instance. Mesos and other tools were installed by hand on an Amazon AMI. Soon we realized that just setting up the development was painful. It required setting up the whole stack on the developer machine which was hours of work. It was so painful that we were sometimes doing tests in the production environment, a definite poor practice. Thanks to our over 3000 unit tests covering almost any part of the app, the small regression we faced could be fixed quickly. However, even in those conditions, it was unacceptable to be unable to setup a development environment within minutes. This wasn’t manageable in the long run and had to find out a way to run our entire stack on our local machines within minutes.

It was time to rethink our basic assumptions and premises.

Reboot

We had to redefine our entire approach. Our new design criteria had to consider affordability and portability to meet our clients’ needs. These criteria included:

On-premise load testing - be able to load test applications behind firewalls, as well as hybrid cloud load testing by mixing cloud and on-premise machines.

Multi-cloud provider support - be able to support multiple cloud providers to address global diversity and to take advantage of cost-saving opportunities when available.

It was time to sit back and think about a new architecture which will solve the issues listed above AND help us to quickly develop those valuable features. We needed:

A portable environment – The development environment should be easy to setup.

A cloud provider agnostic architecture - We want to be able to deploy the infrastructure on any cloud provider with ease.

A simple and coherent system - Managing a multi-region Mesos cluster for our purpose was overkill. SH scripts should be eliminated as much as possible.

An all-in-one solution - We don’t have enough time to take the best technology in each field and glue them together. We need a solution which covers all our Docker clustering needs.

Round 2 - A Docker and Rancher Driven Architecture

Our new architecture has been entirely moved to Docker containers, managed by a Docker cluster orchestration tool. The diagram gives a high-level overview of how our system is designed now. Backend and DB containers can be scaled horizontally across as many hosts as needed. We solved many of the limitations of our first architecture:

Provider agnostic - we rely on a Docker orchestration tool which is cloud vendor independent.

On-premise capability - the new infrastructure treats a Docker host in the cloud the same as an on premise machine,

Multi cloud-provider support - we start devices using Rancher’s support for Docker-machine which makes the perfect bridge between all the cloud providers and us. Many cloud options are supported! (Amazon, DigitalOcean and more)

JMeter test execution

Previously, we were running JMeter instances with SH scripts on Mesos slaves. Now, we packed our JMeter setup in a Docker container. We schedule the JMeter Docker containers on Rancher, which then executes them on the wanted cloud provider in the desired region.

Docker

Why Docker? The answer seems quite obvious now that you understand all the issues we faced. Docker allows to you create portable apps that run anywhere under the same conditions. Docker opens up an entirely new world which also comes with its own challenges. It’s not as simple as putting all of our apps into Docker containers. However, thanks to the Awesome Docker curated list, we could quickly have an overview of the existing technologies around Docker that could meet our needs such as being able to cluster Docker containers.

Docker Container Orchestration

Why orchestration? Simply because it’s not safe to put your entire app on a single machine. Also, a single instance may not be enough to execute the workload. We should be able to scale the app horizontally by simply adding more machines. Clustering Docker containers is essential. Clustering means running an ensemble of containers on a cluster of machines. There are some tools which allow you to run Docker containers on a cluster like Docker swarm. Being able to manage a cluster of Docker hosts from a single place is mandatory. We have chosen to go with Rancher. Its Web UI gives you an instant overview of your entire Docker host cluster and the containers being run. There are many other tools, mostly in command-line, to form Docker clusters. We have looked at CoreOS, Weave and many more. Either we found the configuration too complicated, or it required us to integrate many technologies together to have all the features we needed. Rancher just made it so easy to deploy and manage our containers anywhere.

Docker Container Networking

Once you start thinking with a cluster, another issue comes up. How can containers communicate with each other? We needed cross-container networking. This network needs to be independent of the cluster layout. Rancher has been incredibly helpful here. It has a built-in Docker container networking system based on IPSec tunneling. This allows you to have cross-host / cross-provider communication between Docker containers as if they were on the same local area network.

Service discovery

Well, now that your containers are able to run on a variety of hardware and communicate with each other, how can they discover each other without messing with the configuration on each deployment? Rancher includes a global, DNS-based service discovery function that allows containers to automatically register themselves as services, as well as services to dynamically discover each other over the network. Service discovery is an essential feature when running services that need to communicate with each other on a cluster of machines. Of course, you could hard-code the service IPs / hostnames, but that’s the opposite of flexibility and resilience. Services in a cluster are moving parts that should be independent of the location where they run.

Data Persistence

Running databases with Docker containers can be difficult. Databases require persistence. The problem with Docker containers is that the data within the container is lost when the container is removed. You can map a directory within a container to a local folder on the docker host, using docker volumes. What happens when the machine dies? Isn’t my container supposed to be cluster agnostic? We need that the data tied to the container keeps moving with it in the Docker cluster. You start to feel the issue with running databases on Docker. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem; volume drivers. Rancher Convoy is the one we use. Flocker is another alternative. We use Convoy to map the container volume to an Amazon EBS volume. Therefore, when the machine hosting the database dies, the container is relocated to another host. The EBS volume, which is independent of the machine, is then linked again to the container

Load Balancing

So our application is now scaled horizontally. The next challenge was centered on how to make our frontend discover our load-balancers when scaling them. Rancher has a built-in Route53 DNS update service. This service updates Route53 DNS entries for each service. When you scale the load-balancer, the newly scaled ones will be added automatically in the Route53 DNS entries. What about setting up an SSL Termination? It’s also dead-simple with Rancher’s built-in SSL certificate management. If we would have to setup HAProxy with SSL termination manually, it would probably take us a week or two and have been a mess.

Monitoring

Once you have a few containers running, you need to have at least a basic monitoring solution to get a quick overview of the resources used by each container. Rancher has a built-in basic monitoring solution which exposes CPU, memory and network metrics in the UI. More precise monitoring can be achieved by setting up Netflix Vector on Docker hosts, which is what we did.

Cost Considerations

With Docker and Rancher, we are able to get rid of many EC2 machines and use existing machines more efficiently. Month-to-month Amazon prices have shown an almost 70% decrease in infrastructure cost. EC2 machines have hourly usage costs that come with Elastic Block Store monthly costs (per GB), and network communication costs. That doesn’t include the maintenance cost to keep the EC2 fleet running smoothly.

Future Evolutions

We plan to move to a microservice architecture, which will naturally lead us to a tool like Hystrix for fault-tolerance and resilience. Circuit-breakers avoid cascading failures and allow resiliency in distributed systems where failures are inevitable. We’ll cover our migration to microservices in future posts.

Final Words

This process has helped us deliver a fantastic platform for our customers quickly, inexpensively and with unprecedented portability. Docker and Rancher makes it possible for a startup to build a scalable, high performance platform in a way that would have been nearly impossible in the past. I can’t thank companies like Netflix, Pivotal and Rancher enough for the time they invest in open-source technologies. Octoperf would not exist without the open-source community.