Glossary

Warning

Unfortunately, our glossary is not full, but the Rally team is working on improving it. If you cannot find a definition in which you are interested, feel free to ping us via IRC (#openstack-rally channel at OFTC) or via E-Mail (openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org with tag [Rally]).

Common

Alembic

A lightweight database migration tool which powers Rally migrations. Read more at Official Alembic documentation

DB Migrations

Rally supports database schema and data transformations, which are also known as migrations. This allows you to get your data up-to-date with latest Rally version.

Rally

A testing tool that automates and unifies multi-node OpenStack deployment and cloud verification. It can be used as a basic tool for an OpenStack CI/CD system that would continuously improve its SLA, performance and stability.

Rally Config

An optional INI file, rally.conf, that customizes Rally behaviour. Nothing creates it for you. Put it in one of the directories Rally looks at, or pass a path with --config-file. See Configuration for the search order and where to find all the options.

Rally DB

Rally uses a relational database as data storage. Several database backends are supported: SQLite (default), PostgreSQL, and MySQL. The database connection can be set via the configuration file option [database]/connection.

Rally Plugin

Most parts of Rally are pluggable. Scenarios, runners, contexts and even charts for HTML report are plugins. It is easy to create your own plugin and use it. Read more at plugin reference.

Environment

Environment

A record in the Rally database that describes the target you test. It holds everything Rally needs to reach that target, for example a URL and credentials. Each task and verification runs against one environment. See Environment Component.

Platform

One target inside an environment, for example an OpenStack cloud. A platform is created from a platform plugin, which is the code that knows how to talk to that kind of target. A single environment can hold several platforms.

Env spec

The JSON or YAML input that describes an environment. See The environment spec.

Deployment

The old name of an environment. Deployments are deprecated and replaced by environments. The rally deployment commands still work, but they print a warning and should not be used in new setups.

Task

Cleanup

This is a specific context which removes all resources on target system that were created by the current task. If some Rally-related resources remain, please file a bug and attach the task file and a list of remaining resources.

Context

A type of plugin that can run some actions on the target environment before the workloads start and after the last workload finishes. This allows, for example, preparing the environment for workloads (e.g., create resources and change parameters) and restoring the environment later. Each Context must implement setup() and cleanup() methods.

Input task

A file that describes how to run a Rally Task. It can be in JSON or YAML format. The rally task start command needs this file to run the task. The input task is pre-processed by the Jinja2 templating engine so it is very easy to create repeated parts or calculate specific values at runtime. It is also possible to pass values via CLI arguments, using the –task-args or –task-args-file options.

Runner

This is a Rally plugin which decides how to run Workloads. For example, they can be run serially in a single process, or using concurrency.

Scenario

Synonym for Workload

Service

Abstraction layer that represents target environment API. For example, this can be some OpenStack service. A Service provides API versioning and action timings, simplifies API calls, and reduces code duplication. It can be used in any Rally plugin.

SLA

Service-Level Agreement (Success Criteria). Allows you to determine whether a subtask or workload is successful by setting success criteria rules.

Subtask

A part of a Task. There can be many subtasks in a single Task.

Task

An entity which includes all the necessary data for a test run, and results of this run.

Workload

An important part of Task: a plugin which is run by the runner. It is usually run in separate thread. Workloads are grouped into Subtasks.

Verify

Rally can run different subunit-based testing tools against a target environment, for example tempest for OpenStack.

Verification

A result of running some third-party subunit-based testing tool.