Whirlwind

Whirlwind is a performance testing library that allows you to run the following higher order functions:

• Load
• Spike
• Stress
• Soak
• DDOS

Whirlwind uses the AWESOME Artillery.io toolkit and runs on Serverless Framework and on Amazon Lambda, allowing you to generate an insane amount of load. You can even simulate a DDOS attack by distributing the load across the globe!

For an example of how to use this, please see the whirlwind-example repository.

Setup

1. Set permission policy for an IAM user with the following config:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "cloudformation:ListStacks",
                "cloudformation:CreateStack",
                "cloudformation:UpdateStack",
                "cloudformation:CreateChangeSet",
                "cloudformation:DescribeChangeSet",
                "cloudformation:ExecuteChangeSet",
                "cloudformation:DescribeStacks",
                "cloudformation:DescribeStackEvents",
                "cloudformation:DescribeStackResource",
                "s3:createBucket",
                "lambda:InvokeFunction",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "cloudformation:ValidateTemplate",
                "iam:GetRole",
                "logs:DescribeLogGroups",
                "iam:CreateRole",
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "iam:DeleteRole",
                "iam:PutRolePolicy",
                "lambda:GetFunction",
                "lambda:CreateFunction",
                "iam:PassRole",
                "lambda:ListVersionsByFunction",
                "lambda:PublishVersion",
                "lambda:UpdateFunctionCode",
                "lambda:UpdateFunctionConfiguration",
                "iam:AttachRolePolicy",
                "cloudformation:DeleteStack",
                "lambda:DeleteFunction",
                "logs:DescribeLogStreams",
                "logs:DeleteLogGroup",
                "s3:DeleteBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

2. Create an ~/.aws/credentials file with:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=KEY
aws_secret_access_key=KEY

3. Make sure you have Node installed (tested with Node v8.9.3 and may work with higher).

4. Export these ENV variables:

export INFLUX_HOST=<your ip>
export INFLUX_PASSWORD=<your password>
export INFLUX_USER=<your user>
export INFLUX_DB=<the database>
export TARGET_HOST=<target host>

Optional steps:

Route all Lambda traffic through 1 IP address

You may want to send all requests from 1 IP address, for example to test a server may still be in development and not accessible from Internet. With AWS VPC and NAT gateway it's possible to run all Lambda functions in a private subnet and route all the traffic through a leased IP address.

Here is a video how to configure this on AWS side:

and a tutorial: How to setup a VPC for Lambdas

You also need to setup securityGroupIds and subnetIds in your serverless.yml file. You can see a commented example in the file in this repo. A securityGroup is defined in VPC Dashboard -> Security -> Security Groups, you can use a default security group with open internet access.

Setup an EC2 influxDB server for logging test results and errors

You can install InfluxDB on a t2.micro (or higher) instance with Ubuntu 16.04. First run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade then follow official installation tutorial Installing influxDB

You then need to setup access to influxDB over the internet by following this tutorial.

Finally you need to open port 5001 (this is a default port for influxDB, you can choose a different port) on your EC2 instance. Here is how.

Graphana

Graphana is a log watcher which can directly connect to influxDB and show your test logs in real-time. It's really easy to use and generates great looking graphs.

We used Graphana hosted on their servers. This is the "We Host It" option that you can see on this page.

Also this blog shows some usage and installation of influxDB and Graphana hosted on your server.

Credits

This project has been forked from the awesome serverless-artillery project. A huge thank you goes to the Nordstorm team for making this OSS and allowing us to build Whirlwind on top of their hard work.