devth/alpine-bench repository overview

⁠alpine-bench

alpine-bench is useful for running Apache Bench in your cluster to gather latency metrics from your services. It does this by:

1. Running Apache Bench using provided options
2. Parsing the results into a JSON data structure and printing them to stdout

This makes it useful for running from your automation (e.g. CI/CD) and making decisions based on the results. For example, in a CD pipeline it can be useful to deploy a new build to dev, measure its latency, and if the result is within some threshold, proceed to prod rollout.

⁠Usage

Nearly all of ab's options can simply be passed in using Docker's normal cmd mechnaism, e.g.:

docker run -it --rm -t devth/alpine-bench -n3 http://google.com/

Sample output:

{
  "connect": {
    "max": 154,
    "mean": 69,
    "median": 66,
    "min": 54,
    "stdDev": 18.60000038147
  },
  "percentiles": {
    "100": 340,
    "50": 258,
    "66": 264,
    "75": 269,
    "80": 283,
    "90": 291,
    "95": 296,
    "98": 340,
    "99": 340
  },
  "processing": {
    "max": 274,
    "mean": 196,
    "median": 196,
    "min": 142,
    "stdDev": 18.60000038147
  },
  "total": {
    "max": 340,
    "mean": 266,
    "median": 258,
    "min": 250,
    "stdDev": 18.799999237061
  },
  "waiting": {
    "max": 274,
    "mean": 196,
    "median": 196,
    "min": 141,
    "stdDev": 18.60000038147
  }
}

The output can be parsed by your CI tool to make decisions about whether to rollout a deployment (or whatever else you might want to do).

⁠Special options

Options which require reading from a file can be passed in via ENV instead. Internally the contents will be written to a file and the corresponding ab option will be used.

⁠Example

docker run -e 'POST=post body' -it --rm -t devth/alpine-bench -n3 http://google.com/

⁠Options

⁠Unsupported options

Options which cause ab to write to a file are not supported.

• -e csv-file
• -g gnuplot-file

They will work, but the resulting file will be lost inside the Docker container when it terminates.

⁠Get a shell in the container

docker run -it --rm --entrypoint sh devth/alpine-bench

⁠Development

Build the image, obtain your docker machine IP, run an Nginx container to measure, and run alpine-bench against it:

docker build -t devth/alpine-bench .
export DM_IP=$(dm ip dev)
docker run -p 8080:80 -it --rm nginx:alpine
docker run -it --rm devth/alpine-bench -n3 http://$DM_IP:8080/

Or run it outside of Docker:

POST='post body' go run main.go -n3 http://$DM_IP:8080/

In your nginx logs you'll see something like:

172.17.0.1 - - [14/Jun/2016:20:20:42 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 612 "-" "ApacheBench/2.3" "-"
172.17.0.1 - - [14/Jun/2016:20:20:42 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 612 "-" "ApacheBench/2.3" "-"
172.17.0.1 - - [14/Jun/2016:20:20:42 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 612 "-" "ApacheBench/2.3" "-"

⁠License

Copyright 2016 Trevor C. Hartman. Distributed under the MIT⁠ license.