Amazon

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Prerequisites

In order to setup Amazon EC2 in OctoPerf EE, the following items are required:

• Amazon AWS Account: The account needs full access to EC2, VPC and IAM Management,
• Access Key and Secret Key: this pair is required to allow OctoPerf EE Interact with your AWS Account.

IAM User

Create an IAM User which has the following Permissions:

• AmazonEC2FullAccess: full access to Amazon EC2,
• AmazonVPCFullAccess: full access to Amazon VPC.

How to create an IAM User dedicated to OctoPerf EE:

• Click on your account name in the top-right corner, then select My Security Credentials,
• Click on Users in the left menu,
• Click on the Add User button,
• Enter User name, Example: octoperf, In Access Type select Programmatic Access, then click on Next,
• Select Attach Existing Policies directly,
• Check both AmazonEC2FullAccess and AmazonVPCFullAccess, then click on Next,
• On the review panel, make sure the user is configured as previously explained,
• Finally, click on Create User.

Copy the provided Access Key ID and Secret Access Key in a safe location. We'll use them at the end of the procedure to create the Amazon Provider.

VPC Setup

OctoPerf EE provisions only Amazon EC2 compute instances running inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Most modern EC2 instances like m4.xlarge or m5.xlarge are running exclusively inside VPC.

The following sections are explaining how to setup and configure properly VPCs along with its subnets in each region.

Info

The steps below must be repeated for each AWS Region you would like to use to provision load generators.

Create a VPC

How to create a VPC:

• Switch to Amazon VPC service from the AWS Management console,
• Click on Add VPC,
• Name Tag: enter the name you want. Example: the name of the region, eu-west-3 in my case,
• IPv4 CIDR block: enter 10.0.0.0/16 (or any other private network with /16 mask like 192.168.0.0/16).
• Tenancy: leave as Default (which is multi tenancy).

Store the VPC ID in a text file along with the region it belongs to. Here our VPC ID is vpc-674e9f0e, in region eu-west-3.

Create Subnets

For each region availability zone:

• Click on Add Subnet,
• Name Tag: I suggest naming it after the availability zone, like public-a for zone a, etc,
• VPC: select the previously created VPC,
• Availability Zone: select the relevant zone,
• IPv4 CIDR Block: 10.0.1.0/24 for zone a, 10.0.2.0/24 for zone b, etc.
• Click on Yes, create.

You should end up with one subnet per availability zone.

Now, we must configure each subnet to auto-assign a public IP to each instance:

• Right-click on each subnet,
• Select Modify auto-assign IP Settings,
• Check the box Enable auto-assign public IPs,
• Click on Save.

Store the subnet ids in a text file with the region and VPC ID they belong to.

Route Table

The route table is necessary to route traffic inside the VPC.

How to create a route table:

• Click on Create Route Table,
• Enter the Name and select the VPC previously created,
• Click on Yes, create.

Then, Edit the router table subnet associations: associate all the previously created subnets by checking them.

Internet Gateway

The internet gateway provides an internet access to instances inside the VPC.

How to create an Internet Gateway:

• Select Internet Gateways,
• Click on Create Internet Gateway,
• Enter any name then click on Yes, create,
• Right-click on the IG, then select Associate to VPC,
• Select the VPC previously created.

We're now done with the VPC setup. Now, we need to configure Amazon EC2.

EC2 Setup

Amazon Machine Image

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud. You must specify a source AMI when you launch an instance.

OctoPerf requires an AMI with Docker already setup. As a reminder, the prerequisites are:

• Ubuntu 18.04LTS Operating System or newer,
• Docker 18.03-ce or newer stable release already installed,
• a name starting with octoperf- for your AMI.

We suggest to use an automation tool like Packer to create Amazon AMIs in each region in just a few minutes. Our team can provide you the relevant packer scripts to get you started. Contact us at support@octoperf.com for more information.

Store the AMI ID (should look like ami-12d456f8a) along with the region in a text file.

Security Group

Create a security group with the following settings:

• Name: any,
• Description: any,
• VPC: select the VPC created previously,
• Inbound Traffic Rules: no inbound traffic rules are required, however you can enable SSH for your own usage,
• Outbound Traffic Rules: leave as All Traffic and All protocols enabled.

You can also use the already existing default security group and modify it according to your needs. Store the security group ID along with the VPC and subnet IDs for the given region in a text file.

Key Pairs

Create a key pair named exactly as the region. Example: eu-west-3 in region eu-west-3. OctoPerf EE automatically associates the provisioned instances with the key pair named as the region (to easily SSH into it if needed).

Create Provider

At this step, you should end up with a text file containing the following information per region:

• Region ID (Example: eu-west-3),
• VPC ID (Example: vpc-125efd2),
• Subnet IDs per VPC (Example: subnet-158def)
• AMI ID (Example: ami-123efc78),
• Security Group ID (Example: sg-5468efa4).

You can now setup the Amazon Provider using the On-Premise configuration panel. Provide all the information above during the regions and availability setup. Double-check all information provided are correct.

OctoPerf can automatically start and stop Amazon EC2 instances on-demand using your own Amazon AWS Account.

General

Amazon provider has the following general settings:

• Provider Name: the name as displayed when selecting the provider for a test run.

AWS Credentials

The following AWS information are required:

• AWS Access Key: an AWS Access Key,
• AWS Secret Key: an AWS Secret Key.

Info

The AWS Access and Secret Key should give full access to EC2 and read-only access to VPC.

Shutdown Policy

The shutdown policy specifies the minimum amount of time a cloud instance should be running before being eligible for automatic shutdown.

Example: shutdown specified after 55min.

Info

Only idle machines (not running load tests) are shut down.

Instance Types

The following Instances are available:

• SMALL: cloud instance with about 2GB RAM,
• MEDIUM: cloud instance with about 4GB RAM,
• LARGE: cloud instance with about 8GB RAM,
• XLARGE: cloud instance with about 16GB RAM.

Select the instance which suits your needs. Smaller instances can simulate less concurrent users.

Memory Usage

These settings are the same as for the On-Premise provider.

Regions

Using the previously entered credentials, OctoPerf scans all the regions and looks for:

• VPC networks and subnets: only instances inside a VPC can be run by OctoPerf,
• Images: an Amazon AMI with name starting with octoperf- must be present in each region. This image must have Docker preinstalled,
• Security Groups: a security group associated to a VPC with outbound traffic must be present.

Each Region can be edited and all the automatically detected settings can be changed.

Elastic IPs

Elastic IPs can be allocated using Dedicated IPs management panel.

Instance Tags

See Amazon Instance Tags backend settings for more information.