Alibaba Cloud PTS Platinum Edition has powerful distributed stress measurement capabilities. Compared with industry-based products launched by cloud hosts, this product is faster, has a wider range of sources, and has stronger pulse capability and traffic control capabilities. A few days ago, Alibaba Cloud launched the PTS platinum version of the early adopter package, which aims to provide users with best practices with high cost performance. We interviewed the person in charge of Alibaba Cloud middleware related products on product-related issues, and listened to him analyze the Alibaba Cloud PTS Platinum Edition for us.
1. What is PTS Platinum Edition?
PTS (Performance Testing Service) is an excellent web-based SaaS performance testing platform. It has powerful distributed stress testing capabilities and can easily simulate the real business scenarios of a large number of users. PTS was officially launched on Alibaba Cloud in 2015, providing users with cost-effective and industry-leading performance stress testing solutions.
PTS Platinum Edition is a new product officially released in August 2016. Its core capabilities are based on the single-link/full-link stress testing platform that has served the entire Alibaba ecosystem for more than 4 years. The platform supports daily external traffic stress testing internally. In addition, it also supports big and small promotion activities, such as Tmall Double 11, Double 12 and New Year's Day, etc.; the source of pressure for the PTS Platinum Edition is the CDN nodes of hundreds of cities and operators across the country. Compared with the cloud host of industry products, it is faster, has a wider range of sources, and has stronger impulse capability and traffic control capability.
The PTS Platinum Edition emphasizes the visual layout of pages in function, and is currently in rapid iteration, advocating complex interactive pressure testing without coding; in addition to the above-mentioned features, TPS pressure testing mode, real-time control, and real-time effective speed regulation capabilities They are also leading the industry. PTS Platinum Edition will continue to provide cost-effective best practices.
2. What are the features of PTS Platinum Edition?
We (Alibaba's high-availability team) hope to continuously simplify the work of performance stress testing itself, return more energy to business and performance itself, create greater value through the improvement of performance and experience, better reduce costs, and improve Stable support for core activities. We chose to export our best practices through the PTS Platinum Edition, an easy-to-use, inexpensive product. PTS Platinum Edition is a product created and maintained by Alibaba Middleware-High Availability Team.
Then, in a closed-loop stress measurement, PTS and other Alibaba Cloud products cover three important capabilities: the ability to translate and construct traffic, the ability to simulate and control real traffic, and the ability to present and locate problems.
3. What are the main terms and concepts involved in PTS Platinum Edition?
VUM: VUM (per virtual user per minute) is the billing unit of the performance test PTS, VUM=VU (the number of concurrent users of the stress test task) M (the execution time of the stress test task, in minute granularity, less than one minute is calculated as one minute) , for example: 100 concurrent users running for 10 minutes is 1000VUM, 1 concurrent user running for 1000 minutes is also 1000VUM, and so on. What is more intimate is that the PTS Platinum Edition does not calculate VUM based on the maximum concurrency preset based on the pressure measurement time like most SaaS pressure measurement products, but is billed according to the actual consumption of VUM.
Link: It is defined as a business behavior in PTS, which can be an interface, page, etc., and is the smallest unit. Taking e-commerce as an example, logging in, querying product details, submitting orders and paying are all a link.
Serial link: A serial link is an ordered set (transaction) of a group of links with a certain business meaning, and the link can only be associated with input and output parameters in the same serial link (run-time data transfer) Wait.
Scenario: A set of sets of serial links forms a scenario, and the scenario can simulate the combined form of various ordered sets, that is, a complex business scenario.
Stress measurement mode: PTS Platinum Edition supports concurrent mode and TPS mode, especially the second one is an original stress measurement mode, which focuses more on evaluating the throughput capacity of the stress-tested side in one step, because the so-called concurrency is on the server side. In the end, it is decoupled by the network into sequential requests.
Instructions: In order to better fit business logic and simulate user behavior more realistically, PTS Platinum Edition provides a series of instruction functions. Instructions are functional components that can change and control the behavior and process of link execution. Instructions can be interspersed in various positions of the serial link. Generally speaking, it only works on a single serial link, and some special commands also work on multiple serial links at the same time.
4. How to do a stress test on the PTS platinum version?
A simple stress test configuration process is described below. More powerful extensions can be experienced in depth by purchasing resource packs.
Suppose our stress test scenario is a process of Home->Search->Details->Thinking Time->Order Placement, that is to say, the stress test scenario contains one serial link, and one serial link contains 4 links.
Then we first enter and set these four links, click Link Management in the left navigation bar, click New Link in the upper right corner of the link list page, and enter the basic information.
If you need to construct the request body, request header, cookie or URL separately for each request, you can upload it after the construction is completed according to the documentation of PTS.
In the business, some links need to output some values to the subsequent links. For example, if the home page passes the userid and name to the subsequent links, and the search passes the searched itemId to the details and order pages, then it needs to be in the corresponding The parameters are defined in the link (regular and JSON expression parsing is supported, see the documentation for details).
Correspondingly, the link that needs outgoing parameters defines an incoming parameter and associates it in the scene (introduced in the scene section later). The definition of the input parameter is very simple, mainly a declaration of a variable. When it needs to be used, it can be directly referenced in the file through the #{param} placeholder. For example, if the details link has an input parameter named "itemid", then only itemid=#{itemid}&age=12 is required in the stress test file.
Next, go to the scene construction step, click Scene Management in the left navigation bar of the console, and click New Scene on the scene list page. Enter the scenario name (it can be named after the service), set the duration (maximum time for the stress test), select the mode (TPS or concurrent mode), and click OK.
As mentioned earlier, there is only one serial link in the scenario, and then add the previously configured service link to the serial link. When adding, associate the out/in parameters before and after as shown in the figure below, and set the start and end of a single link. The target pressure measurement value is sufficient.
In the instruction part, the most common thinking time is added in this example. The thinking time is used to simulate the time spent by the user to think and react between the two nodes before and after, and supports multiple modes, such as fixed value, uniform distribution and normal distribution.
There are also a series of other instructions, such as rendezvous point, import and export of cookies, etc. For details, please refer to the documentation and use it according to the business situation.
After all the configuration is completed, the effect is as follows:
Of course, you can use the debugging scene function to debug the scene conveniently before starting. In the case of no billing, it will run a data or poll once and display the request/response of each link in a structured way, and the input and output parameters/assertions will be displayed. They will be displayed separately for easy troubleshooting.
Then save the configuration or go to the pressure test directly. The real-time client-side monitoring and reporting effects are as follows:
When the pressure test is completed, a report will be automatically generated, which is divided into two parts: overview and details.
5. What are the PTS Platinum Edition resource packs?
The PTS Platinum Edition has a lot of resource packs to choose from, and the maximum concurrency can reach 100W or higher. There are also many choices for the total amount of VUM. Generally, the most purchased resource packs are more than 1,000 yuan. In order to allow more users to experience excellent SaaS-based stress testing products, recently launched the 9.9 premium early adopter package, which enjoys complete functions, up to 500 concurrent, CDN-initiated traffic, and a total of 10,000 VUMs. That is to say, 500 concurrency may correspond to several thousand TPS. Under such a throughput, a 20-minute stress test can be performed. It is easy to use and not expensive!