Performance Testing An Airline Reservation System

Until a few weeks ago I ran the performance and capacity testing team for the airline reservation system ITA develops. The group is under the umbrella of operations, which may seem out of place to many software shops, where typically the performance testing team exists in QA (or doesn’t exist at all until needed). We work very closely with development and QA as needed (and often, development has a dedicate set of engineers on performance work), and after doing performance work for the past few years, I’m convinced the best people for the job are the people that are skilled in development and systems administration (these are the DevOps people everyone is talking about). We’ve developed a lot of processes and tools to do our job and I think other people might find these ideas as useful as we have.

Testing Tools

At ITA we had to build many of the performance tools we use in-house because performance tools that could speak the airline industry protocols used by many interfaces to a reservations system (MATIP, for example) don’t exist. We also have a set of custom XML interfaces as well as a large collection of other interfaces that we need to send traffic to, or read instrumentation from. Our initial load generation script not only generated this traffic but also took care of all the other functions required to run an experiment, but this monolithic script didn’t scale. We ended up breaking up that script into agents that can be distributed across many machines, with each agent performing a single function needed for a load test. The agents are run by a master scheduling script which co-ordinates agent start and stop. In this way we can be sure that instrumentation requests aren’t blocking the load generation tools from working, and we can also schedule periodic events, report status, and do the hundred other things required for a full-system load test.

We gather a lot of metrics during a test, and for every major performance test we automatically generate a dashboard to help us drill into the results, a subset of which looks like this:



We gather this data from the system via SNMP, munin, per-component instrumentation, and other monitoring tools. We’ve been very happy with munin in particular as you can quickly add support for gathering new data types from remote hosts by writing simple Perl scripts.

Continuous Automated Testing

In any large system I’ve worked on the hardest problems are the integration problems, and a complex multi-component system such as a reservation system has these in spades. When we started doing performance testing, most of the system components weren’t finished and the interfaces between components kept changing. Furthermore, airline schedules, inventory and availability change rapidly over time.

There are countless factors that play into the performance and scalability of a complex system, and there are many philosophies around testing such systems, but in this post I want to discuss the technique that saves us the most time and money: continuous automated performance testing.

As discussed in the groundbreaking article Continuous Integration & Deployment In The Airline Industry [note: article not groundbreaking], ITA uses Hudson to build and test a complete reservation system on each check-in to the source tree (provided a build is not in progress). Hudson deploys the built software to a cluster of machines that are dedicated to continuous performance testing. After deployment, the load test master control software I discussed earlier runs a fixed scenario of load against the newly-deployed software. After a run completes, we store all of the results and instrumentation data in a database and update the graphs which trend test results over time. If our scripts find too much deviation in run time or throughput between this run and the previous runs, we set a status code so that Hudson can tell the people who’ve checked in since the last run that they may have broken the build.

Having a visual representation of performance issues in the continuous test environment has helped us tremendously because it both shortens the debug time and lets us see patterns of performance over time. Here’s an example of our throughput graph for a single component when someone breaks the build (click on the image for a larger version):

Along the X axis are revision numbers, and on our system the graph will show you the commit messages and the usernames of everyone who committed for each revision when you mouse over the data points.  We also make the graph very user-friendly with a “green lines are good, red lines are bad” design. Clicking on a data point will bring you to our internal source code repository browser.

Throughput, which is shown in the above graph, is only one side of the story. What about the run time of the system during the issue with revision 346626?

The multiple trend lines in this graph represent the timings reported by each instrumentation layer in this component. In the case above the graph is saying that the issue is not with CPU time consumed by the component (that trend is flat), but is instead with time spent in the database. This helps us quickly narrow down where to start looking for the cause of the performance problem. In this example, the developer fixed the issue quickly because the developer had notification of the failed test within an hour of check-in and had all the tools and data needed to isolate and resolve the problem.

At ITA we have environments we use to run large-scale performance tests, but the setup, execution and analysis for such tests are very expensive in terms of computers (many hundreds) and people (tens for what may be a few weeks for a single test). Those resources aren’t cheap, and the wins from automating performance testing finding a single bug save us more then the cost of the computers and people we invested in building this system — and we routinely see 2-3 performance regressions in a month.

It doesn’t take many computing resources to build a system like the one I’ve described. Here are some tips for doing this yourself:

  • Use real machines, as virtual machines suffer from the other guests on the same machine
  • Define a fixed workload you can replay via your load generation tool as this lets you establish a baseline to trend and alert from
  • Make sure your workload represents the majority of the types of load you’d see in production
  • Start simple and add metrics and instrumentation as you need them, not before
  • Don’t worry about fancy presentation of the results – it is more important that you start getting results
  • Publicize your testing system widely once it is up and running to help spread a philosophy of continuous testing in your organization

If you’ve got any questions I’d be happy to answer them in the comments and would love to hear about any systems like this that other people have built.

March 14, 2010 devops, integration, ITA, performance

Continuous Integration & Deployment In The Airline Industry

Jim Bird had interesting things to say about continuous deployment in a recent blog post on his site, Building Real Software. Jim concluded a blog entry that is otherwise full of useful insights with these dismissive paragraphs:

It’s bad enough to build insecure software out of ignorance. But by following continuous deployment, you are consciously choosing to push out software before it is ready, before you have done even the minimum to make sure it is safe. You are putting business agility and cost savings ahead of protecting the integrity or privacy of customer data.

Continuous deployment sounds cool. In a world where safety and reliability and privacy and security aren’t important, it would be fun to try. But like a lot of other developers, I live in the real world. And I need to build real software.

I commented on Jim’s blog that I work on building airline reservation systems at ITA Software and we try to do as much continuous deployment and continuous integration as possible. We are absolutely far from perfect in what we do, but accepting that is the first step to accepting the evolutionary model of software operations.

I think the use of continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) is orthogonal to issues around privacy, security and safety; if you don’t care about privacy, security and safety then you’re writing bad software, whether you choose to do CI/CD or not.

The reservation system ITA has built is a large, mission critical, multi-component, distributed, high-throughput transactional system. We run our software on Linux on commodity hardware, and the components are written in a variety of languages (Python, Java, C/C++, PL/SQL and LISP). Each component has to be highly available. The software needs to be secure; we process credits cards, flight information and sensitive passenger information. We don’t implement the systems that measure fuel or balance the plane, but as with any part of the airline industry, safety is very important.

So how could we possibly continuously deploy or integrate this software? We deploy an entire reservation system to our development environment at least three times a week. We run an automated set of integration tests against this complex system to verify a deployment. We build and package each component of the software automatically on every check-in to our source tree and automatically run a set of tests against this software. We build controls around privacy, security and safety throughout this system.

We trigger our build/package/deploy cycle using Hudson and custom scripts. The build process is unique per component but generally follows industry standard practices per language or technology, and the packaging is done with RPM. The interesting part, and the part that makes CI and CD work for us, is that we’ve built software and processes to represent the reservation system as a whole. We package manifests that represent, in Python’s Coil, the dependency matrix of the components and services that make up a working reservation system. The coil in the manifest file details all of the software RPMs, component configurations, service validation scripts to be run, monitoring configurations and more. Manifests themselves are revision controlled, and each manifest has an ID that is all that is needed to start a deployment. If we chose to, we could have a manifest built and deployed on every check in to our source tree (this isn’t feasible due to human and computer resource limitations, but is technically possible). Manifests can be promoted throughout the other environments as needed, so we can move from the automatically deployed and tested environments to customer facing or testing environments that may need to be static for long periods of time.

Our deployment framework can automatically control the state of our monitoring. The framework will suppress monitoring during deploys, check monitor states any time during a deployment, and enable monitoring at the end of the deployment. The framework also ties in to our ticketing system by automatically opening a ticket for every deploy and documenting deploy state in the ticket. If a deployment fails, we can track the resolution directly in the ticket that the tools opened for the deploy. The deployment framework automatically resolves the ticket it opened after a successful deploy.

We also use service command and control software that we’ve built in house (similar to ControlTier) to make sure the services are in the correct state. We wrote our own service management framework because at the time we started this project there wasn’t existing software that met our particular needs; now there are many excellent solutions.  Our deployment framework, which is driven by the manifest described above, has the ability to work with our service management framework so we can verify the state of our components as part of our deployment.

One of the differences between our CI/CD process and the process at Flickr or Facebook is that our customers, both internal and external, want predictable change and often dictate our release cycles. Perhaps this is what Jim means by CI/CD putting customers at risk, because some customers don’t want continuous updates to their software. Despite this, we still do CI/CD internally at ITA because failing a customer deploy can mean an airplane doesn’t fly. I’m not interested in learning how to deploy a reservation system the day of a production deployment with those kinds of stakes.

The big advantage of automating our deployments as much as possible and doing as many deploys as possible is the same in the airline industry as it is at any company: we deploy a lot so we know our deploys work. Continuous deployment is nothing more than another step in assuring that you are minimizing errors throughout your service. Not doing CI/CD is like not doing QA.

I’ve got more stories about the successes (and many, many struggles) of CI/CD at ITA and they’ve been kind enough to give me permission to post some of the stories here (we do some really cool things in performance testing that I’m excited to write about), so please check back often for more post about CI/CD at ITA.

March 4, 2010 deployment, devops, integration, ITA