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Atman has provided Contrust with a large cloud environment for heavy testing

Contrust is a Dutch IT start-up that designs and develops business software and makes it available in the cloud in the SaaS model. The company also created the Clouding platform – a tool for automated management of an IT environment dispersed in several clouds – and is looking for partners offering stable cloud environments. It became interested in Atman Cloud – a VPC (virtual private cloud) IaaS service, which underwent thorough revitalization in the second half of 2017: change of architecture, network upgrade to 100 GbE, and increase of its size – both the number of compute nodes and storage space data. Last December, the modified platform was made available to clients, and since then the group of active service users has been expanding regularly.

“In the process of stabilizing the platform, we performed numerous tests, both internal and FUT, which gave us the confidence of a perfectly prepared product. That’s why when, after the market launch of the product, Contrust offered us a challenge – heavy tests using management automation tools – we accepted it without hesitation. We assessed this as a classic win-win arrangement. Contrust – an expert in management automation, working with huge global clouds – wanted to expand its experience with a local cloud based on the OpenStack ecosystem. At Atman, we decided to make a hard user environment available at an early stage of the revitalized service’s life, counting on constructive, valuable feedback,” emphasizes Jakub Bryła, Product Manager responsible for the Atman Cloud revitalization process.

We dedicated several days to joint tests. Within such a relatively complex undertaking, the most effort was consumed by the preparatory activities – correct setting of limits, quotas, specific configurations which Atman does not provide for as a predefined standard, and which were necessary for Contrust to run automated tests. After several checks of the correctness of communication, the tests started.

“Atman has separated for us a standard, virtual server environment, such as they provide to their clients. With one difference – an above-average amount of resources was allocated to our virtual server room. We decided to test the system consisting of 800 virtual servers, several private networks together with the predefined, shared external network, and several load balancers – from the level of our product, i.e. Clouding. Moreover, we agreed with Atman that we will do a sensitivity analysis to test a wider spectrum of potential behaviors, i.e. we will repeat a series of several tests for different environmental sizes, starting with a 20-server environment and ending with 800 virtual machines,” explains Jarosław Świerad, DevOps Solutions Architect, co-founder of Contrust.

Conclusions from tests

• During stress tests Atman Cloud reacts similarly to other clouds, including global ones – CPU performance for virtual machines of the same type will work starts to vary, but the differences are not big and Atman Cloud keeps up with global benchmarks.
• With a higher load of parallel queries, the API behaves in the expected manner, for example when flooding, it communicates errors to the client. Extended API response times, observed under heavy stress, do not affect the correctness of the commands executed or Infrastructure as a Code processes.
• Even when heavily loaded with many operations on a large number of objects, the web panel’s for virtual environment administration fully performed its tasks and did not communicate unwanted statuses or errors, and a slight decrease in the speed of the panel’s operation had no impact on the user experience.
• The platform behaves predictably and very stably.

“If a client who is looking for a cloud in Poland came to me today, I would certainly recommend the Atman solution with a clear conscience. Naturally, managed from the level of Clouding :)” sums up Jarosław Świerad.