Kata lightweight VMs for OpenAFS scalability testing
Presenters:
- Pravin Junnarkar, IBM
- Yadavendra Yadav, IBM
- Kailas Zadbuke, IBM
- Todd DeSantis, IBM
The traditional performance/scalability testing with the OpenAFS module has the requirement of multiple Bare-metal systems or virtual machines which is cost-intensive and the setup itself is a laborious process. An alternative to this is a widely used containerization approach but their core capability of sharing the host kernel is actually the limitation with OpenAFS since each OpenAFS client has to work with its own kernel module.
To overcome these challenges, we investigated Kata Containers. Kata provides a standard implementation of lightweight virtual machines (VMs) that feels and performs like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.
The session highlights how the automated OpenAFS testing framework is effectively using Docker and Kata to provide a reusable and easily reproducible infrastructure for faster scalability/performance testing.