Running Rally with Docker#
Rally is available as a Docker image.
Limitations#
The following Rally functionality isn’t supported when using the Docker image:
Distributing the load test driver to apply load from multiple machines.
Using other pipelines apart from
benchmark-only.
Quickstart#
You can test the Rally Docker image by first issuing a simple command to list the available tracks:
$ docker run elastic/rally list tracks
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Available tracks:
Name Description Documents Compressed Size Uncompressed Size Default Challenge All Challenges
------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ------------------- ----------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eql EQL benchmarks based on endgame index of SIEM demo cluster 60,782,211 4.5 GB 109.2 GB default default
eventdata This benchmark indexes HTTP access logs generated based sample logs from the elastic.co website using the generator available in https://github.com/elastic/rally-eventdata-track 20,000,000 756.0 MB 15.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,transform
geonames POIs from Geonames 11,396,503 252.9 MB 3.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts,append-fast-with-conflicts,significant-text
geopoint Point coordinates from PlanetOSM 60,844,404 482.1 MB 2.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-fast-with-conflicts
geopointshape Point coordinates from PlanetOSM indexed as geoshapes 60,844,404 470.8 MB 2.6 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-fast-with-conflicts
geoshape Shapes from PlanetOSM 60,523,283 13.4 GB 45.4 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts
http_logs HTTP server log data 247,249,096 1.2 GB 31.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,runtime-fields,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts,append-index-only-with-ingest-pipeline,update,append-no-conflicts-index-reindex-only
metricbeat Metricbeat data 1,079,600 87.7 MB 1.2 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts
nested StackOverflow Q&A stored as nested docs 11,203,029 663.3 MB 3.4 GB nested-search-challenge nested-search-challenge,index-only
noaa Global daily weather measurements from NOAA 33,659,481 949.4 MB 9.0 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,top_metrics,aggs
nyc_taxis Taxi rides in New York in 2015 165,346,692 4.5 GB 74.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts-index-only,update,append-ml,date-histogram,indexing-querying
percolator Percolator benchmark based on AOL queries 2,000,000 121.1 kB 104.9 MB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts
pmc Full text benchmark with academic papers from PMC 574,199 5.5 GB 21.7 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts,append-fast-with-conflicts,indexing-querying
so Indexing benchmark using up to questions and answers from StackOverflow 36,062,278 8.9 GB 33.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts
-------------------------------
[INFO] SUCCESS (took 3 seconds)
-------------------------------
As a next step, we assume that Elasticsearch is running on es01:9200 and is accessible from the host where you are running the Rally Docker image.
Run the nyc_taxis track in test-mode using:
$ docker run elastic/rally race --track=nyc_taxis --test-mode --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=es01:9200
Note
We didn’t need to explicitly specify esrally as we’d normally do in a normal CLI invocation; the entrypoint in the Docker image does this automatically.
Now you are able to use all regular Rally commands, bearing in mind the aforementioned limitations.
Configuration#
The Docker image ships with a default configuration file under /rally/.rally/rally.ini.
To customize Rally you can create your own rally.ini and bind mount it using:
docker run -v /home/<myuser>/custom_rally.ini:/rally/.rally/rally.ini elastic/rally ...
As a quality of life improvement, the rally.ini and logging.json files can use ${CONFIG_DIR} in rally.ini and ${LOG_PATH} in logging.json in order to
make the files more portable. For example:
In
rally.ini, you can setroot.dir = ${CONFIG_DIR}/benchmarksinstead of hard-coding the path as/rally/.rally/benchmarksIn
logging.json, you can set"filename": "${LOG_PATH}/rally.log"instead of hard-coding the path as"filename": "/rally/.rally/logs/rally.log"
These files can then be used with the docker image, with the entire local ~/.rally directory mounted as follows:
docker run -v type=bind,source=$HOME/.rally,target=/rally/.rally elastic/rally ...
Persistence#
It is highly recommended to use a local bind mount (or a named volume) for the directory /rally/.rally in the container.
This will ensure you have persistence across invocations and any tracks downloaded and extracted can be reused, reducing the startup time.
You need to ensure the UID is 1000 (or GID is 0 especially in OpenShift) so that Rally can write to the bind-mounted directory.
If your local bind mount doesn’t contain a rally.ini the container will create one for you during the first run.
Example:
mkdir myrally
sudo chgrp 0 myrally
# First run will also generate the rally.ini
docker run --rm -v $PWD/myrally:/rally/.rally elastic/rally race --track=nyc_taxis --test-mode --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=es01:9200
...
# inspect results
$ tree myrally/benchmarks/races/
myrally/benchmarks/races/
└── 1d81930a-4ebe-4640-a09b-3055174bce43
└── race.json
1 directory, 1 file
In case you forgot to bind mount a directory, the Rally Docker image will create an anonymous volume for /rally/.rally to ensure logs and results get persisted even after the container has terminated.
For example, after executing our earlier quickstart example docker run elastic/rally race --track=nyc_taxis --test-mode --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=es01:9200, docker volume ls shows a volume:
$ docker volume ls
DRIVER VOLUME NAME
local 96256462c3a1f61120443e6d69d9cb0091b28a02234318bdabc52b6801972199
To further examine the contents we can bind mount it from another image e.g.:
$ docker run --rm -i -v=96256462c3a1f61120443e6d69d9cb0091b28a02234318bdabc52b6801972199:/rallyvolume -ti python:3.11.11-slim-bullseye /bin/bash
root@9a7dd7b3d8df:/# cd /rallyvolume/
root@9a7dd7b3d8df:/rallyvolume# ls
root@9a7dd7b3d8df:/rallyvolume/.rally# ls
benchmarks logging.json logs rally.ini
# head -4 benchmarks/races/1d81930a-4ebe-4640-a09b-3055174bce43/race.json
{
"rally-version": "2.11.1.dev0",
"environment": "local",
"race-id": "1d81930a-4ebe-4640-a09b-3055174bce43",
Specifics about the image#
Rally runs as user 1000 and its files are installed with uid:gid 1000:0 (to support OpenShift arbitrary user IDs).
Extending the Docker image#
You can also create your own customized Docker image on top of the existing one. The example below shows how to get started:
FROM elastic/rally:2.11.1.dev0 COPY --chown=1000:0 rally.ini /rally/.rally/
You can then build and test the image with:
docker build --tag=custom-rally .
docker run -ti custom-rally list tracks