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Load Tests for Vault

This project aims to generate realistic load against Vault (and, by extension, Consul) by exercising various secrets engines and auth methods.

Prerequisites

You need to have Vault running, obviously, and the vault must be unsealed before starting the test.

The code in this repo requires Python3.6.

If you want to test dynamic secret generation via the database backends (MySQL, MongoDB), you must have those database engines running during the test. You will need to set up environment variables with the connection strings in the appropriate formats, for example:

export MONGODB_URL="mongodb://localhost:27017/admin"
export MYSQL_URL="root:password@tcp(127.0.0.1:3306)/mysql"

If you don't have the databases available, remove the database locusts from the locustfile.

Setup

  1. Clone this repo.
  2. pip install -r requirements.txt.
  3. Run the prepare.py script to populate Vault with random secrets.
  4. Run locust to start a test.

Preparing Vault for the test

The prepare.py script fills Vault with a bunch of random secrets that are then queried during the test. The paths are random strings of hex characters with two levels, like this:

fd/410a7adef1cd7ce6fbfaebc3b4eb49b9
e3/c0a0bafa86e81e2b4b8775f9b9dacfcf
fd/8f4293e2fd64cadda5f6cb936ff054e4

Each secret consists of a single key whose value is a string of random bytes. The length of the string is controlled by the --secret-size parameter (default: 1024 bytes), and the number of secrets created is controlled by the --num-secrets parameter (default: 1000).

The script assumes that the target Vault instance lives at http://localhost:8200. If this is not correct, use the --host or -h option to specify the correct URL.

The final argument to prepare.py must be a Vault token for authentication. The token can instead be passed in the environment variable VAULT_TOKEN if you prefer.

Example usage:

VAULT_TOKEN="72e7ff6e-8f44-5414-75a8-99d308649954" ./prepare.py --num-secrets=1000000 --host="http://localhost:8200"

Running the test

Run the locust command to start an interactive web interface at http://localhost:8089. If you needed to use the --host parameter above, make sure you use it here too. The test will not start until you open the web page and click the Start Swarming button.

If you'd prefer to run the test non-interactively, you can specify additional command-line parameters along with --no-web.

For example, to start a test with 25 locusts (25 simulated users), starting 5 per second until all 25 are running:

locust -H http://localhost:8200 -c 25 -r 5 --no-web

testdata.json

Running the ./prepare.py script creates a testdata.json file on the host it is run from.

This file contains the vault token used to run the pre-fill vault with secrets, so treat that file as secret.

If you plan to run the load test from multiple hosts, you will need to copy the testdata.json file to those hosts before running the load test in order for it to work correctly.

What the test does

The test simulates several different patterns of access:

  1. Reading, writing, and listing secrets with the KV engine.
  2. Generating certificates from the PKI engine.
  3. Encrypting data via the Transit engine.
  4. Generating dynamic secrets from the MySQL, MongoDB, and TOTP engines.
  5. Authenticating via username/password and AppRole.

The tests are weighted so that 60% of the users are interacting with the KV engine, 20% with the PKI engine, and 20% with the Transit engine. These weights can be adjusted by changing the weight parameter in each of the files in the locusts folder.

Future enhancements

  • Authentication
  • Dynamic secret generation
  • Reports and analysis?