Getting to know the components

Grids

A grid is a group of flood agents running on any type of computer (for example a laptop or a cloud-managed VM instance).

Agents with the same name are part of the same grid

If you're working on a single machine (your laptop for example) you can let flood-agent pick a random name like submerged-dolphin

Say you'd like to run a larger grid. You could run flood-agent on a second machine

flood-agent --grid submerged-dolphin

However, in this case it'd just be easier to start both agents with a grid name of your choosing:

# ec2 instance 1
aws-ec2-1 $ ./flood-agent --name aws-grid-1
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# ec2 instance 2
aws-ec2-2 $ ./flood-agent --name aws-grid-1

Machines running in the same Grid should be homogeneous (though it isn't mandatory)

For example, using a laptop on home a broadband connection and an extra-large VM instance located in a cloud provider's datacenter as part of the same grid would make test results difficult to interpret and trust.

Floods

A flood is an instance of a load test plan. To run a load test, a flood is scheduled onto one or more grids.

So, when you run a flood, it ends up running on all the flood-agent instances running within the grids you have organised and selected:

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