Introduction
============

What is the reason for writing this?
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Cloud computing is a complex and evolving process. Its definition can be as
simple as:

    **a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled
    capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies**
    (*IT Glossary: Cloud Computing*)

At the same time it may require a separate article to explain what cloud
computing is. There are several characteristics which can describe the system,
called *cloud*: on **demand**, **scale**, **elasticity**, and **as a Service**.
All these characteristics are areas of interest for scale and performance
testing.

All documentation pieces you'll find here are the summary of knowledge and
experience gained by various people from different companies, that aims to
share the ideas of how we can evaluate, analyse and test OpenStack cloud
performance, including the very infrastructure basics.

As a community we want this knowledge to become publicly available to allow
OpenStack developers, QA engineers and operators to have unified way for their
projects and products evaluation and best recipes for doing this.

Who will be interested in this?
-------------------------------

Cloud operators, software and quality assurance engineers and any person who
takes active part in either OpenStack development or its usage.

Who is contributing to this guide?
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Short answer: OpenStack community.

A bit longer answer: performance engineers from various companies, cloud
operators, OpenStack projects developers, etc. We all are part of
**Performance Team**. Therefore you can find here
test plans and methodologies, that were written keeping in mind all these
groups of people, their interest and experience.