Ruhtest

Ruhtest is an open-source framework for automated reliability and performance testing of distributed systems. It provides a language-agnostic way to define test scenarios, orchestrate distributed test runs, collect metrics, and reproduce results across environments.

The project originated in the late 2010s as a collaboration among developers seeking to unify load testing, chaos engineering, and resilience validation. It is maintained on a public repository and emphasizes openness, extensibility, and reproducibility.

Architectural overview: a central orchestrator coordinates worker agents deployed on target hosts or containers. Tests are defined in YAML or JSON, with steps, conditions, and assertions. The system supports multiple transport protocols (HTTP, gRPC, and message queues) and can run in Kubernetes, on-premises, or locally. The architecture is designed to be modular, allowing new protocols and reporters to be added via plugins.

Key features include scenario scripting, parallel execution, pluggable reporters, and built-in dashboards. It collects latency, error rates, throughput, and resource usage, exposing results as JSON and allowing integration with CI/CD pipelines. It also supports plugin modules for fault injection and custom metrics.

Reception and usage: ruhtest has a growing user base in cloud-native and fintech deployments, where reliability testing and performance benchmarking are critical. It competes with tools such as JMeter and Locust but emphasizes distributed orchestration and reproducibility.