Yahoo Open Sources Daytona Testing Framework

Yahoo is to help developers test their applications with Daytona, an open-source framework for automated performance testing and analysis.

The framework is ‘application-agnostic’ and will allow for performance testing and analysis with ‘repeatable test execution, standardised reporting, and built-in profiling support’, coupled with a simple user interface.’

Yahoo says that Daytona was built with the intention of publishing it as open source, and the development comes just months after years of bad publicly for the Internet giant. In March Yahoo was slammed by Germany’s cyber agency for not cooperating with an investigation into last year’s highly damaging data breach.

Testing Framework

Daytona is now available on GitHub and gives developers and organisations the ability to ‘build a customised test harness in a single, unified framework to test and analyse the performance of any application.’

“You’ll get easy repeatability, consistent reporting, and the ability to capture trends,” said Sapan Panigrahi, Infrastructure Leader at Yahoo. “Daytona’s UI accepts a performance testing script that can run on a command line. This includes websites, databases, networks, or any workload you need to test and tune for performance. You can submit tests to the scheduler queue from the Daytona UI or from your CI/CD tool.”

Daytona can also be deployed as a hosted service in an on-premise environment or on the public cloud.

Yahoo feels that Daytona difference from other testing frameworks is that it has the ability to aggregate and present essential aspects of application, system, and hardware performance metrics with a simple and unified user interface.

Panigrahi said that Daytona allows for load testing tools to be integrated under a single framework and aggregate test results in one common central repository.

“We are gaining insight into the performance characteristics of many of our applications on a continuous basis,” said Panigrahi. “These insights help us optimise our applications which results in better utilisation of our hardware resources and helps improve user experience by reducing the latency to serve end-user requests.”

Daytona architecture is made of a centralized scheduler, a distributed set of agents running on SUTs (systems under test), a MySQL database to store all metadata for tests, and a PHP-based user interface.

Torrid Time

It has been a torrid few years for the beleaguered internet firm.

In February it issued a fresh warning to users about potential malicious activity on its accounts between 2015 and 2016, shortly before revealing that hackers had accessed around 32 million accounts using forged cookies over the last two years.

And the fallout from these security breaches severely impacted its takeover offer from Verizon, with the telecommunications firm shaving $350 million (£280m) off the deal as a direct result of the security revelations.

In January Yahoo announced that it will be renamed to Altaba Inc. after the deal is complete, with a number of directors, including CEO Marissa Mayer, set to step down from the board.

Quiz: Do you know all about security in 2016?