Integrating your AWS and RedLine13 accounts

One of the key benefits of using RedLine13 is the ability to abstract away the management of individual load agents. This is accomplished by coupling with AWS and enabling our service to spin up, manage, and ultimately terminate load agents without you ever having to worry about any of those details. In this blog post, we will be guiding you through this one-time process of integrating your AWS account with your RedLine13 account.

To get started, log into your account and from the “AWS Keys” menu, select the “AWS Keys” option:

We will be creating a new AWS key pair, and the first step in setting that up is to give our key pair a name. Here we have chosen “Load Testing AWS Account”:

The preferred integration method is using an “AWS Account Role” and that is the method which will be explained here. The next step involves setting up an IAM role within your AWS account. For that we will want to click on the blue “Toggle Instructions” button, which will display a number of required steps:

You will want to copy the JSON policy under Step 3. Within your AWS console, navigate to “IAM” under “Security, Identity, & Compliance”:

From the “Policy” link on the left side, select the blue “Create policy” button:

Select the “JSON” tab and paste the policy copied from Step 3 found under the RedLine13 Key Pairs instructions.

You may click through to the final step of the policy creation, where you will be prompted to give your new IAM policy a descriptive name. We suggest something like “RedLine13_Access”, but you may choose any policy name that is meaningful to you:

Back on the main IAM screen, from the “Roles” link on the left side select the blue “Create role” button:

Select the “Another AWS Account” option on the subsequent screen, and enter the RedLine13 account ID 635144173025:

You will also want to check the “Require external ID” checkbox, and when prompted enter the unique external ID number found on the RedLine13 Key Pairs page (also listed with Step 9 of the key pair instructions):

On the following page, you will have the opportunity to attach the policy created above. You can search for the policy by typing in part of the meaningful name you gave it earlier. To attach the policy, ensure that it is checked in the list below:

From here you may click through to the final page of the role set-up, where you will be required to give a name to your role.  We recommend something along the lines of “RedLine13_Access”, however you can choose any name that is meaningful to you or your organization:

Once you have created this role, you will be brought back to the AWS Roles page. Select your role by clicking on it, and find the “Role ARN”. This can be copied to the clipboard by clicking on the “copy” icon next to the ARN string:

This is to be pasted into the “AWS Role ARN” text box back in the RedLine13 “Key Pairs” page. Once you have pasted the ARN here, click the blue “Add Key Pair” button:

At this point AWS integration should be complete. The newly added key pair will appear in the “Key Pairs” listing (along with a message that adding the key pair has occurred) which will verify that all of the above steps have been completed successfully:

Returning to the Test Dashboard and clicking on “Start a New Test”, the last step is to verify that RedLine13 has all of the necessary permissions set up properly to spin up load agent EC2 instances in AWS and execute tests. For that we recommend starting a JMeter test and adding at least one load agent.

We hope that you find the simplicity and abstraction of AWS management as a useful boost to your cloud-based JMeter load testing. You may also consider some of the more advanced features our Basic and Premium plans offer, which can be evaluated with a free trial.