Flood terminology

Defining projects, streams, floods, grids, nodes, and virtual user hours

Projects, streams, and floods

As you progress with Flood, you may have multiple tests that you need to keep organized. Perhaps you've seen us refer to projects, streams and floods. All these words are buckets used to organize your tests. They don't really have a purpose other than to keep your Flood account easy to manage and to group related items together.

You can really use these buckets any way you want and group your tests in the way that makes the most sense to you. However, below is an explanation of the structure we recommend for most teams.

Projects > Streams > Floods

Projects correspond to real-life projects or releases. Let's say your project is called Flood Web Store. This project will contain all the different types of tests you have run that web store.

Streams are a little bit like test scenarios under projects. One stream under the project might be Login and Buy Shirt. Another stream might be Browse, where the user does not log in.

Floods are specific tests that fall under streams. A flood is an execution of a test scenario. Each time you run a test, that's a flood.

You can have several floods in the same stream, several streams in the same project and several projects in the same account.

Grids and nodes

Nodes are the machines that your flood runs on. Sometimes these are called load generators. They can be physical machines running on-premises or in your data center, but they can also be virtual machines that are provisioned for you on the cloud. Each Flood node has a unique IP address and runs anywhere from 1 to 1,000 virtual users, depending on the tool you're using.

A grid is a collection of nodes, and on Flood a grid can contain anywhere from 1 to 90 nodes. All nodes on a grid are in the same geographical region.

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