Tag Archives: Consul

Notes from OSCON Container Podcast: Dan Berg, Phil Estes and Rob Hirschfeld

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At OSCON, I had the pleasure of doing a IBM Dojo Podcast with some deep experts in the container and data center space: Dan Berg (@DanCBerg) and Phil Estes (@estesp).

ibm-dojo-podcast-show-art-16x9-150x150We dove into a discussion around significant trends in the container space, how open technology relates to containers and looked toward the technology’s future. We also previewed next month’s DockerCon, which is set for June 19-21 in Seattle.

Highlights!  We think containers will be considered MORE SECURE next year and also have some comments about the linguistic shift from Docker to CONTAINERS.”

Here are my notes from the recording with time stamps if you want to skip ahead:

  • 00:35 – What are the trends in Containers?
    • Rob: We are still figuring out how to make them work in terms of networking & storage
    • Dan: There are still a lot of stateful work moving into containers that need storage
    • Phil: We need to use open standards to help customers navigate options
  • 2:45 – Are the changes keeping people from moving forward?
    • Phil: Not if you start with the right guidelines and architecture
    • Dan: It’s OK to pick one and keep going because you need to build expertise
    • Rob: RackN experience changed Digital Rebar to microservices was an iterative experience
  • 5:00 Dan likes that there is so much experimentation that’s forcing us to talk about how applications are engineered
  • 5:45  Rob points out that we got 5 minutes in without saying “Docker”
    • There are a lot of orchestration choices but there’s confusion between Docker and the container ecosystem.
  • 7:00 We’re at OSCON, how far has the technology come in being open?
    • Phil thinks that open container initiative (OCI) is helping bring a lot of players to the field.
    • Dan likes that IBM is experimenting in community and drive interactions between projects.
    • Rob is not sure that we need to get everyone on the same page: open source allows people to pursue their own path.
  • 10:50 We have to figure out how to compensate companies & individuals for their work
    • Dan: if you’ve got any worthwhile product, you’ve got some open source component of it.  There are various ways to profit around that.
  • 13:00 What are we going to be talking about this time next year?
    • Rob (joking) we’ll say containers are old and microkernels are great!
    • Rob wants to be talking about operations but knows that it’s never interesting
    • Phil moving containers way from root access into more secure operations
    • Dan believes that we’ll start to consider containers as more secure than what we have today.  <- Rob strongly agrees!
  • 17:20 What is the impact of Containers on Ops?  Aka DevOps
    • Dan said “Impact is HUGE!”  > Developers are going to get Ops & Capabilities for free
    • Rob brings up impact of Containers on DevOps – the discussion has really gone underground
  • 19:30 Role of Service Registration (Consul & Etcd)
    • Life cycle management of Containers has really changed (Dan)
    • Rob brings up the importance of Service Registration in container management
  • 20:30 2016.Dockercon Docket- what are you expecting?
    • Phil is speaking there on the contribute track & OCI.
    • Rob is doing the hallway track and looking to talk about the “underlay” ops and the competitive space around Docker and Container.
    • Dan will be talking to customers and watching how the community is evolving and experimenting
    • Rob & Dan will be at Open Cloud Technology Summit, June 22 in Seattle

 

exploring Docker Swarm on Bare Metal for raw performance and ops simplicity

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As part of our exploration of containers on metal, the RackN team has created a workload on top of OpenCrowbar as the foundation for a Docker Swarm on bare metal cluster.  This provides a second more integrated and automated path to Docker Clusters than the Docker Machine driver we posted last month.

It’s really pretty simple: The workload does the work to deliver an integrated physical system (Centos 7.1 right now) that has Docker installed and running.  Then we build a Consul cluster to track the to-be-created Swarm.  As new nodes are added into the cluster, they register into Consul and then get added into the Docker Swarm cluster.  If you reset or repurpose a node, Swarm will automatically time out of the missing node so scaling up and down is pretty seamless.

When building the cluster, you have the option to pick which machines are masters for the swarm.  Once the cluster is built, you just use the Docker CLI’s -H option against the chosen master node on the configured port (defaults to port 2475).

This work is intended as a foundation for more complex Swarm and/or non-Docker Container Orchestration deployments.  Future additions include allowing multiple network and remote storage options.

You don’t need metal to run a quick test of this capability.  You can test drive RackN OpenCrowbar using virtual machines and then expand to the full metal experience when you are ready.

Contact info@rackn.com for access to the Docker Swarm trial.   For now, we’re managing the subscriber base for the workload.  OpenCrowbar is a pre-req and ungated.  We’re excited to give access to the code – just ask.

Want CI Consul Love? OK! Run Consul in Travis-CI [example scripts]

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If you are designing an application that uses microservice registration AND continuous integration then this post is for you!  If not, get with the program, you are a fossil.

Inside The EngineSunday night, I posted about the Erlang Consul client I wrote for our Behavior Driven Development (BDD) testing infrastructure.  That exposed a need to run a Consul service in the OpenCrowbar Travis-CI build automation that validates all of our pull requests.  Basically, Travis spins up the full OpenCrowbar API and workers (we call it the annealer) which in turn registers services in Consul.

NOTE: This is pseudo instructions.  In the actual code (here too), I created a script to install consul but this is more illustrative of the changes you need to make in your .travis.yml file.

In the first snippet, we download and unzip consul.  It’s in GO so that’s about all we need for an install.  I added a version check for logging validation.

before_script:
  - wget 'https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/consul/0.4.1_linux_amd64.zip'
  - unzip "0.4.1_linux_amd64.zip"
  - ./consul --version

In the second step, we setup the consul service and register it to itself in the background.  That allows the other services to access it.

script: 
  - ../consul agent -server -bootstrap-expect 1 -data-dir /tmp/consul &

After that, the BDD infrastructure can register the fake services that we expect (I created an erlang consul:reg_serv(“name”) routine that makes this super easy).  Once the services are registered, OpenCrowbar will check for the services and continue without trying to instantiate them (which it cannot do in Travis).

Here’s the pull request with the changes.

Erlang Consul Client

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OpenCrowbar has been using Consul more and more deeply.  We’ve reached the point where we must register services on Consul to pass automated tests.

Consequently, I had to write a little Consul client in Erlang.

The client is very basic, but it seems to perform all of the required functions.  It relies on some other libraries in OpenCrowbar’s BDD but they are relatively self-contained.  Pulls welcome if you’d like to help build this out.

Here’s the code and the API reference.   Check in OpenCrowbar/BDD for latest updates and dependencies.