First 10 long running transactions - kubernetes

I have a fairly small cluster of 6 nodes, 3 client, and 3 server nodes. Important configurations,
storeKeepBinary = true,
cacheMode = Partitioned (some caches's about 5-8, out of 25 have this as TRANSACTIONAL)
AtomicityMode = Atomic
backups = 1
readFromBackups = false
no persistence
When I run the app for some load/performance test on-prem on 2 large boxes, 3 clients on one box, and 3 servers on another box, all within docker containers, I get a decent performance.
However, when I move them over to AWS and run them in EKS, the only change I make is to change the cluster discovery from standard TCP (default) to Kubernetes-based discovery and run the same test.
But now the performance is very bad, I keep getting,
WARN [sys-#145%test%] - [org.apache.ignite] First 10 long-running transactions [total=3]
Here the transactions are running more than a min long.
In other cases, I am getting,
WARN [sys-#196%test-2%] - [org.apache.ignite] First 10 long-running cache futures [total=1]
Here the associated future has been running for > 3 min.
Most of the places 'google search' has taken me, talks flaky/inconsistent n/w as the cause.
The app and the test seem to be ok since on a local on-prem this works just fine and the performance is decent as well.
Wanted to check if others have faced this or when running on Kubernetes in the public cloud something else needs to be done. Like somewhere I read nodes need to be pinned to the host in a cloud/virtual environment, but it's not mandatory.
TIA

Related

is RabbitMQ queueing system unnecessary in a Kubernetes cluster?

I have just been certified CKAD (Kubernetes Application Developer) by The Linux Foundation.
And from now on I am wondering : is RabbitMQ queueing system unnecessary in a Kubernetes cluster ?
We use workers with queueing system in order to avoid http 30 seconds timeout : let's say for example we have a microservice which generates big pdf documents in average of 50 seconds each and you have 20 documents to generate right now, the classical schema would be to make a worker which will queue each documents one by one (this is the case for the company I have been working for lately)
But in a Kubernetes cluster by default there is no timeout for http request going inside the cluster. You can wait 1000 seconds without any issue (20 documents * 50 seconds = 1000 seconds)
With this last point, is it enought to say that RabbitMQ queueing system (via the amqplib module) is unuseful in a Kubernetes cluster ? moreover Kubernetes manages so well load balancing on each of your microservice replicas...
But in a Kubernetes cluster by default there is no timeout for http request going inside the cluster.
Not sure where you got that idea. Depending on your config there might be no timeouts at the proxy level but there's still client and server timeouts to consider. Kubernetes doesn't change what you deploy, just how you deploy it. There's certainly other options than RabbitMQ specifically, and other system architectures you could consider, but "queue workers" is still a very common pattern and likely will be forever even as the tech around it changes.

Elastic Cloud APM Server - Queue is full

I have many Java microservices running in a Kubernetes Cluster. All of them are APM agents sending data to an APM server in our Elastic Cloud Cluster.
Everything was working fine but suddenly every microservice received the error below showed in the logs.
I tried to restart the cluster, increase the hardware power and I tried to follow the hints but no success.
Obs: The disk is almost empty and the memory usage is ok.
Everything is in 7.5.2 version
I deleted all the indexes related to APM and everything worked after some minutes.
for better performance u can fine tune these fields in apm-server.yml file
internal queue size increase queue.mem.events=output.elasticsearch.worker * output.elasticsearch.bulk_max_size
default is 4096
output.elasticsearch.worker (increase) default is 1
output.elasticsearch.bulk_max_size (increase) default is 50 very less
Example : for my use case i have used following stats for 2 apm-server nodes and 3 es nodes (1 master 2 data nodes )
queue.mem.events=40000
output.elasticsearch.worker=4
output.elasticsearch.bulk_max_size=10000

Using MySQL Workbench causes errors on Galera Cluster

I have a 5 cluster MariaDB/Galera cluster running in production environment.
I also have a monitor which checks every 20 seconds for cluster size changes. One of our other engineers has been running queries using MySQL Workbench, and when that application is running, I start seeing alerts coming from my monitor where cluster size is 1. It does recover in a few seconds back to the correct size of 5, however it's disconcerting that this client app is causing issues on the cluster. I've requested everyone on our team to not use this app... however I wonder if anyone else has seen this, or knows what it is doing to the cluster.

MongoDB sharding: mongos and configuration servers together?

We want to create a MongoDB shard (v. 2.4). The official documentation recommends to have 3 config servers.
However, the policies of our company won't allow us to get 3 extra servers for this purpose. Since we have already 3 application servers (1 web node, 2 process nodes) we are considering to put the configuration servers in the same application servers, with the mongos. Availability is not critical for us.
What do you think about this configuration? Can we face some problem or is it discouraged for some reason?
Given that Availability is not critical for your use case, I would say it should be fine to place the config servers in the same application servers and mongos.
If one of the process nodes is down, you will lose: 1 x mongos, 1 application server and 1 config server. During this down time, the other two config servers will be read-only , which means there won't be balancing of shards, modification to cluster config etc. Although your other two mongos should still be operational (CRUD wise). If your web-node is down, then you have a bigger problem to deal with.
If two of the nodes are down (2 process nodes, or 1 web server and process node), again, you would have bigger problem to deal with. i.e. Your applications are probably not going to work anyway.
Having said that, please consider the capacity of these nodes to be able to handle a mongos, an application server and a config server. i.e. CPU, RAM, network connections, etc.
I would recommend to test the deployment architecture in a development/staging cluster first under your typical workload and use case.
Also see Sharded Cluster High Availability for more info.
Lastly, I would recommend to check out MongoDB v3.2 which is the current stable release. The config servers in v3.2 are modelled as a replica set, see Sharded Cluster config servers for more info.

Mongodb cluster with aws cloud formation and auto scaling

I've been investigating creating my own mongodb cluster in AWS. Aws mongodb template provides some good starting points. However, it doesn't cover auto scaling or when a node goes down. For example, if I have 1 primary and 2 secondary nodes. And the primary goes down and auto scaling kicks in. How would I add the newly launched mongodb instance to the replica set?
If you look at the template, it uses an init.sh script to check if the node being launched is a primary node and waits for all other nodes to exist and creates a replica set with thier ip addresses on the primary. When the Replica set is configured initailly, all the nodes already exist.
Not only that, but my node app uses mongoose. Part of the database connection allows you to specify multiple nodes. How would I keep track of what's currently up and running (I guess I could use DynamoDB but not sure).
What's the usual flow if an instance goes down? Do people generally manually re-configure clusters if this happens?
Any thoughts? Thanks.
This is a very good question and I went through this very painful journey myself recently. I am writing a fairly extensive answer here in the hope that some of these thoughts of running a MongoDB cluster via CloudFormation are useful to others.
I'm assuming that you're creating a MongoDB production cluster as follows: -
3 config servers (micros/smalls instances can work here)
At least 1 shard consisting of e.g. 2 (primary & secondary) shard instances (minimum or large) with large disks configured for data / log / journal disks.
arbiter machine for voting (micro probably OK).
i.e. https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/sharded-cluster-architectures-production/
Like yourself, I initially tried the AWS MongoDB CloudFormation template that you posted in the link (https://s3.amazonaws.com/quickstart-reference/mongodb/latest/templates/MongoDB-VPC.template) but to be honest it was far, far too complex i.e. it's 9,300 lines long and sets up multiple servers (i.e. replica shards, configs, arbitors, etc). Running the CloudFormation template took ages and it kept failing (e.g. after 15 mintues) which meant the servers all terminated again and I had to try again which was really frustrating / time consuming.
The solution I went for in the end (which I'm super happy with) was to create separate templates for each type of MongoDB server in the cluster e.g.
MongoDbConfigServer.template (template to create config servers - run this 3 times)
MongoDbShardedReplicaServer.template (template to create replica - run 2 times for each shard)
MongoDbArbiterServer.template (template to create arbiter - run once for each shard)
NOTE: templates available at https://github.com/adoreboard/aws-cloudformation-templates
The idea then is to bring up each server in the cluster individually i.e. 3 config servers, 2 sharded replica servers (for 1 shard) and an arbitor. You can then add custom parameters into each of the templates e.g. the parameters for the replica server could include: -
InstanceType e.g. t2.micro
ReplicaSetName e.g. s1r (shard 1 replica)
ReplicaSetNumber e.g. 2 (used with ReplicaSetName to create name e.g. name becomes s1r2)
VpcId e.g. vpc-e4ad2b25 (not a real VPC obviously!)
SubnetId e.g. subnet-2d39a157 (not a real subnet obviously!)
GroupId (name of existing MongoDB group Id)
Route53 (boolean to add a record to an internal DNS - best practices)
Route53HostedZone (if boolean is true then ID of internal DNS using Route53)
The really cool thing about CloudFormation is that these custom parameters can have (a) a useful description for people running it, (b) special types (e.g. when running creates a prefiltered combobox so mistakes are harder to make) and (c) default values. Here's an example: -
"Route53HostedZone": {
"Description": "Route 53 hosted zone for updating internal DNS (Only applicable if the parameter [ UpdateRoute53 ] = \"true\"",
"Type": "AWS::Route53::HostedZone::Id",
"Default": "YA3VWJWIX3FDC"
},
This makes running the CloudFormation template an absolute breeze as a lot of the time we can rely on the default values and only tweak a couple of things depending on the server instance we're creating (or replacing).
As well as parameters, each of the 3 templates mentioned earlier have a "Resources" section which creates the instance. We can do cool things via the "AWS::CloudFormation::Init" section also. e.g.
"Resources": {
"MongoDbConfigServer": {
"Type": "AWS::EC2::Instance",
"Metadata": {
"AWS::CloudFormation::Init": {
"configSets" : {
"Install" : [ "Metric-Uploading-Config", "Install-MongoDB", "Update-Route53" ]
},
The "configSets" in the previous example shows that creating a MongoDB server isn't simply a matter of creating an AWS instance and installing MongoDB on it but also we can (a) install CloudWatch disk / memory metrics (b) Update Route53 DNS etc. The idea is you want to automate things like DNS / Monitoring etc as much as possible.
IMO, creating a template, and therefore a stack for each server has the very nice advantage of being able to replace a server extremely quickly via the CloudFormation web console. Also, because we have a server-per-template it's easy to build the MongoDB cluster up bit by bit.
My final bit of advice on creating the templates would be to copy what works for you from other GitHub MongoDB CloudFormation templates e.g. I used the following to create the replica servers to use RAID10 (instead of the massively more expensive AWS provisioned IOPS disks).
https://github.com/CaptainCodeman/mongo-aws-vpc/blob/master/src/templates/mongo-master.template
In your question you mentioned auto-scaling - my preference would be to add a shard / replace a broken instance manually (auto-scaling makes sense with web containers e.g. Tomcat / Apache but a MongoDB cluster should really grow slowly over time). However, monitoring is very important, especially the disk sizes on the shard servers to alert you when disks are filling up (so you can either add a new shard to delete data). Monitoring can be achieved fairly easily using AWS CloudWatch metrics / alarms or using the MongoDB MMS service.
If a node goes down e.g one of the replicas in a shard, then you can simply kill the server, recreate it using your CloudFormation template and the disks will sync across automatically. This is my normal flow if an instance goes down and generally no re-configuration is necessary. I've wasted far too many hours in the past trying to fix servers - sometimes lucky / sometimes not. My backup strategy now is run a mongodump of the important collections of the database once a day via a crontab, zip up and upload to AWS S3. This means if the nuclear option happens (complete database corruption) we can recreate the entire database and mongorestore in an hour or 2.
However, if you create a new shard (because you're running out of space) configuration is necessary. For example, if you are adding a new Shard 3 you would create 2 replica nodes (e.g. primary with name => mongo-s3r1 / secondary with name => mongo-s3r2) and 1 arbitor (e.g. with name mongo-s3r-arb) then you'd connect via a MongoDB shell to a mongos (MongoDB router) and run this command: -
sh.addShard("s3r/mongo-s3r1.internal.mycompany.com:27017,mongo-s3r2.internal.mycompany.com:27017")
NOTE: - This commands assumes you are using private DNS via Route53 (best practice). You can simply use the private IPs of the 2 replicas in the addShard command but I have been very badly burned with this in the past (e.g. serveral months back all the AWS instances were restarted and new private IPs generated for all of them. Fixing the MongoDB cluster took me 2 days as I had to reconfigure everything manually - whereas changing the IPs in Route53 takes a few seconds ... ;-)
You could argue we should also add the addShard command to another CloudFormation template but IMO this adds unnecessary complexity because it has to know about a server which has a MongoDB router (mongos) and connect to that to run the addShard command. Therefore I simply run this after the instances in a new MongoDB shard have been created.
Anyways, that's my rather rambling thoughts on the matter. The main thing is that once you have the templates in place your life becomes much easier and defo worth the effort! Best of luck! :-)