Deploying Hono with Enmasse - kubernetes-helm

I am using Hono for a while, it is a pretty awesome IoT-Hub - thanks for a great job :)
Now I am trying to get forward and as it is recommended by the Hono documentation,
I would like to integrate the EnMasse Project and replace the default "AMQP Messaging Network in hono with the EnMasse.
After reading the EnMasse-Doc I realized that actually also EnMasse uses the same "AMQP Networking" structure as Hono by means of Qpid Dispatch router and (Multiple) ActiveMQ Artemis!
Now my Questions are:
What is actually the difference between the default AMQP-Messaging Network in Hono and the EnMasse?
I searched a lot on the Net but found no answer on how to integrate EnMasse in Hono. I am grateful for any Idea where to start!
Thanks in advance!

ad 1) By default, the Hono Helm chart deploys a single instance of each Qpid Dispatch Router and Artemis broker. This means that both Dispatch Router and Artemis are single points of failure. With enMasse, a network of Dispatch Routers and multiple Artemis brokers can be created and (more importantly) consistently managed. This will be important for scale out and fail over in production scenarios.
ad 2) If you want to deploy to Kubernetes then you might want to start with using the enMasse operator to create an instance of enMasse in your kubernetes cluster. You can then use the Hono Helm chart's configuration properties to configure your Hono instance to not deploy the example AMQP Messaging Network (i.e. single Dispatch Router + Artemis) but instead to connect to the enMasse instance that you have created.

Related

Could I replace RabbitMQ with native kubernetes messaging queue

I didn't find could we replace rabbitMQ/activeMQ/SQS with native kubernetes messaging queue?
or they are totally different in terms of features?
It is a totally different mechanism.
Kubernetes internal queues is not a real "queues" you can use in external applications, they are a part of internal messaging system and manage only objects which are parts of Kubernetes.
Moreover, Kubernetes doesn't provide any message queue as a service for external apps (except a situation when your app actually service one of K8s objects).
If you are not sure which service is better for your app - try to check queues.io.
That is a list of almost all available MQ engines with some highlights.
If you are referring to the Parallel Processing Using a Work Queue approach, you can technically use any queuing system, because the main logic is in the code used to get the items from the queue, Kubernetes is used only to control the parallelism.
If the idea is to use the queue algorithm used internally by kubernetes. it is not exposed as a a service for external applications, you would have to copy the code and implement in you application.

Service Fabric Strategies for Bi-Directional Communication with External Devices

My company is interested in using a stand-alone Service Fabric cluster to manage communications with robots. In our scenario, each robot would host its own rosbridge server, and our Service Fabric application would maintain WebSocket clients to each robot. I envision a stateful service partitioned along device ids which opens connections on startup. It should monitor connection health via heartbeats, pass messages from the robots to some protocol gateway service, and listen to other services for messages to pass to the robots.
I have not seen discussion of this style of external communications in the Service Fabric documentation - I cannot tell if this is because:
There are no special considerations for managing WebSockets (or any two-way network protocol) this way from Service Fabric. I've seen no discussion of restrictions and see no reason, conceptually, why I can't do this. I originally thought replication would be problematic (duplicate messages?), but since only one replica can be primary at any time this appears to be a non-issue.
Service Fabric is not well-suited to bi-directional communication with external devices
I would appreciate some guidance on whether this architecture is feasible. If not, discussion on why it won't work will be helpful. General discussion of limitations around bi-directional communication between Service Fabric services and external devices is welcome. I would prefer if we could keep discussion to stand-alone clusters - we have no plans to use Azure services at this time.
Any particular reason you want SF to host the client and not the other way around?
Doing the way you suggest, I think you will face big challenges to make SF find these devices on your network and keep track of them, for example, Firewall, IPs, NAT, planned maintenance, failures, connection issues, unless you are planning to do it by hand.
From the brief description I saw in the docs your provided about rosbridge server, I could understand that you have to host it on a Server(like you would with a service fabric service) and your devices would connect to it, in this case, your devices would have installed the ROS to make this communication.
Regarding your concerns about the communication, service fabric services are just executable programs you would normally run on your local machine, if it works there will likely work on service fabric environment on premise, the only extra care you have to worry is the external access to the cluster(if in azure or network configurations) and service discovery.
In my point of view, you should use SF as the central point of communication, and each device would connect to SF services.
The other approach would be using Azure IoT Hub to bridge the communication between both. There is a nice Iot Hub + Service Fabric Sample that might be suitable for your needs.
Because you want to avoid Azure, you could in this case replace IoT Hub with another messaging platform or implement the rosbridge in your service to handle the calls.
I hope I understood everything right.
About the obstacles:
I think the major issue here is that bi-directional connection can be established between service replica and the robot.
This has two major problems:
Only primary replica has write access - i.e. only one replica would be able to modify state. This issue hence could be mitigated by creating a separate partition for each robot (but please remember that you can't change partition count after the service was created) or by creating a separate service instance for each robot (this would allow you to dynamically add or remove robots but would require additional logic related to service discoverability).
The replica can be shutdown (terminated), moved to another node (shutdown and start of new replica) or even demoted (the primary replica get's demoted to secondary and another secondary replica get's promoted to primary) by various reasons. So the service code and robot communication code should be able to handle this.
About WebSockets
This looks possible by implementing custom ICommunicationListener and other things using WebSockets.

Service Fabric - Reliable services pub/sub or broadcast events

I could not found any broadcast or pub/sub pattern between Reliable Services in any documentation. Did I miss anything?
My use case is , we need to notify custom event to all the SF stateful service replica in cluster if there any state change in any primary replica.
I am aware of Reliable state manager events which triggers when any change in Reliable collections.
Is there any other broadcast , pub/sub events to communicate between services replicas of the cluster ?
Thanks,
Ashish
Did you see this oss project and package? It allows pub/sub messaging between services.
Why reinvent the wheel?
Service Fabric does not contains a brokered messaging engine because:
There are lot's of options already in the market available for this.
Would make your system tight coupled with service fabric runtime.
Why not just use Service Bus Pub\Sub Topics?
If the concern is latency, why not run RabitMQ, ActiveMQ or any other messaging system as a guest executable service or maybe inside a container.
If you had this feature on SF, you would have to write your services dependent on this feature, once you start adding external dependencies, you gonna face an integration challenge to forward these events to systems outside your cluster, having to create a service listening to these events just to forward it to another queue\topic.
It will just add extra work, complexity and maintenance to your solution.

How do config tools like Consul "push" config updates to clients?

There is an emerging trend of ripping global state out of traditional "static" config management tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible, and instead storing configurations in some centralized/distributed tool, of which the main players appear to be:
ZooKeeper (Apache)
Consul (Hashicorp)
Eureka (Netflix)
Each of these tools works differently, but the principle is the same:
Store your env vars and other dynamic configurations (that is, stuff that is subject to change) in these tools as key/value pairs
Connect to these tools/services via clients at startup and pull down your config KV pairs. This typically requires the client to supply a service name ("MY_APP"), and an environment ("DEV", "PROD", etc.).
There is an excellent Consul Java client which explains all of this beautifully and provides ample code examples.
My understanding of these tools is that they are built on top of consensus algorithms such as Zab, Paxos and Gossip that allow config updates to spread almost virally, with eventual consistency, throughout your nodes. So the idea there is that if you have a myapp app that has 20 nodes, say myapp01 through myapp20, if you make a config change to one of them, that change will naturally "spread" throughout the 20 nodes over a period of seconds/minutes.
My problem is: how do these updates actually deploy to each node? In none of the client APIs (the one I linked to above, the ZooKeeper API, or the Eureka API) do I see some kind of callback functionality that can be set up and used to notify the client when the centralized service (e.g. the Consul cluster) wants to push and reload config updates.
So I ask: how is this supposed to work (dynamic config deployment and reload on clients)? I'm interested in any viable answer for any of those 3 tools, though Consul's API seems to be the most advanced IMHO.
You could use cfg4j for that. It's a Java configuration library for distributed services. It supports Consul as one of the configuration sources.
That's a nice question. I can tell how Consul HTTP client works.
I also think initially that it works in the push mechanism but while I was recently exploring Consul, I found that all Consul clients poll server for changes they want to watch. Although it is a bit different polling mechanism, Consul supports blocking queries. These are HTTP requests with a max timeout of 10 mins. This query waits until there is some change on the watched key/folder and return with the latest index. If the index is changed, the client reloads the configuration. For more info : Consul Blocking Query

Akka cluster and OpenShift

I'm new to Akka Clusters, however as I am understanding its documentation, I need to know at least one "seed node" to join an existing cluster.
So when using clusters with OpenShift I would need to know if the current gear is the first node - then I would create a new cluster - or if there are already some other gears around - I would need to know at least one of their IPs to join them.
Is this possible with OpenShift cloud? (I'm using the DIY catridge, so customizing the start up script wouldn't be a problem. However I can't find any environment variable which provides me relevant data.)
DIY gears on OpenShift Online do not scale. And if you are spinning up separate applications for each of the nodes in your cluster, you are going to (probably) run into inter-gear communication issues. You might need to create your own akka cartridge (http://docs.openshift.org/origin-m4/oo_cartridge_developers_guide.html), then you can set your own scaling options. You might check out this cartridge (https://github.com/smarterclayton/openshift-redis-cart) which supports scaling and might give you some ideas about how to implement yours.