Service Discovery with Vert.x gRPC and Consul - vert.x

I have a service which runs a couple of verticles. The main verticle configures the remaining verticles and is also responsible for registering the service with consul. However, my gRPC server cannot run on the same port as the main verticle. Does this mean I need to register each verticle as a separate service, or is there some way to use consul to advertise the correct port for my gRPC server?

It seems like tags are the way to go. I can't find the link to the github issue discussing single services with multiple ports, but that was the suggestion. Multiple ports is something being considered for a future API but there are obstacles such as the SRV entries to contend with before this is possible.

Related

Register a service with multiple instance in Consul

I have a couple of microservices that I want to register in Consul, so that they can find each other and communicate.
Everything runs on docker compose.
I am wondering how that would work if one of the two services has multiple replicas. How does Consul (or docker compose) deal with that? Is there some sort of internal load balancing or what?
Consul supports registering multiple instances/replicas of a service. When a consumer queries the Consul catalog, Consul will return information for each of the registered service instances.
If the consumer/client is querying Consul via DNS, the client's DNS resolver will ultimately be responsible for choosing the endpoint to connect to from the list of IP's in the DNS response.
If the client is querying Consul via the HTTP API (e.g., /v1/agent/health/service/:service), the client must implement its own logic to select an upstream instance from the list of instances returned in the API response.
See the query services section of the Register a Service with Consul Service Discovery tutorial for more info.

Synchronize HTTP requests between several service instances in Kubernetes

We have a service with multiple replicas which works with storage without transactions and blocking approaches. So we need somehow to synchronize concurrent requests between multiple instances by some "sharding" key. Right now we host this service in Kubernetes environment as a ReplicaSet.
Don't you know any simple out-of-the-box approaches on how to do this to not implement it from scratch?
Here are several of our ideas on how to do this:
Deploy the service as a StatefulSet and implement some proxy API which will route traffic to the specific pod in this StatefulSet by sharding key from the HTTP request. In this scenario, all requests which should be synchronized will be handled by one instance and it wouldn't be a problem to handle this case.
Deploy the service as a StatefulSet and implement some custom logic in the same service to re-route traffic to the specific instance (or process on this exact instance). As I understand it's not possible to have abstract implementation and it would work only in Kubernetes environment.
Somehow expose each pod IP outside the cluster and implement routing logic on the client-side.
Just implement synchronization between instances through some third-party service like Redis.
I would like to try to route traffic to the specific pods. If you know standard approaches how to handle this case I'll be much appreciated.
Thank you a lot in advance!
Another approach would be to put a messaging queue (like Kafka and RabbitMq) in front of your service.
Then your pods will subscribe to the MQ topic/stream. The pod will decide if it should process the message or not.
Also, try looking into service meshes like Istio or Linkerd.
They might have an OOTB solution for your use-case, although I wasn't able to find one.
Remember that Network Policy is not traffic routing !
Pods are intended to be stateless and indistinguishable from one another, pod-networking.
I recommend to Istio. It has special component which is responsible or routing- Envoy. It is a high-performance proxy developed in C++ to mediate all inbound and outbound traffic for all services in the service mesh.
Useful article: istio-envoy-proxy.
Istio documentation: istio-documentation.
Useful Istio explaination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2kowI0fAz0.
But you should be able to create a Deployment per customer group, and a Service per Deployment. The Ingress nginx should be able to be told to map incoming requests by whatever attributes are relevant to specific customer group Services.
Other solution is to use kube-router.
Kube-router can be run as an agent or a Pod (via DaemonSet) on each node and leverages standard Linux technologies iptables, ipvs/lvs, ipset, iproute2.
Kube-router uses IPVS/LVS technology built in Linux to provide L4 load balancing. Each ClusterIP, NodePort, and LoadBalancer Kubernetes Service type is configured as an IPVS virtual service. Each Service Endpoint is configured as real server to the virtual service. The standard ipvsadm tool can be used to verify the configuration and monitor the active connections.
How it works: service-proxy.

Proxy outgoing traffic of Kubernetes cluster through a static IP

I am trying to build a service that needs to be connected to a socket over the internet without downtime. The service will be reading and publishing info to a message queue, messages should be published only once and in the order received.
For this reason I thought of deploying it into Kubernetes where I can automatically have multiple replicas in case one process fails, i.e. just one process (pod) should be running all time, not multiple pods publishing the same messages to the queue.
These requests need to be routed through a proxy with a static IP, otherwise I cannot connect to the socket. I understand this may not be a standard use case as a reverse proxy as it is normally use with load balancers such as Nginx.
How is it possible to build this kind of forward proxy in Kubernetes?
I will be deploying this on Google Container Engine.
Assuming you're happy to use Terraform, you can use this:
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraform-google-nat-gateway
However, there's one caveat and that is it may inbound traffic to other clusters in that same region/zone.
Is the LoadBalancer that you need?
kubernetes create external loadbalancer,you can see this doc.

Low Level Protocol for Microservice Orchestration

Recently I started working with Microservices, I wrote a library for service discovery using Redis to store every service's url and port number, along with a TTL value for the entry. It turned out to be an expensive approach since for every cross service call to any other service required one call to Redis. Caching didn't seem to be a good idea, since the services won't be up all the times, there can be possible downtimes as well.
So I wanted to write a separate microservice which could take care of the orchestration part. For this I need to figure out a really low level network protocol to take care of the exchange of heartbeats(which would help me figure out if any of the service instance goes unavailable). How do applications like zookeeperClient, redisClient take care of heartbeats?
Moreover what is the industry's preferred protocol for cross service calls?
I have been calling REST Api's over HTTP and eliminated every possibility of Joins across different collections.
Is there a better way to do this?
Thanks.
I think the term "Orchestration" is not good for what you are asking. From what I've encountered so far in microservices world the term "Orchestration" is used when a complex business process is involved and not for service discovery. What you need is a Service registry combined with a Load balancer. You can find here all the information you need. Here are some relevant extras that great article:
There are two main service discovery patterns: client‑side discovery and server‑side discovery. Let’s first look at client‑side discovery.
The Client‑Side Discovery Pattern
When using client‑side discovery, the client is responsible for determining the network locations of available service instances and load balancing requests across them. The client queries a service registry, which is a database of available service instances. The client then uses a load‑balancing algorithm to select one of the available service instances and makes a request.
The network location of a service instance is registered with the service registry when it starts up. It is removed from the service registry when the instance terminates. The service instance’s registration is typically refreshed periodically using a heartbeat mechanism.
Netflix OSS provides a great example of the client‑side discovery pattern. Netflix Eureka is a service registry. It provides a REST API for managing service‑instance registration and for querying available instances. Netflix Ribbon is an IPC client that works with Eureka to load balance requests across the available service instances. We will discuss Eureka in more depth later in this article.
The client‑side discovery pattern has a variety of benefits and drawbacks. This pattern is relatively straightforward and, except for the service registry, there are no other moving parts. Also, since the client knows about the available services instances, it can make intelligent, application‑specific load‑balancing decisions such as using hashing consistently. One significant drawback of this pattern is that it couples the client with the service registry. You must implement client‑side service discovery logic for each programming language and framework used by your service clients.
The Server‑Side Discovery Pattern
The client makes a request to a service via a load balancer. The load balancer queries the service registry and routes each request to an available service instance. As with client‑side discovery, service instances are registered and deregistered with the service registry.
The AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is an example of a server-side discovery router. An ELB is commonly used to load balance external traffic from the Internet. However, you can also use an ELB to load balance traffic that is internal to a virtual private cloud (VPC). A client makes requests (HTTP or TCP) via the ELB using its DNS name. The ELB load balances the traffic among a set of registered Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances or EC2 Container Service (ECS) containers. There isn’t a separate service registry. Instead, EC2 instances and ECS containers are registered with the ELB itself.
HTTP servers and load balancers such as NGINX Plus and NGINX can also be used as a server-side discovery load balancer. For example, this blog post describes using Consul Template to dynamically reconfigure NGINX reverse proxying. Consul Template is a tool that periodically regenerates arbitrary configuration files from configuration data stored in the Consul service registry. It runs an arbitrary shell command whenever the files change. In the example described by the blog post, Consul Template generates an nginx.conf file, which configures the reverse proxying, and then runs a command that tells NGINX to reload the configuration. A more sophisticated implementation could dynamically reconfigure NGINX Plus using either its HTTP API or DNS.
Some deployment environments such as Kubernetes and Marathon run a proxy on each host in the cluster. The proxy plays the role of a server‑side discovery load balancer. In order to make a request to a service, a client routes the request via the proxy using the host’s IP address and the service’s assigned port. The proxy then transparently forwards the request to an available service instance running somewhere in the cluster.
The server‑side discovery pattern has several benefits and drawbacks. One great benefit of this pattern is that details of discovery are abstracted away from the client. Clients simply make requests to the load balancer. This eliminates the need to implement discovery logic for each programming language and framework used by your service clients. Also, as mentioned above, some deployment environments provide this functionality for free. This pattern also has some drawbacks, however. Unless the load balancer is provided by the deployment environment, it is yet another highly available system component that you need to set up and manage.

Fabric Service availability on start

I have a scenario where one of our services exposes WCF hosts that receive callbacks from an external service.
These hosts are dynamically created and there may be hundreds of them. I need to ensure that they are all up and running on the node before the node starts receiving requests so they don't receive failures, this is critical.
Is there a way to ensure that the service doesn't receive requests until I say it's ready? In cloud services I could do this by containing all this code within the OnStart method.
My initial thought is that I might be able to bootstrap this before I open the communication listener - in the hope that the fabric manager only sends requests once this has been done, but I can't find any information on how this lifetime is handled.
There's no "fabric manager" that controls network traffic between your services within the cluster. If your service is up, clients or other services inside the cluster can choose to try to connect to it if they know its address. With that in mind, there are two things you have control over here:
The first is whether or not your service's endpoint is discoverable by other services or clients. This is the point at which your service endpoint is registered with Service Fabric's Naming Service, which occurs when your ICommunicationListener.OpenAsync method returns. At that point, the service endpoint is registered and others can discover it and attempt to connect to it. Of course you don't have to use the Naming Service or the ICommunicationListener pattern if you don't want to; your service can open up an endpoint whenever it feels like it, but if you don't register it with the Naming Service, you'll have to come up with your own service discovery mechanism.
The second is whether or not the node on which your service is running is receiving traffic from the Azure Load Balancer (or any load balancer if you're not hosting in Azure). This has less to do with Service Fabric and more to do with the load balancer itself. In Azure, you can use a load balancer probe to determine whether or not traffic should be sent to nodes.
EDIT:
I added some info about the Azure Load Balancer to our documentation, hope this helps: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-connect-and-communicate-with-services/