Bluemix Schedule App Stop & Start - ibm-cloud

Anyone know if we can set a schedule to start-stop apps on Bluemix?
We are basically looking for ways to reduce our footprint by shutting down internal application out of hours.
We understand there's a feature on Azure (Auzre Automation) which can facilitate this, does anyone know if Bluemix has an equivalent?
Else another approach?

I don't believe there's anything 'out of the box' in BlueMix to do this. There are numerous ways you can solve this with the primitives that Cloud Foundry provides, the simplest being a script on a CI server that enumerates apps in a space and calls cf stop on each of them.
The Cloud Controller API will help you, as will using the cf curl command. Alternatively you could write a script in something like Ruby, and use that to parse returned JSON.

Related

FlowForce - monitoring and alerting tool

I had to configure AppDynamics alerts in the past for Java applications I worked for.
I also heard of Nagios, but I am not very sure how that works.
Now, I need to configure alerts for a FlowForce Server, but I don't believe it can be integrated with AppDynamics or Nagios.
I saw FlowForce allow me to send some alerts, like when a step of a job fails, but I would like to have some server alerts, like, for instance, if the license expires and, as a result, the server is automatically shut down.
I am wondering the best way to achieve it.
I am running it on a Windows environment BTW.
Suggestions are welcome.
Thank you in advance!
I found my answer on the Flow Force online help (https://manual.altova.com/flowforceserver/flowforceserver/)
The Flow Force is deployed as two servers, which in a window env, can be started and stopped as windows services (can be found via "Control Panel">"Administrative Tools">Services). With this information, I can monitor them via NAGIOS.

How Do I Send An Message To A Running Yarn Application?

I want to have my application already started on my YARN cluster and allow the users to send additional commands. I am still in the design phase, but I'm confused on the best way about going about this. Is this possible? Could the user send some sort of REST command to the Application Master or Resource Manager that could then be passed to the running YARN Application?
You can if you're willing to build a custom AM and write your own REST API but writing a custom AM is not trivial. As for the RM, you can kill your application or move to another queue via REST API calls but not much else.
https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.1/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-site/ResourceManagerRest.html

node-red redeploy flow using REST from within node-red

I have a node-red flow in bluemix that uses dash-db nodes also. So each time some dash db maintenance or some other reason, this db connection gets lost and all writes fail. When i redeploy, everything is fine again. Bluemix shows only logs of last few hours hence I am finding it very difficult to debug. Meanwhile i was thinking of doing an automatic redeploy after i detect this issue to avoid losing writes.
Can this be done using GET /flows followed by POST /flows in the same node-red app itself?
it would be worth raising this as an issue with the dash-db nodes so the author can help address it - https://github.com/smchamberlin/node-red-nodes-cf-sqldb-dashdb
Yes, you can post back the flows. The full admin http api is documented here: http://nodered.org/docs/api/admin/ - have a look at the 'reload' option on /flows.

AWS deployment without using SSH

I've read some articles recently on setting up AWS infrastructure w/o enabling SSH on Ec2 instances. My web app requires a binary to run. So how can I deploy my application to an ec2 instance w/o using ssh?
This was the article in question.
http://wblinks.com/notes/aws-tips-i-wish-id-known-before-i-started/
Although doable, like the article says, it requires to think about servers as ephemeral servers. A good example of this is web services that scale up and down depending on demand. If something goes wrong with one of the servers you can just terminate your server and spin up another one.
Generally, you can accomplish this using a pull model. For example at bootup pull your code from a git/mecurial repository and then execute scripts to setup your instance. The script will setup all the monitoring required to determine whether your server and application are up and running appropriately. You would still need an SSH client for this if you want to pull your code using ssh. (Although you could also do it through HTTPS)
You can also use configuration management tools that don't use ssh at all like Puppet or Chef. Essentially your node/server will pull all your application and server configuration from the Puppet master or the Chef server. The Puppet agent or Chef client would then perform all the configuration/deployment/monitoring changes for your application to run.
If you with this model I think one of the most critical components is monitoring. You need to know at all times if there's something wrong with one of your server and in the event something goes wrong discard the server and spin up a new one. (Even better if this whole process is automated)
Hope this helps.

Scheduled Tasks for Web Applications

What are the different approaches for creating scheduled tasks for web applications, with or without a separate web/desktop application?
If we're talking Microsoft platform, then I'd always develop a separate Windows Service to handle such batch tasks.
You can always reference the same assemblies that are being used by your web application to avoid any nasty code duplication.
Jeff discussed this on the Stack Overflow blog -
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/easy-background-tasks-in-aspnet/
Basically, Jeff proposed using the CacheItemRemovedCallback as a timer for calling certain tasks.
I personally believe that automated tasks should be handled as a service, a Windows scheduled task, or a job in SQL Server.
Under Linux, checkout cron.
I think Stack Overflow itself is using an ApplicationCache expiration to run background code at intervals.
If you're on a Linux host, you'll almost certainly be using cron.
Under linux you can use cron jobs (http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html) to schedule tasks.
Use URL fetchers like wget or curl to make HTTP GET requests.
Secure your URLs with authentication so that no one can execute the tasks without knowing the user/password.
I think Windows' built-in Task Scheduler is the suggested tool for this job. That requires an outside application.
This may or may not be what you're looking for, but read this article, "Simulate a Windows Service using ASP.NET to run scheduled jobs". I think StackOverflow may use this method or it was at least talked about using it.
A very simple method that we've used where I work is this:
Set up a webservice/web method that executes the task. This webservice can be secured with username/pass if desired.
Create a console app that calls this web service. If desired, you can have the console app send parameters and/or get back some sort of metrics for output to the console or external logging.
Schedule this executable in the task scheduler of choice.
It's not pretty, but it is simple and reliable. Since the console app is essentially just a heartbeat to tell the app to go do its work, it does not need to share any libraries with the application. Another plus of this methodology is that it's fairly trivial to kick off manually when needed.
Use URL fetchers like wget or curl to make HTTP GET requests.
Secure your URLs with authentication so that no one can execute the tasks without knowing the user/password.
You can also tell cron to run php scripts directly, for example. And you can set the permissions on the PHP file to prevent other people accessing them or better yet, don't have these utility scripts in a web accessible directory...
Java and Spring -- Use quartz. Very nice and reliable -- http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/1.2.x/reference/scheduling.html
I think there are easier ways than using cron (Linux) or Task Scheduler (Windows). You can build this into your web-app using:
(a) quartz scheduler,
or if you don't want to integrate another 3rd party library into your application:
(b) create a thread on startup which uses the standard Java 'java.util.Timer' class to run your tasks.
I recently worked on a project that does exactly this (obviously it is an external service but I thought I would share).
https://anticipated.io/
You can receive a webhook or an SQS event at a specific scheduled time. Dealing with these schedulers can be a pain so I thought I'd share in such case someone is looking to offload their concerns.