Ansible release with serial: 50% for two different backend in haproxy - deployment

I have the following configuration in haproxy.
backend 1
machine-1 machine-1.com:8080
machine-2 machine-2.com:8080
machine-3 machine-3.com:8080
machine-4 machine-4.com:8080
machine-5 machine-5.com:8080
machine-6 machine-6.com:8080
machine-7 machine-7.com:8080
machine-8 machine-8.com:8080
machine-9 machine-9.com:8080
machine-10 machine-10.com:8080
backend 2
machine-11 machine-11.com:8080
machine-12 machine-12.com:8080
Serial is set to 50% in ansible rolling deployment.We also change the state of the machines to maintenance in this window. Thus ansible puts machine 1-6 in maintenance mode in the first go while making 7-12 as maintenance in the second go.
As it puts 7-12 as maintenance in the second go; the backend 2 cluster has no nodes online to take the traffic. This causes a huge number of issues on the application side.
How should I remediate this? I am using ansible 2.0.0.
EDIT 1
Two solutions that I can think of
Make two releases for two backends
replace one machine from 1-6 with one machine in backend 2, say 11.
Looking for solutions other than these. more in the line of using ansible to solve it.

Creating a host groups for each backend and run the update for each backend group in a separate run would be IMHO the best solution. If there is no way to do that it is possible to define batch sizes as a list since Ansible 2.2.
So this should work:
- name: test play
hosts: backend servers.
serial:
- 5
- 1

Related

First 10 long running transactions

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

ProxySQL vs MaxScale on Kubernetes

I'm looking to set up a writing proxy for our MariaDB database on Kubernetes. The problem we are currently having is that we only have one Write master on our 3 master galera cluster setup. So even though we have ours pods replication properly, if our first node goes down then our other two masters end up failing because they are not able to be written to.
I saw this was a possible option to use either ProxySQL or MaxScale for Write proxying, but I'm not sure if I'm reading their uses properly. Do I have the right idea looking to deploy either of these two applications/services on Kubernetes to fix my problem? Would I be able to write to any of the Masters in the cluster?
MaxScale will handle selecting which server to write to as long as you use the readwritesplit router and the galeramon monitor.
Here's an example configuration for MaxScale that does load balancing of reads but sends writes to one node:
[maxscale]
threads=auto
[node1]
type=server
address=node1-address
port=3306
[node2]
type=server
address=node2-address
port=3306
[node3]
type=server
address=node3-address
port=3306
[Galera-Cluster]
type=monitor
module=galeramon
servers=node1,node2,node3
user=my-user
password=my-password
[RW-Split-Router]
type=service
router=readwritesplit
cluster=Galera-Cluster
user=my-user
password=my-password
[RW-Split-Listener]
type=listener
service=RW-Split-Router
protocol=mariadbclient
port=4006
The reason writes are only done on one node at a time is because doing it on multiple Galera nodes won't improve write performance and it results in conflicts when transactions are committed (applications seem to rarely handle these).

Running two podman/docker containers of PostgreSQL on a single host

I have two applications, each of which use several databases. Before the days of Docker, I would have just put all the databases on one host (due to resource consumption associated with running multiple physical hosts/VMs).
Logically, it seems to me that separating these into groups (1 group of DBs per application) is the right thing to do and with containers the overhead is low and this seems possible. However, I have not seen this use case. I've seen multiple instances of containerized Postgres running so as to maintain multiple versions (hence different images).
Is there a good technical reason why people do not do this (two or more containers of PostgreSQL instances using the same image for purposes of isolating groups of DBs)?
When I tried to do this, I ran into errors having to do with the second instance trying to configure the postgres user. I had to pass in an option to ignore migration errors. I'm wondering if there is a good reason not to do this.
Well, I am not used to work with prosgresql but with mysql, sqlite and ms sql - and docker, of course.
When I entered docker I used to read a lot about microservices, developing of these and, of course, the devops ideas behind docker and microsoervices.
In this world I would absolutly prefer to have 2 containers of the same base image with a multi stage build and / or different env-files to run you infrastructure. Docker is not only allowing this, it is prefering this.

Is there a sane way to stagger a cron job across 4 hosts with Ansible?

I've been experimenting with writing playbooks for a few days and I'm writing a playbook to deploy an application right now. It's possible that I may be discovering it's not the right tool for the job.
The application is deployed HA across 4 systems on 2 sites and has a worst case SLA of 1 hour. That's being accomplished with a staggered cron that runs every 15 minutes. i.e. s1 runs at 0, s2 runs at 30 s3 runs at 15, ...
I've looked through all kinds of looping and cron and other modules that Ansible supports and can't really find a way that it supports incrementing an integer by 15 as it moves across a list of hosts, and maybe that's a silly way of doing things.
The only communication that these 4 servers have with each other is a directory on a non-HA NFS share. So the reason I'm doing it as a 15 minute staggered cron is to survive network partitions and the death of the NFS connection.
My other thoughts are ... I can just bite the bullet, make it a */15, and have an architecture that relies on praying that NFS never dies which would make writing the Ansible playbook trivial. I'm also considering deploying this with Fabric or a Bash script, it's just that the process for getting implementation plans approved, and for making changes by following them is very heavy, and I just want to simplify the steps someone has to take late at night.
Solution 1
You could use host_vars or group_vars, either in separate files, or directly in the inventory.
I will try to produce a simple example, that fits your description, using only the inventory file (and the playbook that applies the cron):
[site1]
host1 cron_restart_minute=0
host2 cron_restart_minute=30
host3 cron_restart_minute=15
host4 cron_restart_minute=45
[site2]
host5 cron_restart_minute=0
host6 cron_restart_minute=30
host7 cron_restart_minute=15
host8 cron_restart_minute=45
This uses host variables, you could also create other groups and use group variables, if the repetition became a problem.
In a playbook or role, you can simply refer to the variable.
On the same host:
- name: Configure the cron job
cron:
# your other options
minute: "{{ cron_restart_minute }}"
On another host, you can access other hosts variables like so:
hostvars[host2].cron_restart_minute
Solution 2
If you want a more dynamic solution, for example because you keep adding and removing hosts, you could set a variable in a task using register or set_fact, and calculate, for example by the number of hosts in the only group that the current host is in.
Example:
- name: Set fact for cron_restart_minute
set_fact:
cron_restart_minute: "{{ 60 / groups[group_names[0]].length * (1 + groups[group_names[0]].index(inventory_hostname)) | int }}"
I have not tested this expression, but I am confident that it works. It's Python / Jinja2. group_names is a 1 element array, given above inventory, since no host is in two groups at the same time. groups contains all hosts in a group, and then we find its length or the index of the current host by its inventory_hostname (0, 1, 2, 3).
Links to relevant docs:
Inventory
Variables, specifically this part.

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! :-)