Jenkins trigger job by another which are running on offline node - plugins

Is there any way to do the following:
I have 2 jobs. One job on offline node has to trigger the second one. Are there any plugins in Jenkins that can do this. I know that TeamCity has a way of achieving this, but I think that Jenkins is more constrictive

When you configure your node, you can set Availability to Take this slave on-line when in demand and off-line when idle.
Set Usage as Leave this machine for tied jobs only
Finally, configure the job to be executed only on that node.
This way, when the job goes to queue and cannot execute (because the node is offline), Jenkins will try to bring this node online. After the job is finished, the node will go back to offline.
This of course relies on the fact that Jenkins is configured to be able to start this node.

One instance will always be turn on, on which the main job can be run. And have created the job which will look in DB and if in the DB no running instances, it will prepare one node. And the third job after running tests will clean up my environment.

Related

Azure DevOps Agent - Custom Setup/Teardown Operations

We have a cloud full of self-hosted Azure Agents running on custom AMIs. In some cases, I have some cleanup operations which I'd really like to do either before or after a job runs on the machine, but I don't want the developer waiting for the job to wait either at the beginning or the end of the job (which holds up other stages).
What I'd really like is to have the Azure Agent itself say "after this job finishes, I will run a set of custom scripts that will prepare for the next job, and I won't accept more work until that set of scripts is done".
In a pinch, maybe just a "cooldown" setting would work -- wait 30 seconds before accepting another job. (Then at least a job could trigger some background work before finishing.)
Has anyone had experience with this, or knows of a workable solution?
I suggest three solutions
Create another pipeline to run the clean up tasks on agents - you can also add demand for specific agents (See here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/demands?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml) by Agent.Name -equals [Your Agent Name]. You can set frequency to minutes, hours, as you like using cron pattern. As while this pipeline will be running and taking up the agent, the agent being cleaned will not be available for other jobs. Do note that you can trigger this pipeline from another pipeline, but if both are using the same agents - they can just get deadlocked.
Create a template containing scripts tasks having all clean up logic and use it at the end of every job (which you have discounted).
Rather than using static VM's for agent hosting, use Azure scaleset for Self hosted agents - everytime agents are scaled down they are gone and when scaled up they start fresh. This saves a lot of money in terms of sitting agents not doing anything when no one is working. We use this option and went away from static agents. We have also used packer to create the VM image/vhd overnight to update it with patches, softwares required, and docker images cached.
ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/scale-set-agents?view=azure-devops
For those discovering this question, there's a much better way: run your self-hosted agent with the --once flag, documented here.
You'll need to wrap it in your own bash script, but something like this works:
while :
do
echo "Performing pre-job setup..."
echo "Waiting for job..."
./run.sh --once
echo "Cleaning up..."
sleep 2
done
Another option would be to use a ScaleSet VM setup which preps a new agent for each run and discards the VM when the run is done. It can prepare new VMs in the background while the job is running.
And I suspect you could implement your own IMaintenanceProvirer..
https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/blob/master/src/Agent.Worker/Maintenance/MaintenanceJobExtension.cs#L53

Spring boot scheduler running cron job for each pod

Current Setup
We have kubernetes cluster setup with 3 kubernetes pods which run spring boot application. We run a job every 12 hrs using spring boot scheduler to get some data and cache it.(there is queue setup but I will not go on those details as my query is for the setup before we get to queue)
Problem
Because we have 3 pods and scheduler is at application level , we make 3 calls for data set and each pod gets the response and pod which processes at caches it first becomes the master and other 2 pods replicate the data from that instance.
I see this as a problem because we will increase number of jobs for get more datasets , so this will multiply the number of calls made.
I am not from Devops side and have limited azure knowledge hence I need some help from community
Need
What are the options available to improve this? I want to separate out Cron schedule to run only once and not for each pod
1 - Can I keep cronjob at cluster level , i have read about it here https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/cron-jobs/
Will this solve a problem?
2 - I googled and found other option is to run a Cronjob which will schedule a job to completion, will that help and not sure what it really means.
Thanks in Advance to taking out time to read it.
Based on my understanding of your problem, it looks like you have following two choices (at least) -
If you continue to have scheduling logic within your springboot main app, then you may want to explore something like shedlock that helps make sure your scheduled job through app code executes only once via an external lock provider like MySQL, Redis, etc. when the app code is running on multiple nodes (or kubernetes pods in your case).
If you can separate out the scheduler specific app code into its own executable process (i.e. that code can run in separate set of pods than your main application code pods), then you can levarage kubernetes cronjob to schedule kubernetes job that internally creates pods and runs your application logic. Benefit of this approach is that you can use native kubernetes cronjob parameters like concurrency and few others to ensure the job runs only once during scheduled time through single pod.
With approach (1), you get to couple your scheduler code with your main app and run them together in same pods.
With approach (2), you'd have to separate your code (that runs in scheduler) from overall application code, containerize it into its own image, and then configure kubernetes cronjob schedule with this new image referring official guide example and kubernetes cronjob best practices (authored by me but can find other examples).
Both approaches have their own merits and de-merits, so you can evaluate them to suit your needs best.

AWS Fargate vs Batch vs ECS for a once a day batch process

I have a batch process, written in PHP and embedded in a Docker container. Basically, it loads data from several webservices, do some computation on data (during ~1h), and post computed data to an other webservice, then the container exit (with a return code of 0 if OK, 1 if failure somewhere on the process). During the process, some logs are written on STDOUT or STDERR. The batch must be triggered once a day.
I was wondering what is the best AWS service to use to schedule, execute, and monitor my batch process :
at the very begining, I used a EC2 machine with a crontab : no high-availibilty function here, so I decided to switch to a more PaaS approach.
then, I was using Elastic Beanstalk for Docker, with a non-functional Webserver (only to reply to the Healthcheck), and a Crontab inside the container to wake-up my batch command once a day. With autoscalling rule min=1 max=1, I have HA (if the container crash or if the VM crash, it is restarted by AWS)
but now, to be more efficient, I decided to move to some ECS service, and have an approach where I do not need to have EC2 instances awake 23/24 for nothing. So I tried Fargate.
with Fargate I defined my task (Fargate type, not the EC2 type), and configure everything on it.
I create a Cluster to run my task : I can run "by hand, one time" my task, so I know every settings are corrects.
Now, going deeper in Fargate, I want to have my task executed once a day.
It seems to work fine when I used the Scheduled Task feature of ECS : the container start on time, the process run, then the container stop. But CloudWatch is missing some metrics : CPUReservation and CPUUtilization are not reported. Also, there is no way to know if the batch quit with exit code 0 or 1 (all execution stopped with status "STOPPED"). So i Cant send a CloudWatch alarm if the container execution failed.
I use the "Services" feature of Fargate, but it cant handle a batch process, because the container is started every time it stops. This is normal, because the container do not have any daemon. There is no way to schedule a service. I want my container to be active only when it needs to work (once a day during at max 1h). But the missing metrics are correctly reported in CloudWatch.
Here are my questions : what are the best suitable AWS managed services to trigger a container once a day, let it run to do its task, and have reporting facility to track execution (CPU usage, batch duration), including alarm (SNS) when task failed ?
We had the same issue with identifying failed jobs. I propose you take a look into AWS Batch where logs for FAILED jobs are available in CloudWatch Logs; Take a look here.
One more thing you should consider is total cost of ownership of whatever solution you choose eventually. Fargate, in this regard, is quite expensive.
may be too late for your projects but still I thought it could benefit others.
Have you had a look at AWS Step Functions? It is possible to define a workflow and start tasks on ECS/Fargate (or jobs on EKS for that matter), wait for the results and raise alarms/send emails...

rundeck: 1 job, multiple nodes involded?

I have a question about Rundeck features. Is it possible to include conditions within job execution? As it is quite difficult to explain, I provide an example:
You have 2 redundant firewalls in your network. You implement a job 'job1' and it's aim is to update your firewall's configuration. Master is down, therefore you do not want to update slave. Indeed if you do so, slave will have to restart and there will not have any firewall running for a short time. So, what I want to do is to test, before running the update, that none of my firewalls are out of service. If the master is down, then do not update slave.
So, is it possible to involve multiple nodes within one job?
Thanks for helping!
You create a job which pings both the firewalls. If both are up then this job will succeed. Now create another job which includes this job before update job in workflow. Make this job proceed only if first workflow succeeds. That should solve your problem.

A Workload Scheduler's step doesn't proceed and remains queued status

I created a simple process by Applicaiton Lab interface in Bluemix Workload Scheduler. I ran my process, but the step didn't proceed and remained in queued status.
How can I proceed the step?
I executed the process by "Run now". The process doesn't have triggers
The step remains "Queued status".
The Process information
There is only one step. The step is "ping www.ibm.com"
Process doesn't have trigger. It is an on-demand process.
There might be a problem with the agent as I can successfully run a simple workload process without any issues. If you are using the Workload Automation Agent that is created for you then you will need to open a support ticket to have the Workload team look at that agent.
reviewing your question I think that a process submitted to the Workload Scheduler service should be a process which will complete: a ping command like the one you are trying to submit, will never complete if not 'killed' using CTRL+C (or called with [-c count] option)