How to Configure Membase? - nosql

After searching about Cassandra a little bit, i wanted to learn about Membase NoSql. I downloaded it but i couldn't find a way to configure it. Is there anyone who can help me ??

In the current version (beta 2) there isn't much configuration to do. With the exception of a per-server memory quota, everything should be setup by default.
Once you install, you should be able to immediately talk "memcached" over port 11211 to the Membase server. Both ASCII and binary protocols are supported.
Beta 3 will introduce multiple buckets, the ability to set memory and disk quotas per bucket as well as the replica count per bucket.
Let me know if you have any other questions, you can also visit forums.northscale.com.
Thanks, take care.
Perry

Related

Mapping out a Kafka+Zookeeper cluster

Background
I inherited a Kafka/Zookeeper installation. I have a passing knowledge of those - I know the general architecture, how clients work, about topics, etc., have been involved in programming Java clients etc.
But the installation is somewhat dubious. They are three instances of Kafka and Zookeeper each (in their separate docker containers). Supposedly they should work, but what I am seeing is all processes spout immense amount of log output with loads and loads of (diverse) warnings and errors. I have the impression that some of these seem to be quite normal (or are being self-healed all the time), and am having a very hard time figuring if everything works as intended or not, and set up correctly.
Some of these are - according to Google - related to unclean shutdowns of the brokers; corrupted individual topics and such. As this is a test environment, I can easily delete such files.
I know about some commands which help me check topics etc. (basic stuff, like listing them, displaying their individual configuration etc.).
However...
Question
Is there an online ressource/documentation which can be used as a systematic walkthrough to check whether everything is basically setup OK; for example to clear up these questions:
Do the three Zookeepers and the three Kafka instances correctly talk to each other for high-availability purposes? Do they have a correct "leader" etc.?
Are the servers generally "healthy", i.e., easily able to accept connections etc.?
How are the topics working (what's in there, how many messages, etc.)?
I am aware that one may very quickly dismiss this question as too generic; I am not asking you to solve my problems. I am looking for a ressource to systematically walk through such an installation - it may or may not cover the examples I have given, but it definitely should give a systematic way to find out if things are fundamentally wrong.
Rather than looking solely at logs, you might want to familiarize yourself with JMX metrics and how you can gather them across the cluster.
If you want to actually collect and analyze logs, you'll likely need to separately use something like Elasticsearch.
You won't see "how many messages" in a topic, and you'll need even more monitoring to know if a port is actually open and the Kafka process is running, the disks are filling up, etc.
My point here is that, Kafka needs fed and watered, if you plan to productionalize it, you can't just set up a small cluster and forget about it. Even if you think it's setup correctly at the beginning, increasing the load on it will cause it to fall in a bad state eventually.
For a limited trial for your dev environment to get a full look at your cluster health, Confluent Control Center can assist with that.
To solve the "what's in there" problem, I suggest you setup a Schema Registry, and convince Kafka producers to use it.
This packtpub tutorial/training by Stéphane Maarek is wonderful resource for setting kafka in cluster mode. However he did that in AWS cloud in ubuntu VM.
I have followed the same steps and installed in Vagrant VMs in cent OS. You can find the code here.
The VM has yahoo kafka manager to monitor the kafka internal details. list of broker available, healthy , partitions, leaders etc.,
kafka manager can help you with high level monitoring.
Please provide your comments.

How much load can Parse Server on Compute Engine instance handle

The server will run singly on one instance of compute engine. What could limit it's serving capacity and how much load can a single instance (4 vCPUs and 15GB Memory) handle.
Note : I've already looked at Kubernetes and even load-balancing multiple instances but accessing the database from multiple clients is a little too complicated for me right now. So please keep in mind if you're going to suggest containerisation, that I'm a beginner.
Any and all advice is welcome. Thanks!
The serving capacity of the server depends on a number of factors, which includes the requests you receive from the clients, the additional applications running in it etc. For a 4 core CPU, as per this help center article, you will get a peak performance of 8Gb/s, which is good for a single instance. Since you are using a single parse server alone on the VM, it should work very well with the above-mentioned configuration.
A container is a tool for a developer. It contains all the dependencies and library which required to run/test a particular application in a container. The applications running in the container are easily portable.
There is this help center article which might give a precise idea of containers and its usage. While the Kubernetes Engine will help you to deploy/manage these containerized application.

Server Architecture for hosting Java PLAY application in the cloud

This is rather a set of questions than one very specific question. In the last couple weeks/days I puzzled together information regarding how to properly host a JAVA PLAY application "in the cloud", as lots of this information is scattered over different services, I felt like gathering up all these small pieces to one, because lots of things are important to be seen in full context. However, I moved my considerations to the bottom of the question, as they are mainly my opinions and subjective findings, which I don't want to be held responsible for. If I got something wrong, please don't hesitate to point that out.
Hosting Java PLAY + MySQL on AWS for world wide accessibility
Our Scenario: we have a quite straight forward application written within the Java PLAY framework (https://www.playframework.com/), working on iOS and Android as well as with a backend-system (for administration, content management and API), storing data in a MySQL DB. While most of the users' interactions with the server is quick and easy (login, sync some data) there are also some more data-intensive tasks (download some <100mb data zips to the mobile phone, upload a couple of mb to the server). Therefore we were looking for a solution to properly provide users far away from our servers with reasonable response times. The obvious next step was hosting in the cloud.
Hosting setup within AWS:
Horizontal scaling: for the start, only 1 EC2 instance with our app will be running in eu-1a. We will need to evaluate how much resources one instance actually requires, if more instances are needed and if more instances would actually benefit to quicker response times.
Horizontal scaling across regions: once the app generates heavy user load from another region, the whole EC2 instance should be duplicated and put to another region, running a db read replica (see Setting up a globally available web app on amazon web services and https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/cross-region-read-replicas-for-amazon-rds-for-mysql/ ).
Vertical scaling of EC2 instances: in recent tests of the old hosting setup, the database proved to be the bottleneck rather than the play app and its server's hardware specifications. Therefore it is not yet fully clear how much vertical scaling would affect response times. If a t2.micro instance serves as good as a m3.xlarge instance, of course we would rather climb our way up from the bottom here.
Vertical scaling of RDS: we will need to estimate how much traffic hits the DB server and what CPU/RAM/etc will be required. Probably we will work our way up here aswell.
Global Redirection: done using Amazon Route 53 (?). A user from Tokio should be redirected to the EC2 instance running in Asia; a user from Rome to the EC2 instance in Europe. This does not only affect API calls within the app, but also content delivery (in both directions).
Open Questions regarding the setup
Is this setup conclusive? Am I missing crucial components?
Regarding global redirection: is Amazon Route 53 the right tool? How does it differ from CloudFront (which strikes me to be purely for content / media distribution?).
How do I define correct data/api endpoints for my app? Of course I don't want to define the database endpoint of a db read replica during app deployment. Will this also happen during the AR53 (question 2) setup? Same goes for API calls, of course the app should direct it's calls to https://myurl.com/api and from there it should be redirected. Is this realistic?
I would highly appreciate all kinds of thoughts (!), also regarding the background info written below. If you can point me to further reading to solve my questions on my own, I am also very thankful - there is simply a huge load of information regarding this, but this makes it hard to narrow the answers down. I do have knowledge in hosting/servers, but I am pretty sure there are true experts out there waiting to slap me with knowledge. :)
Background-Information
Current Hosting Setup: a load balancer distributes the traffic on 2 root linux servers, both of them running the PLAY app, one of them also holding the MySQL installation.
The current hosting setup has 3 big flaws:
No vertical scalability: the hosting company would take money for each scaling step. Currently the servers are running idle, but if the app booms, we could run short on capacity quickly. Running idle is still paid as if permanently under full load. This is expensive!
No deployment support: currently, we connect through SSH, manually deploy the correct folders to the file system, recompile on the server, set privileges, apply database evolutions; do the same for the second server (with different db connection parameters). What could possibly go wrong. ;)
No worldwide availability: to set up another server in another region of the world would mean a huge effort. To have a synchronized replica of our DB can be done, but once again deploying would mean downtime, room for errors and therefore time and money.
Hosting Options for Java PLAY:
There are lot of different blog posts about this. In short:
AWS: Amazon Web Services is one of the first places you start looking. Here you get everything that's possible, at a flexible price. You set yourself up an EC2 instance, a MySQL RDS and you're good to go - all of this in the free tier, so you can experiment, play around, test your stuff.
Microsoft Azure: similar to AWS regarding pricing and possibilities. However, I did not dive into setting up and deploying our application for test purposes.
Heroku: super easy deployment from within PLAY, scalable servers. However (on the first glance?) lacks possibility to supply remote regions with high speed content.
Jelastic: even easier deployment from within PLAY / IntelliJ IDEA. You push your app image to jelastic, jelastic distributes it further to their infrastructure providers.
RedHat OpenShift (https://www.openshift.com/): sounds promising, yet not as complete as AWS.
Lots of choices and possible setups/prices. Especially after finding out about deployment using boxfuse (https://cloudcaptain.sh/) I made my choice for AWS, as it offers absolutely all we need from 1 source. Boxfuse has low monthly costs but is perfectly integrated into AWS. Scaling is supported as well as the 3 common environments (dev/test/prod). Support is outstanding.
The setup looks good. I would however make one change: your large up- & downloads. As mobile speeds may not be ideal, have your app serve long-running requests is something you should avoid as this will needlessly tie up server threads. Instead consider having users upload and download straight from S3 using presigned URLs. You can then later add CloudFront to the mix when it makes financial sense to do so.
R53 will work just fine for picking the best server(s) for each end user.
For EC2 consider having an ELB + Auto-Scaling Group setup. Even just for a single instance you get the benefit of permanent health monitoring and auto-respawns. If you expect more load you can then auto-scale based on your expected bottleneck (cpu, network i/o). This will give you a more autonomous and robust setup than manually having to scale up and down based on your own monitoring analysis (even though the scaling part is very easy if you stick with immutable infrastructure & blue/green deployments like what Boxfuse offers).
Your focus on vertical server scaling might not serve you well on AWS. I would start thinking about horizontal scaling of app servers behind an Elastic Load Balancer, and possibly look into Elastic Beanstalk.
I'm not sure you can setup a read replica in another region via RDS, you might have to set that up via MySQL servers running on standard EC2 instances. And even if you can, that's going to be some expensive and high-latency data transfer.
If file uploads and downloads are all you are worried about, you just need to put CloudFront (Amazon's CDN service) in front of your application, and allow it to handle file uploads and downloads via its global edge servers. You could even do this without moving your entire application into AWS. I would recommend reading this blog post as a start.

Optimized environment for mongo

I have my RHEL linux server(VM) running a 4core processor and 8GB ram running the below applications
- an Apache Karaf container
- an Apache tomcat server
- an ActiveMQ server
- and the mongod server(either primary of secondary).
Often I see that mongo consumes nearly 80% of cpu. Now I see that my cpu and memory is overshooting most of the time and this has caused me to doubt whether my hardware config is too low for running these many components.
Please let me know if it is ok to run mongo like this on a shared server..
The question is to broad and the answer depends on too many variables, but I'll try to give you overall sense of it.
Can you use all these services together on the same machine at a minimum load? - for sure. It's not clear where other shards reside though, but it will work either way. You didn't provide your HDD specs which is quite important for a DB server, but again it will work at a minimum load.
Can you use this setup under heavy load - not the best idea. Perhaps it's better to have separate servers handling these services.
Monitor overall server load like: CPU, memory, IO. Check mongo logs for slow queries. If your queries supposed to run fast and they don't, you'll need more hardware.
Nobody would be really able to tell you how much load a specific server configuration can handle. You need at least 512Mb RAM and 1 CPU to get going these days but very soon you hit the limits. It all depends on how many users you have, what kinds of queries they run and how much data they cover.
Can you run MongoDB along other applications on a single server? Well it would appear that if you are having memory issues or CPU issues in your current configuration then you will likely need to address something. But "Can You?", well if it is not going to affect you then of course you can.
Should you, do this? Most people would firmly agree that you should not, and that would also stand for most of the other applications you are running on the one machine.
There are various reasons, process isolation, resource allocation, security, and far too many for a short topic response to go into why you should not have this kind of configuration. And certainly where it becomes a problem you should be addressing the issue by seeking a new configuration.
For Mongo alone, most people would not think twice about running their SQL database on dedicated hardware. The choice for Mongo should likely be no different.
Have also suggested this be moved to ServerFault, as it is not a programming question suited to stack overflow.

Amazon aws hints

I have to setup a server environment for a web application. I have to use aws, and so far it looks good for that purpose.
I need:
a scalable Tomcat 7 webapp server
session replication!
a mongodb database cluster(?)
As far as I think it could work with:
The scalable Tomcat 7 I can do easily with elastic beanstalk.
The session replication could work with elasticache
It seems like I have todo the mongodb cluster "manually", so I created some ec2 instances todo so.
I have some problems with that.
the costs would be quite high. The minimum setup would be 2 ec2 instances and one for the elasticache
The only thing, which autoscales, is the elastic beanstalk, means that I have to take care of that, too. (Well, for the mongodb instances, I could use a balancer, too)
In case of the mongodb ec2 instances, I need to setup each instance by myself
Do you have any idea how to:
lower the costs (Especially in the beginning, it would be a little much, no?)?
make the administration easier?
If you install mongo, have a look at: AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf. It is very customary to have one member of the replica set outside the availability zone you use, or even outside of the same region, so you can have a hot backup in case of a failure.
About prices - experiment (load test) and find the smaller instance type that fits you. Also, remember to shut down unused instances
About management - there is the AWS console and many 3rd party products. Also, Netflix have released some nice management tools.
Autoscaling for your web server is easily done with Elastic Beanstalk, but you can use it independently. Check out the documentation for autoscaling here: http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/
It has couple of features that will help you save most of your computation costs;
one is the ability to scale out (and most importantly in), by changing automatically the number of web server you are using, based on your load. You can define the minimum number (for example, 1) and the maximum number. The system can watch a set of metrics (number of requests, CPU load...) and decide when to add or subtract instances.
the second is the ability to change the scale policy and increase or decrease the size of the machines, based on your usage. You can use medium size instances and switch to large or extra large ones, if you find it more cost effective. You are encourage to try out different sizes to see what fits you best.
Using Elastic Cache, can help you both in the session replication, but also to lower the load on your DB machine. You can cache there your frequent queries output (front page, main category page...), and get better performance, and use fewer DB instances. It supports Memecached clients, which makes it very easy to develop in almost any programming language.
You should check Couchbase instead of MongoDB (see comparison). It is more robust and more reliable in scale.
Elastic BeanStalk is the best to reduce the over head of management for Web/App servers. However if haven't taken the development too far, I would recommend to use DynamoDB for the administration easement aspect.
However keep check on cost as well. Performance and Management is something really awesome in DynamoDB