I am looking into using Consul, and cannot figure out what Consul defines as a 'service' (aka how does it start it / what information is passed to it on start.)
I have a working cluster, and have written custom init.d services in Ubuntu to try and test it out, but the init.d services are never called when I register them as service with Consul, and do not show up in the web UI either.
Local consul server config:
{
"bootstrap": true,
"server": true,
"log_level": "DEBUG",
"enable_syslog": true,
"datacenter": "dc1",
"data_dir": "data",
"acl_datacenter": "dc1",
"acl_default_policy": "allow",
"encrypt": "secret",
"acl_master_token": "secret",
"ui": true
}
Super simple script to try and determine information passed:
echo "$#" > /home/user/file1
set > /home/user/file2
My end goal is to simply have Consul start a custom script on a given node (with no web interface), that passes the information in Consul's service definition into it (ID and tags specifically).
I imagine I am understanding something elementally wrong, and would like any guidance you have to offer.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: For example, they show lower on that page how you can run two redis servers on multiple ports. How are the services being started and how is that information passed to them?
Edit 2: Thanks for the replies, they both helped me understand this better! (so I just accepted the one that came first.)
Consul has nothing to do with "starting services", it only provides information about services for another services.
Edit: For example, they show lower on that page how you can run two
redis servers on multiple ports. How are the services being started
and how is that information passed to them?
In this Example both Redis servers were started outside of Consul. For example we are using supervisord fot this or starting Redis as service via init.d
So, how it works:
You have started both of Redis instances by yourself (init.d or supervisord, doesn't matter).
Register this instances as services in consul. You can do it via config json file in consul dir. Or, otherwise you can register it via API (from terminal using curl, for example, in this case). Your own services you can register from itself, btw.
Consul's "services" is an architecture pattern. It allows you to build a dynamic service discovery system. This concept should not be garbled with other services concepts (in the OS like init.d or any other). Consul's service is just a virtual entity in Consul's service catalog.
The idea is following:
Something registers a Service entry in the Consul defined as (Name, Address, Node, HealthCheck)
Then this Service entry can be discovered by the Name in the Consul's DNS, or via REST API
Service availability and status is controlled via running health checks
You as a developer of the distributed system is responsible for registering, unregistering services and providing valid health checking routines.
Related
I don’t understand the difference between consul’s agent api and catalog api
Although the consul document has always emphasized that agent and catalog should not be confused，But there are indeed many methods that look similar, such as:
/catalog/services
/agent/services
When should I use catalog or agent（Just like the above http url）?
Which one is suitable for high frequency calls?
Consul is designed for services to be registered against a Consul client agent which is running on the same host where a service is deployed. The /v1/agent/service/ endpoints provide a way for you to interact with services which are registered with the specific Consul agent to which you are communicating, and register new services against that agent.
Each Consul agent in the data center submits its registered service information to the Consul servers. The servers aggregate this information to form the service catalog (https://www.consul.io/docs/architecture/anti-entropy#catalog). The /v1/catalog/ endpoints return that aggregated information.
I want to call out this sentence from the anti-entropy doc.
Consul treats the state of the agent as authoritative; if there are any differences between the agent and catalog view, the agent-local view will always be used.
The catalog APIs can be used to register or remove services/nodes from the catalog, but normally these operations should be performed against the client agents (using the /v1/agent/ APIs) since they are authoritative for data in Consul.
The /v1/agent/ APIs should be used for high frequency calls, and should be issued against the local Consul client agent running on the same node as the app, as opposed to communicating directly with the servers.
We're planning to develop some microservices based on the play framework. They will provide rest apis and lots of them will be using akka cluster/cluster-sharding under the hood.
We would like to have an api gateway that exposes the apis of our internal services, but we're facing one big issue:
- Multiple instances of each service will be running under some ip and port.
- How will the api gateway know where the services instances are running?
- Is there maybe something load-balancer-like for play that keeps track of all running services?
Which solution(s) could possibly fill the spot for the "API Gateway"/"Load Balancer"?
The question you're asking is not really related to play framework. And there is no single answer that would solve what you need.
You could start by reading akka Service Discovery and then make your choice based what fits you more.
We're building services with akka-http and use akka-cluster but use unrelated technologies to expose and run the services.
Check out
Kong for API Gateway
Consul for DNS based service discovery
docker swarm for running containers with mesh network for load balancing
You are looking for following components,
Service Registry : The whole point of this component is to keep track of "what service are running on what addresses". This can be as simple as a simple database which keeps entries for all the running services and their instances. Generally the orchestration service is responsible to register new service instances with Service Registry. Other choice can be to have instances themselves notify the service registry about their existence.
Service Health Checker : This component is mostly responsible for doing periodic runtime checks on the registered service instances and tell service registry if any of them is not working. The service registry implementation can then either mark these instances as "inactive" till they are found to be working by Service Health Checker in future (if ever).
Service Resolution : This is the conceptual component responsible for enabling a client to somehow get to the running service instances.
The whole of above components is called Service Discovery.
In your case, you have load-balancers which can act as a form of ServiceDiscovery.
I don't think load-balancers are going to change much over time unless you require a very advanced architecture, so your API gateway can simply "know" the url's to load-balancers for all your services. So, you don't really need service registry layer.
Now, your load-balancers inherently provide a health-check and quarantine mechanism for instances. So, you don't need an extra health check layer.
So, the only piece missing is to register your instances with the load balancer. This part you will have to figure out based on what your load-balancers are and what ecosystem they live in.
If you live in AWS ecosystem and your load balancers are ELB, then you should have things sorted out in that respect.
Based on Ivan's and Sarvesh's answers we did some research and discovered the netflix OSS projects.
Eureka can be used as service locator that integrates well with the Zuul api gateway. Sadly there's not much documentation on the configuration, so we looked further...
We've now finally choosen Kubernetes as Orchestator.
Kubernetes knows about all running containers, so there's no need for an external service locator like Eureka.
Traefik is an api gateway that utilizes the kuberentes api to discover all running microservices instances and does load balancing
Akka management finds all nodes via the kubernetes api and does the bootstrapping of the cluster for us.
I am migrating my spring cloud eureka application to AWS ECS and currently having some trouble doing so.
I have an ECS cluster on AWS in which two EC2 services was created
Eureka-server
Eureka-client
each service has a Task running on it.
QUESTION:
how do i establish a "docker network" amongst these two services such that i can register my eureka-client to the eureka-server's registry? Having them in the same cluster doesn't seem to do the trick.
locally i am able to establish a "docker network" to achieve this task. is it possible to have a "docker network" on AWS?
The problem here lies on the way how ECS clusters work. If you go to your dashboard and check out your task definition, you'll see an ip address which AWS assigns to the resource automatically.
In Eureka's case, you need to somehow obtain this ip address while deploying your eureka client apps and use it to register to your eureka-server. But of course your task definitions gets destroyed and recreated again somehow so you easily lose it.
I've done this before and there are couple of ways to achieve this. Here is one of the ways:
For the EC2 instances that you intend to spread ECS tasks as eureka-server or registry, you need to assign Elastic IP Addresses so you always know where to connect to in terms of a host ip address.
You also need to tag them properly so you can refer them in the next step.
Then switching back to ECS, when deploying your eureka-server tasks, inside your task definition configuration, there's an argument as placement_constraint
This will allow you to add a tag to your tasks so you can place those in the instances you assigned elastic ip addresses in the previous steps.
Now if this is all good and you deployed everything, you should be able to refer your eureka-client apps to that ip and have them registered.
I know this looks dirty and kind of complicated but the thing is Netflix OSS project for Eureka has missing parts which I believe is their proprietary implementation for their internal use and they don't want to share.
Another and probably a cooler way of doing this is using a Route53 domain or alias record for your instances so instead of using an elastic ip, you can also refer them using a DNS.
I'm interested in knowing if I can use Consul to solve the following issues:
1) Can Consul be used to load balance microservices? For instance, if I put console on the server that hosts my API gateway, can it be used to monitor all microservices it has discovered and load balance if I have two of the same microservice?
2) Can Consul be used at the microservice level to spin up instances as needed? Essentially, I'd like to not use IIS and find an alternative.
3) If for whatever reason Consul monitors a microservice as offline, can it attempt to start it up again? Or force a shut down of a microservice for whatever reason?
If Consul software can't solve these issues, is there other alternatives?
Thank you.
Consul DNS can provide a simple way for you to load balance services. It's especially powerful if you combine it with Consul Prepared Queries and health checks.
Consul is best suited for monitoring services (via health checks) but you can use consul watch to trigger events if a service suddenly becomes unavailable.
Hashicorp (the company behind Consul) offers another tool called Nomad.
Unlike Consul, Nomad is designed to run services (called jobs) and restart them if necessary.
Nomad works best if you tell it where to find Consul. This enables automatic service registration for any task Nomad launches, including deregistering it if you instruct Nomad to stop running that task. Health checks are supported as well.
I am playing a little with Docker and Consul and i have a couple of questions regarding agent-service mapping especially in docker environment. Assume i have a service name "myGreatService" being simple web nodejs helloworld application encapsulated with docker image named "myGreatServiceImage". From Consul docs i did understand that when you register a service (through HTTP or service definition file) than service is about to be "wired" to agent/consul node (the wired node can be retrieved via /v1/catalog/service/). So if a consul node is down (or node health check decided it is down) than all services "wired" to that consule node will automatically be marked as down. Am i right ?
If i run my GreatServiceImage image multiple times on a single host via docker (resulting of multiple instances of "myGreatService" service)
how many agents shall I run ?
A single per host managing all containers (all service instances) on that host? Or maybe a separate agent for each container (service instance) ?
If a health check for a service fails then the service will be marked as down and won't show up if you do a DNS query for that service
dig #localhost -p 8500 apache.service.consul
If you do a call to the api you will see that the service is still listed. This is because the service is not removed, it is just marked as down. If you would do an api call to check the health of that service it would be shown as down.
curl localhost/v1/catalog/service/apache
curl localhost/v1/health/service/apache
You can add the ?passing flag to that last call to recieve only the healthy services. (just like the dns query)
curl localhost/v1/health/service/apache?passing
If the consul agent on the host fails then all services running on that host won't show up if you query consul for the services. (either via a dns query or via the api).
As for the number of agents you should be running: Run one consul agent per host. Let your services register themselves via the api of your local consul agent. (or preconfigure all your services in the config files, but I recommend you to make this a dynamic process of self registering)