I went through the video on introduction of DCOS. It was good but got me somewhat confused in terms of classification of component definitions in Mesosphere.
I get that DCOS is an ecosystem and Mesos is like a kernel. Please correct me if I am wrong. For eg. It's like Ubuntu and Linux kernel I presume.
What is marathon? Is it a service or framework or is it something else that falls in neither category? I am bit confused in terms of service vs framework vs application vs Task definition in Mesosphere's context.
Are the services(Cassandra, HDFS, Kubernetes, etc..) that he launches in the video can safely be also called as frameworks?
From 3, are these "services" running as executors in the slaves?
What should rails-app's type be here? Is it a task? So will it also have an executor?
Who makes the decision of autoscaling the rails-app to more nodes, when he increases the traffic using marathon.
1) I get that DCOS is an ecosystem and Mesos is like a kernel. Please
correct me if I am wrong. For eg. It's like Ubuntu and Linux kernel I
presume.
Correct!
2) What is marathon? Is it a service or framework or is it something
else that falls in neither category? I am bit confused in terms of
service vs framework vs application vs Task definition in Mesosphere's
context.
In Apache Mesos terminology, Marathon is a framework. Every framework consists of a framework scheduler and an executor. Many frameworks reuse the standard executor rather than providing their own. An app is a Marathon specific term, meaning the long-running task you launch through it. A task is the unit of execution, running on a Mesos agent (in an executor). In DC/OS (the product, Mesosphere is our company) we call frameworks in general services. Also, in the context of DC/OS, Marathon plays a special role: it acts as a sort of distributed initd, launching other services such as Spark or Kafka.
3) Are the services(Cassandra, HDFS, Kubernetes, etc..) that he
launches in the video can safely be also called as frameworks?
See above.
4) From 3), are these "services" running as executors in the slaves?
No. See above.
5) What should rails-app's type be here? Is it a task? So will it also
have an executor?
The Rails app may have one or more (Mesos) tasks running in executors on one or more agents.
6) Who makes the decision of autoscaling the rails-app to more nodes,
when he increases the traffic using marathon.
Not nodes but instances of the app. Also as #air suggested, with Marathon autoscaling is simple, see also this autoscaling example.
Related
I have 2 sets of storm topologies in use today, one is up 24/7, and does it's own work.
The other, is deployed on demand, and handles a much bigger loads of data.
As of today, we have N supervisors instances, all from the same type of hardware (CPU/RAM), I'd like my on demand topology to run on stronger hardware, but as far as I know, there's no way to control which supervisor is assigned to which topology.
So if I can't control it, it's possible that the 24/7 topology would assign one of the stronger workers to itself.
Any ideas, if there is such a way?
Thanks in advance
Yes, you can control which topologies go where. This is the job of the scheduler.
You very likely want either the isolation scheduler or the resource aware scheduler. See https://storm.apache.org/releases/2.0.0-SNAPSHOT/Storm-Scheduler.html and https://storm.apache.org/releases/2.0.0-SNAPSHOT/Resource_Aware_Scheduler_overview.html.
The isolation scheduler lets you prevent Storm from running any other topologies on the machines you use to run the on demand topology. The resource aware scheduler would let you set the resource requirements for the on demand topology, and preferentially assign the strong machines to the on demand topology. See the priority section at https://storm.apache.org/releases/2.0.0-SNAPSHOT/Resource_Aware_Scheduler_overview.html#Topology-Priorities-and-Per-User-Resource.
I've been playing with Mesos cluster for a little bit, and thinking of utilizing Mesos cluster in our production environment. One problem I can't seem to find an answer to: how to properly schedule long running apps that will have varying load?
Marathon has "CPUs" property, where you can set weight for CPU allocation to particular app. (I'm planning on running Docker containers) But from what I've read, it is only a weight, not a reservation, allocation, or limitation that I am setting for the app. It can still use 100% of CPU on the server, if it's the only thing that's running. The problem is that for long running apps, resource demands change over time. Web server, for example, is directly proportional to the traffic. Coupled to Mesos treating this setting as a "reservation," I am choosing between 2 evils: set it too low, and it may start too many processes on the same host and all of them will suffer, with host CPU going past 100%. Set it too high, and CPU will go idle, as reservation is made (or so Mesos think), but there is nothing that's using those resources.
How do you approach this problem? Am I missing something in how Mesos and Marathon handle resources?
I was thinking of an ideal way of doing this:
Specify weight for CPU for different apps (on the order of, say, 0.1 through 1), so that when going gets tough, higher priority gets more (as is right now)
Have Mesos slave report "Available LA" with its status (e.g. if 10 minute LA is 2, with 8 CPUs available, report 6 "Available LA")
Configure Marathon to require "Available LA" resource on the slave to schedule a task (e.g. don't start on particular host if Available LA is < 2)
When available LA goes to 0 (due to influx of traffic at the same time as some job was started on the same server before the influx) - have Marathon move jobs to another slave, one that has more "Available LA"
Is there a way to achieve any of this?
So far, I gather that I can possible write a custom isolator module that will run on slaves, and report this custom metric to the master. Then I can use it in resource negotiation. Is this true?
I wasn't able to find anything on Marathon rescheduling tasks on different nodes if one becomes overloaded. Any suggestions?
As of Mesos 0.23.0 oversubscription is supported. Unfortunately it is not yet implemented in Marathon: https://github.com/mesosphere/marathon/issues/2424
In order to dynamically do allocation, you can use the Mesos slave metrics along with the Marathon HTTP API to scale, for example, as I've done here, in a different context. My colleague Niklas did related work with nibbler, which might also be of help.
I am trying to understand how the various components of Mesos work together, and found this excellent tutorial that contains the following architectural overview:
I have a few concerns about this that aren't made clear (either in the article or in the official Mesos docs):
Where are the Schedulers running? Are there "Scheduler nodes" where only the Schedulers should be running?
If I was writing my own Mesos framework, what Scheduler functionality would I need to implement? Is it just a binary yes/no or accept/reject for Offers sent by the Master? Any concrete examples?
If I was writing my own Mesos framework, what Executor functionality would I need to implement? Any concrete examples?
What's a concrete example of a Task that would be sent to an Executor?
Are Executors "pinned" (permanently installed on) Slaves, or do they float around in an "on demand" type fashion, being installed and executed dynamically/on-the-fly?
Great questions!
I believe it would be really helpful to have a look at a sample framework such as Rendler. This will probably answer most of your question and give you feeling for the framework internal.
Let me now try to answer the question which might be still be open after this.
Scheduler Location
Schedulers are not on on any special nodes, but keep in mind that schedulers can failover as well (as any part in a distributed system).
Scheduler functionality
Have a look at Rendler or at the framework development guide.
Executor functionality/Task
I believe Rendler is a good example to understand the Task/Executor relationship. Just start reading the README/description on the main github page.
Executor pinning
Executors are started on each node when the first Task requiring such executor is send to this node. After this it will remain on that node.
Hope this helped!
To add to js84's excellent response,
Scheduler Location: Many users like to launch the schedulers via another framework like Marathon to ensure that if the scheduler or its node dies, then it can be restarted elsewhere.
Scheduler functionality: After registering with Mesos, your scheduler will start getting resource offers in the resourceOffers() callback, in which your scheduler should launch (at least) one task on a subset (or all) of the resources being offered. You'll probably also want to implement the statusUpdate() callback to handle task completion/failure.
Note that you may not even need to implement your own scheduler if an existing framework like Marathon/Chronos/Aurora/Kubernetes could suffice.
Executor functionality: You usually don't need to create a custom executor if you just want to launch a linux process or docker container and know when it completes. You could just use the default mesos-executor (by specifying a CommandInfo directly in TaskInfo, instead of embedded inside an ExecutorInfo). If, however you want to build a custom executor, at minimum you need to implement launchTask(), and ideally also killTask().
Example Task: An example task could be a simple linux command like sleep 1000 or echo "Hello World", or a docker container (via ContainerInfo) like image : 'mysql'. Or, if you use a custom executor, then the executor defines what a task is and how to run it, so a task could instead be run as another thread in the executor's process, or just become an item in a queue in a single-threaded executor.
Executor pinning: The executor is distributed via CommandInfo URIs, just like any task binaries, so they do not need to be preinstalled on the nodes. Mesos will fetch and run it for you.
Schedulers: are some strategy to accept or reject the offer. Schedulers we can write our own or we can use some existing one like chronos. In scheduler we should evaluate the resources available and then either accept or reject.
Scheduler functionality: Example could be like suppose say u have a task which needs 8 cpus to run, but the offer from mesos may be 6 cpus which won't serve the need in this case u can reject.
Executor functionality : Executor handles state related information of your task. Set of APIs you need to implement like what is the status of assigned task in mesos slave. What is the num of cpus currently available in mesos slave where executor is running.
concrete example for executor : chronos
being installed and executed dynamically/on-the-fly : These are not possible, you need to pre configure the executors. However you can replicate the executors using autoscaling.
I am trying to run a spark streaming app through marathon on mesos and this job eventually stores some counts into an instance of cassandra. My question is should I set number of instances (on marathon) for this app to 2 (for HA); however, the issue is wouldn't the 2nd instance be just a replica of the first one and processing and results would be duplicated?
No you don't set the number of instances to 2 for HA. Marathon will re-start any app that due to whatever reasons has gone down. It is a good practice to implement health checks, though.
I would like to use Apache Marathon to manage resources in a clustered product. Mesos and Marathon solves some of the "cluster resource manager" problems for additional components that need to be kept running with HA, failover, etc.
However, there are a number of services that need to be kept running to keep mesos and marathon running (like zookeeper, mesos itself, etc). What can we use to keep those services running with HA, failover, etc?
It seems like solving this across a cluster (managing how many instances of zookeeper, etc, and where they run and how they fail over) is exactly the problem that mesos/marathon are trying to solve.
As the Mesos HA doc explains, you can start multiple Mesos masters and let ZK elect the leader. Then if your leading master fails, you still have at least 2 left to handle things. It is common to use something like systemd to automatically restart the mesos-master on the same host if it's still healthy, or something like Amazon AutoScalingGroups to ensure you always have 3 master machines even if a host dies.
The same can be done for Marathon in its HA mode (on by default if you start multiple instances pointing to the same znode). Many users start these on the same 3 nodes as their Mesos masters, using systemd to restart failed Marathon services, and the same ASG to ensure there are 3 Mesos/Marathon master nodes.
These same 3 nodes are often configured to be the ZK quorum as well, so there are only 3 nodes you have to manage for all these services running outside of Mesos.
Conceivably, you could bootstrap both Mesos-master and Marathon into the cluster as Marathon/Mesos tasks. Spin up a single Mesos+Marathon master to get the cluster started, then create a Mesos-master app in Marathon to launch 2-3 masters as Mesos tasks, and a Marathon-master app in Marathon to launch a couple of HA Marathon instances (as Mesos tasks). Once those are healthy, you can kill the original standalone Mesos/Marathon master and the cluster would failover to the self-hosted Mesos and Marathon masters, which would be automatically restarted elsewhere on the cluster if they failed. Maybe this would work with ZK too. You'd probably need something like Mesos-DNS and/or ELB to let other services find Mesos/Marathon. I doubt anybody's running Mesos this way, but it's crazy enough it just might work!
In order to understand this, I suggest you spend a few minutes reading up on the architecture and the HA part in the official Mesos doc. There, it is clearly explained how HA/failover in Mesos core is handled (which is, BTW, nothing magic—many systems I know of use pretty much exactly this model, incl. HBase, Storm, Kafka, etc.).
Also, note that—naturally—the challenge keeping a handful of the Mesos masters/Zk alive is not directly comparable with keeping potentially 10000s of processes across a cluster alive, evict them or fail them over (in terms of fan out, memory footprint, throughput, etc.).