I am looking for any best practices and/or recommendations around how best to manage releases for custom modules in a production environment running on the Spring-XD platform.
Specifically, if I have a custom module foo-1.0.0 deployed into a farm of xd containers and I wish to rev it to version foo-1.1.0. What are my alternatives? I gather the following might work (from looking at other questions and docs):
Assuming a shared filesystem/directory for each server/container the custom module jar can be replaced and the container will pick up the new version without a need to restart the server. Will this work? Does this mean the jar name needs to be the same or will it work with versioned named jars?
Maintain a duplicate/mirrored container envs so that one set of containers can be updated by properly removing the stream/job/modules and then bring up the environment up with the updated module version etc... (though this is expensive from a hardware perspective) basically doing a rolling upgrade of sorts
Any other ways?
An ancillary question might be about how easy is it to expose the version of the custom module being used by a given container?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Mark
Related
We have build a few Microservices (MS) which have been deployed to our company's K8s clusters.
For current deployment, any one of our MSs will be built as a Docker image and they deployed manually using the following steps; and it works fine:
Create Configmap
Installing a Service.yaml
Installing a Deployment.yaml
Installing an Ingress.yaml
I'm now looking at Helm v3 to simplify and encapsulate these deployments. I've read a lot of the Helm v3 documentation, but I still haven't found the answer to some simple questions and I hope to get an answer here before absorbing the entire doc along with Go and SPRIG and then finding out it won't fit our needs.
Our Spring MS has 5 separate application.properties files that are specific to each of our 5 environments. These properties files are simple multi-line key=value format with some comments preceded by #.
# environment based values
key1=value1
key2=value2
Using helm create, I installed a chart called ./deploy in the root directory which auto-created ./templates and a values.yaml.
The problem is that I need to access the application.properties files outside of the Chart's ./deploy directory.
From helm, I'd like to reference these 2 files from within my configmap.yaml's Data: section.
./src/main/resource/dev/application.properties
./src/main/resources/logback.xml
And I want to keep these files in their current format, not rewrite them to JSON/YAML format.
Does Helm v3 allow this?
Putting this as answer as there's no enough space on the comments!
Check the 12 factor app link I shared above, in particular the section on configuration... The explanation there is not great but the idea is behind is to build one container and deploy that container in any environment without having to modify it plus to have the ability to change the configuration without the need to create a new release (the latter cannot be done if the config is baked in the container). This allows, for example, to change a DB connection pool size without a release (or any other config parameter). It's also good from a security point of view as you might not want the container running in your lower environments (dev/test/whatnot) having production configuration (passwords, api keys, etc). This approach is similar to the Continuous Delivery principle of build once, deploy anywhere.
I assume that when you run the app locally, you only need access to one set of configuration, so you can keep that in a separate file (e.g. application.dev.properties), and have the parameters that change between environments in helm environment variables. I know you mentioned you don't want to do this, but this is considered a good practice nowadays (might be considered otherwise in the future...).
I also think it's important to be pragmatic, if in your case you don't feel the need to have the configuration outside of the container, then don't do it, and probably using the suggestion I gave to change a command line parameter to pick the config file works well. At the same time, keep in mind the 12 factor-app approach in case you find out you do need it in the future.
According to Jelastic documentation it is possible to export the Environment configuration and download it so it can be restored in another provider
However I have tried with 2 Jelastic providers and they both have disabled the option for exporting private data.
So exporting/download/upload/import of environment is not possible.
i.e. I was expecting to have a process similar to CPanel backup/restore tool
In fact, another view for the deployment process gives a possibility to get rid of the model of handling the data or configuration on the platform. Try to think a bit differently and using CI/CD approach. The Jelastic provides a platform where something you created, locate on somewhere you're elaborating(VCS or GIT as an example) and based on or depends on the specific stack, already pre-configured like a layer and can be installed(copied) over Jelastic. Don't need to handle the data somewhere in the cloud because you have it locally(means within any VCS) and doing the changes there. Then just do a 'pull' procedure(manually or automatically) on that deployment(test, production, staging) environment you're expecting.
Moreover, you can expect any environments type like a code and perform it creating before deploying the data.
Please, find the articles being described each case:
Deployment Guide
Jelastic Packaging Standard for CI/CD Automation
In case you would like to handle the databases' backups, check this article:
Scheduling Database Backups
Additional FTP add-on can make the copies more easily for each instance:
FTP/FTPS Support in Jelastic
On Jelastic, I created a node for building an application (maven), there are several identical environments (NGINX + Spring Boot), the difference is in binding to its database and configured SSL.
The task is to ensure that after building the application (* .jar), deploy at the same time go to these several environments, how to implement it?
When editing a project, it is possible to specify only one environment, multi-selection is not provided.
it`s allowed to specify just one environment
We suggest creating a few environments using one Repository branch, and run updates by API https://docs.jelastic.com/api/#!/api/environment.Vcs-method-Update pushing whole code to VCS.
It's possible to use CloudScripting technology for attaching custom logic to onAfterBuildProject event and deploying the project to additional environments after build is complete. Please check this JPS as an example of the code syntax. Most likely you will need to use DeployProject API method.
There are two publishing instances and one is recently down. An advice is to start a clean publishing instance and let the sync happen automatically.
The situation is, two publishing instances are not clustered now and there are quite a few bundles installed.
My question is, if I try to start a clean publishing instance as advised, do I need to do anything to make it exactly the same as the running one? like the followings:
republish the pages
manually install OSGi bundles
configure publishing agent (if url and port number remains the same)
Anything is appreciated.
You're not far off in my opinion.
Some minor additions:
You don't need to install the site-specific osgi bundles manually,
you can replicate them (after configuring the replication agent) from
the author instance.
Re-Publish the pages using tree-activiation.
In order to know which revision number the application is built from, we use to give the ears we deploy to Glassfish names like myapp_2012-01-20_rev22123.ear. Then we can simply login to Glassfish and see what version is deployed in the web interface (as the appname is the name of the ear file). A downside of this approach is that we need to do a manual undeploy/redeploy to update the name...
But I would like to script the undeploy/deploy process, and having each version of an ear get a different name is not very suitable to scripting this redeployment process. Glassfish 2 does not support the "list applications" goal that Glassfish 3 has, which I could have used to retrieve the application name to undeploy.
So is there any good strategy that will easily allow us to see what version is deployed of an application, and that does not suffer from the above fault?
It would be preferable if this meant we did not have to change the existing applications (like add a jsp page or something to show the current scm revision), but a change in a Maven build script would be acceptable.
I faced a similar issue, I finally came around it by using maven-buildnumber-plugin and writing a simple servlet to get build information. You can find the details in the blog post I made.
Why not use the built-in GlassFish Server versioning to assign a version number at deploy time? This will also enable you to rollback to prior versions. For example:
asadmin deploy --name MyApplication:2012-01-20_rev22123 MyApplication.ear
There is more information on application versioning here:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18930_01/html/821-2417/gihzx.html#gkhhv
Hope this helps.