Strategies for making platform level decisions within a bundle - osgi

I have a requirement where, if one bundle fails to start because of some internal state issue, the entire application should not be running and thus the platform should be shutdown (bundleCtx.getBundle(0).stop()).
Because of OSGi's nice modularity and so on, other bundles might've started up just fine.
It feels kinda wrong for bundles to be calling bundleCtx.getBundle(0).stop() (or System.exit(nn) if a BundleException occurs) in different places.
Is there a common way to implement this? One way may be Declarative Services, but those are only notified when a given component starts, right? It cannot tell if something has failed (AFAIK).

Ah, here is one possibility I just stumbled upon.
I have a bootstrap bundle which is responsible for starting all of the other bundles in my app. It does this with START_TRANSIENT.
I could put logic into this bundle to do certain things depending on which bundle failed.

So one idea would be to have one bundle that checks if all needed services and bundles come up. It can then stop the framework if one or more services are missing or if a bundle does not start. This would allow to centralize the checking logic at one place.

Related

How to keep service/componnet running while update bundle OSGI

I have implemented 2 services A,B in my bundle. I would like to change the code of service A by building a new jar file and do update command but keep the service B running without start it again.
Sounds like you have 2 services in 1 bundle. The unit of deployment is a bundle, so my recommendation is to split the two services into two bundles. Otherwise, undeploying your existing bundle will naturally also tear down Service B.
Alternatively, in case the API/interface resides in a separate bundle, you could deploy a new service-implementation for A in a separate bundle, with a higher priority, and rewire all uses of the service. Which typically is rather confusing, so it's a distant second place recommendation.
Edit: You comment that you are combining services in a bundle to minimize the number of jars, but you want to update the services independently. Specifically for minimizing the number of jars: Are you trying to solve a problem that you indeed had? I'm mainly working with Liferay, which is fully OSGi, and a plain vanilla installation comes with more than 1000 bundles - the runtime handles it just fine. Make sure you're not preemptively optimizing something that doesn't need optimization.
If your components have different maintenance intervals, then deploy them in different bundles. Period. No use working against the system, which has no problem with the number of bundles at all.

Looking for help on how to manage microservices in Golang

Currently, I deal with microservices on a daily basis at my 9-5. Most everything that I touch is written in PHP, and as only a software engineer, SysOps manages everything that has to do with apps running, etc. I have a little familiarity in how the infrastructure and build pipeline is setup, but I still am not a SysOps or DevOps guy.
With that said, I love Golang and for a side project, I am creating a fairly large web application with a lot of moving parts. Writing and designing the code is easy as I have learned a lot from my day job, but deploying and managing Golang web apps (as they are executables) is quite different than updating files for apache to serve.
I have researched a lot on how I would build and deploy my microservice apps, but I keep on thinking of more problems that will need to be solved along the way. I have tinkered with the idea of using Docker for all of this, but I would rather not have the added complexity of learning that and managing storage for all of the images as that could be large.
Is there a best practice or a good way to manage Golang applications after they have been deployed? I would need a way to keep track of all the microservice processes to be able to see if they are still up and to be able to stop them when a new build is going to be deployed.
As for the setup, just assume that all the microservices will be run on the server, not in a container or in a VM. They will all need to be managed, but also able to act upon independently. Jenkins will be used for building and deploying. I will be using Consul for service discovery and possibly configuration, and most likely health checks on the services. I'm thinking of having each microservice register itself to consul when started and deregister when stopping.
Again, I am looking for a solution that is hopefully not just "Docker". I also had thoughts into creating a deploy service that manages the services (add and remove), as well as registering them in Consul. So if I cannot find a better solution, I might go that path. Any help is appreciated.
** Sorry if my question was confusing, but since a couple people answered on the wrong topic at hand, I will try to clarify. I don't need any help making the microservices, or even know anything about them. I brought that point up as to why I need to ask my question. Basically what I need is just the ability to manage the running go processes of all my microservices so I can do deployments and be able to stop and start processes to update the code. It is easier when you have to worry about one app, but when you can have up to 10-15 difference microservices they become harder to keep track of. After my own research, it seems that Supervisord is what I am looking for, but I'm not sure. That is the direction I am going in with this question. Thanks.
Golang is great to use for microservices, but I would say there is not so big difference of managing golang or other languages microservices.
What I would say is golang specific:
you don't need to install anything on servers since golang is compiled to single library
you can take advantage of std lib golang rpc package and gob binary decoding, instead of usin 3rd party solution (gorpc, protocol buffer etc)
Other than that you need to use your own judgement. There is plenty of ways of doing one things in microservices world; one day you will implement solution A but when after 3 month you will see that its better to do B, do that.
In internet, there is so much reading about microservices. I will recommend you 2 good resurces: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Building_Microservices.html?id=RDl4BgAAQBAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y&hl=en
And article: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/4/8/microservices-not-a-free-lunch.html
Remember, microservices are not a golden bullet, they often can help making application easier to maintain and grow, but from the other side require lot of additional work, consequence in specifying API contracts and strong devops culture.

XPC service(s) to handle multiple loadable bundles in a sandbox app

I have a sandbox app which accepts third-party made plugins, multiple plugins at the same time could be connected. I'd like to use XPC service(s) to create another layer of security for those bundles and just in case if one of them crashes I'd like to continue using others without this one.
I am using NSXPCConnection, but the problem is I cannot create multiple instances of this thing at the same time. All instances mess up with each other. I don't want one service instance to handle all the bundles, because if I have a problem with one than I would have to restart whole thing. And I don't want to create a bunch of service duplicates in the project just to do the same thing by using the different service name.
So maybe there is another way to do this, maybe even there is a proper way, please help

ServiceMix and clustering

First of all I've read this post and it partially answered my question but here's my dilemma: I'd like to install ServiceMix on two different machines, and I want them to be working on failover. Which means if one instance dies for whatever reason the other one takes over control, and if I have to install a third instance of ServiceMix it would be easy to do so.
What I'm planning on installing and using is basically : Camel (with Jetty extension), ActiveMQ, Karaf, hawt.io and webconsole.
So basically what I want to do is to have the same bundles in both OSGis, same configuration for both instances, when I change something on one it gets propagated to the second.
Any Idea on how I could get that done? Thank you in advance.
You have to experiment a bit, but I think it is a reachable task.
First of all for the propagation Task you'll need to use the Apache Karaf Cellar clustering solution, it will help you propagate all your changes throughout your Cluster-Group. Second you'll need to configure a fail-over mechanism as described in the documentation. For this you most likely need to switch to Container-level locking. The crucial part is to make sure all your own bundles aren't stopped while the Karaf Cellar ones are already working. You might need to tweak the startlevels for your own apps and the default startlevel a bit.

How to provision OSGi services per client

We are developing a web-application (lets call it an image bank) for which we have identified the following needs:
The application caters customers which consist of a set of users.
A new customer can be created dynamically and a customer manages it's users
Customers have different feature sets which can be changed dynamically
Customers can develop their own features and have them deployed.
The application is homogeneous and has a current version, but version lifting of customers can still be handled individually.
The application should be managed as a whole and customers share the resources which should be easy to scale.
Question: Should we build this on a standard OSGi framework or would we be better of using one of the emerging application frameworks (Virgo, Aries or upcoming OSGi standard)?
More background and some initial thoughts:
We're building a web-app which we envision will soon have hundreds of customers (companies) with hundreds of users each (employees), otherwise why bother ;). We want to make it modular hence OSGi. In the future customers themselves might develop and plugin components to their application so we need customer isolation. We also might want different customers to get different feature sets.
What's the "correct" way to provide different service implementations to different clients of an application when different clients share the same bundles?
We could use the app-server approach (we've looked at Virgo) and load each bundle once for each customer into their own "app". However it doesn't feel like embracing OSGi. We're not hosting a multitude of applications, 99% of the services will share the same impl. for all customers. Also we want to manage (configure, monitor etc.) the application as one.
Each service could be registered (properly configured) once for each customer along with some "customer-token" property. It's a bit messy and would have to be handled with an extender pattern or perhaps a ManagedServiceFactory? Also before registering a service for customer A one will need to acquire the A-version of each of it's dependencies.
The "current" customer will be known to each request and can be bound to the thread. It's a bit of a mess having to supply a customer-token each time you search for a service. It makes it hard to use component frameworks like blueprint. To get around the problem we could use service hooks to proxy each registered service type and let the proxy dispatch to the right instance according to current customer (thread).
Beginning our whole OSGi experience by implementing the workaround (hack?) above really feels like an indication we're on the wrong path. So what should we do? Go back to Virgo? Try something similar to what's outlined above? Something completely different?!
ps. Thanks for reading all the way down here! ;)
There are a couple of aspects to a solution:
First of all, you need to find a way to configure the different customers you have. Building a solution on top of ConfigurationAdmin makes sense here, because then you can leverage the existing OSGi standard as much as possible. The reason you might want to build something on top is that ConfigurationAdmin allows you to configure each individual service, but you might want to add a layer on top so you can more conveniently configure your whole application (the assembly of bundles) in one go. Such a configuration can then be translated into the individual configurations of the services.
Adding a property to services that have customer specific implementations makes a lot of sense. You can set them up using a ManagedServiceFactory, and the property makes it easy to lookup the service for the right customer using a filter. You can even define a fallback scenario where you either look for a customer specific service, or a generic one (because not all services will probably be customer specific). Since you need to explicitly add such filters to your dependencies, I'd recommend taking an existing dependency management solution and extending it for your specific use case so dependencies automatically add the right customer specific filters without you having to specify that by hand. I realize I might have to go into more detail here, just let me know...
The next question then is, how to keep track of the customer "context" within your application. Traditionally there are only a few options here, with a thread local context being the most used one. Binding threads to customers does tend to limit you in terms of implementation options though, as in general it probably means you have to prohibit developers from creating threads themselves, and it's hard to off-load certain tasks to pools of worker threads. It gets even worse if you ever decide to use Remote Services as that means you will completely loose the context.
So, for passing on the customer identification from one component to another, I personally prefer a solution where:
As soon as the request comes in (for example in your HTTP servlet) somehow determine the customer ID.
Explicitly pass on that ID down the chain of service dependencies.
Only use solutions like the use of thread locals within the borders of a single bundle, if for example you're using a third party library inside your bundle that needs this to keep track of the customer.
I've been thinking about this same issue (I think) for some time now, and would like your opinions on the following analogy.
Consider a series of web application where you provide access control using a single sign-on (SSO) infrastructure. The user authenticates once using the SSO-server, and - when a request comes in - the target web application asks the SSO server whether the user is (still) authenticated and determines itself if the user is authorized. The authorization information might also be provided by the SSO server as well.
Now think of your application bundles as mini-applications. Although they're not web applications, would it still not make sense to have some sort of SSO bundle using SSO techniques to do authentication and to provide authorization information? Every application bundle would have to be developed or configured to use the SSO bundle to validate the authentication (SSO token), and validate authorization by asking the SSO bundle if the user is allowed to access this application bundle.
The SSO bundle maintains some sort of session repository, and also provides user properties, e.g. information to identify the data repository (of some sort) of this user. This way you also wouldn't pass trough a (meaningful) "customer service token", but rather a cryptic SSO-token that is supplied and managed by the SSO bundle.
Please not that Virgo is an OSGi container based on Equinox, so if you don't want to use some Virgo-specific feature, you don't have to. However, you'll get lots of benefits if you do use Virgo, even for a basic OSGi application. It sounds, though, like you want web support, which comes out of the box with Virgo web server and will save you the trouble of cobbling it together yourself.
Full disclosure: I lead the Virgo project.

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