I'm developing my first application for Play! 2.0 framework. It feels really nice, love akka actors but one thing I'm looking for is something where I could hook some performance metrics on. What I'm looking for is Rails notifications like API or something like Twitter's finagle offers (look for curl command used to retrieve stats.txt).
Is there anything baked in in Play! 2.0? or should I start cooking something on my own? If there isn't anything ready - any pointers and tips are welcome!
The official way of getting Akka performance metrics is the following: http://typesafe.com/products/console
While I have not used it in a Play! scala app, I've been a big fan of Newrelic for all the performance metrics in production. That said, I do not think it'd be any different with a Play! war. It will give you basic metrics with a free account. For most of my scala apps I use the newrelic annotations to collect metrics around a particular method that I'd want to track in detail - I've seen newrelic give much detailed results with Java than Scala, hence the annotations.
There is a statsd play2 plugin: https://github.com/typesafehub/play-plugins/tree/master/statsd
Or Codahale's Metrics Play2 plugin: https://github.com/kenshoo/metrics-play
I'm looking at the metrics one to provide JMX data out at the moment although if statsd is an option, you might want to look at that first.
Related
I have a mobile app where the back-end is currently running as a NodeJS Cloud Function, but I'm nowhere near as comfortable with NodeJS as I am with Java. So, I've re-written the API in Java - however, when it comes to deploying that as a Cloud Function or on Cloud Run the cold-start performance is obviously not very good. I'm seeing roundabouts 15 second cold-start time when I add in the dependencies that I need, which is not going to work. I do have a "warmup" endpoint that I call immediately when a user logs into the mobile app to kick off the initialization of the API back-end, which does help a little.
I've been playing around with GraalVM and generating a native image for a while as well, and while I can get your basic hello-world app and some slightly more elaborate examples working, my app has some dependencies like gRPC and Cloud Firestore, among others, and I have not been successful in generating a native image for that with Micronaut, Quarkus, or Spring Boot.
I considered running on a managed instance group with a minimum of 1 so there's always at least one instance up and running, ready to serve requests, but I would then need a Cloud Loadbalancer in front and I've read some horror stories where the Cloud Loadbalancer wound up costing folks a lot more than they had expected.
Is there a way to front a managed instance group using Cloud Endpoints? I see where you can do it with a single VM instance, but not across a group which leads me to believe that in that case I would need a Cloud Loadbalancer to do what I need?
Cost-effectiveness is important, because my app is super new and is not generating any revenue at all yet, and since it's just me funding it using personal money, my infrastructure budget is not super high :)
TL;DR/ Looking for tips on what the cheapest way would be to host a Java-based API app on a framework like Micronaut, Quarkus, or Spring Boot on GCP while maintaining good performance and elasticity.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
I wrote an article on Java framework cold start on Cloud Run (the results are outdated because after this article release and discussions with Googlers, the team has updated the Cloud Run platform and the way to manage Java containers. Now they start quickly now!)
Anyway, your question seems relevant at the beginning, but finally not really. I will explain why.
Firstly, the cold start is a temporary issue. Your first request is slow, and the dozens, hundreds after are very fast. Does it really a problem?
If so, the min instance feature (only available on CLoud Run for Anthos for now) is coming in the managed version. Like this you never really scale to 0, an instance is kept warm and start instantly (but, as counterpart, it won't be free).
Secondly, if you look for maintainability, I recommend you the framework that you know. You will be more efficient to improve your code, fix your issue and to save your time (and time is money) much more that infrastructure consideration!
All the Java framework are relatively close when optimized (Naive Spring Boot on Cloud Run start in 20s, in 2s after packaging optimizations!). Of course, native compilation (with GraalVM) is the fastest, but it's not really stable for now with several side effect (and I won't recommend it for production).
Personal opinion: I'm a big fan of Spring Boot and its ecosystem. But Micronaut and its AOT compilation, in addition of annotation compliant with Spring Boot idioms, is absolutely awesome. Quarkus is more recent, and I haven't real opinion on it (never used in production/real project)
I would say you need more Micronaut or Quarkus in combination with GraalVM if you target performance. Define your services to be run as
My experience is primary with Micornaut serverless application and it is manageable to have api service running as function/lambda with boot time of 100-500 ms. Cold starts are not a big issue anymore if you enable provisioning (feature is available since 12.2019 in AWS), you could skip the so called warming.
How to make your lambda faster ?
Keep your package size as small a possible (remove all big libraries where a fraction of it is used) - keep package size to max 20 MB. On every cold start this package is fetched and decompressed.
If you use a JVM technology for your services, try to migrate them to Graalvm where the boot-up overhead is reduced to minimum.
micronaut + graalvm
quarkus + graalvm
helidon + graalvm
Use cloud infrastructure configs to reduce the cold starts.
This is what AWS provides, not sure about GPC
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/aws-lambda-announces-provisioned-concurrency/
Note: IMHO AWS has a better setup for serverless application so far compared to GCP in terms of boot-up and cold starts.
Lagom by default uses Google Guice as implementation od DI pattern.
I would like to use Spring Framework instead.
Is it possible? IF so, how should it be done?
I have successfully integrated Akka with Spring (using hints from documentation and Internet), however I cannot find anything in documentation about integrating with Spring.
Possible? Yes. Will you be constantly swimming upstream, with reach upgrade break in new and unexpected ways requiring you to debug undocumented internal APIs? Most probably.
Lagom is built on Play, Play's DI support is ostensibly pluggable, when I wrote it I hacked together a proof of concept to ensure that Spring could be plugged into it. But it was only ever a proof of concept, neither I or the Play team ever had any desire or intention of maintaining it, so I published my work to GitHub:
https://github.com/jroper/play-spring
So that anyone for whom Spring support was important could continue where I left off. That was 3 years ago. In spite of a community of over a hundred thousand developers, no one ever took the work up. There's not a lot of work to do on the module itself, where most of the work would be is in Play and Lagom to fix areas where they have grown incompatible with Spring.
But really, why do you want to use Spring? The whole Lagom and Play ecosystems are built on Guice, saying you want to use Spring with Lagom is like saying you want to use a narrow gauge train in a country that only has standard guage rails, you're going to have to build yourself an entire new rail system to do so. What do you hope to achieve?
I have a web service written in scala and built on top of twitter finagle RPC system. Now we are hitting some performance issues. We have external API components and database layer.
I am planning of installing Zipkin in order to have a service level tracing system. This will allow me to know where the bottleneck is at the service level.
I am wondering though if there are framework out there to monitor the performance inside my application layer. The application is a suite of filters that are applied consecutively to my data and I would like to know which filter take time to compute. I heard about JVM profiling but it seems a little overkill for what I want to do. What would you recommend ? Thanks for your help.
Well before starting digging into JVM stuff or setting up all the infrastructure needed by Zipkin you could simply start by measuring some application-level metrics.
You could try the library metrics via this scala api.
Basically you manually set up counters and gauges at specific points of your application that will help you diagnose your bottleneck problem.
I'm looking to make a website that will probably get some heavy, repetitive traffic. Is grails up to the task?
I agree with lael, also because it's built on java technologies there are a lot of proven clustering and 'enterprisey' tools available which allow you to easily scale across multiple application services.
The cloud tools around Grails are also becoming very good and make deploying to a cloud like EC2 very easy. I've recently been using Cloud Foundry and found it very good.
As the first poster points out however, you can write a badly performing application in any framework/language. One thing I'd recommend is getting a good understanding of Hibernate which is the underlying persistence library. If you understand how that works, it should help you avoid making any silly mistakes at the DB level. On this side of things, a tool like p6spy is great for checking what the database is up to during normal use. It should help you spot any repetitive queries.
The scalability of your web application won't really depend on what language/framework you choose to use, but rather how your application is built. You can build a scalable web application in Grails, just as you can build an incredibly slow application in C++. If Grails is the framework you would like to use, then use it; you can always rewrite the slow parts in Java or another fast language, if need be. (After all, that's what Twitter did with Scala.)
Disclaimer: I've never actually used Grails.
Grails is essentially a thin layer on top of the Spring Framework, which many consider to be a very scalable framework in the enterprise world. Spring + Hibernate has become a standard in many Java shops around the globe.
If you run into performance bottlenecks in Groovy, you can always rewrite those parts in Java.
Take a look at the Success Stories for examples of sites that were written in Grails. The Testamonials are also a good place to look for examples. You will use a little more memory(heap and permgen) than a vanilla Java app, but you can tune it just like you would any other Java application.
On the low end you aren't going to find $3/month Hosting options that you could with PHP stack (for example). That said, there are some good caching solutions for Grails apps EhCache, MemCache, etc. Beyond that you can also setup an Apache layer to caches static resources or whatever you need.
Don't mean to pile on here. You've already got some great answers but I just want to add on thing that I was reminded of recently. Scalability depends not only on the software you write (regardless of language/framework) but also on the deployment environment. A very well written application deployed on an undersized or poorly configured server will not scale at all. If you do use Grails or any other Java based framework, the default settings on your container (Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) will probably not be what you need.
Just something to keep in mind,
Dave
Grails run on the JVM. Simply put, you will not find a more scalable, solid and robust runtime platform than the JVM, anywhere. That's Grails's big advantage over, say, PHP or RoR.
Does anybody has an experience with Spring Integration project as embedded ESB?
I'm highly interesting in such use cases as:
Reading files from directory on schedule basis
Getting data from JDBC data source
Modularity and possibility to start/stop/redeploy module on the fly (e.g. one module can scan directory on schedule basis, another call query from jdbc data source etc.)
repeat/retry policy
UPDATE:
I found answers on all my questions except "Getting data from JDBC data source". Is it technically possible?
Remember, "ESB" is just a marketing term designed to sell more expensive software, it's not a magic bullet. You need to consider the specific jobs you need your software to do, and pick accordingly. If Spring Integration seems to fit the bill, I wouldn't be too concerned if it doesn't look much like an uber-expensive server installation.
The Spring Integration JDBC adapters are available in 2.0, and we just released GA last week. Here's the relevant section from the reference manual: http://static.springsource.org/spring-integration/docs/latest-ga/reference/htmlsingle/#jdbc
This link describes the FileSucker with Spring Integration. Read up on your Enterprise Integration patterns for more info I think.
I kinda think you need to do a bit more investigation your self, or do a couple of tries on some of your usecases. Then we can discuss whats good and bad
JDBC Adapters appear to be a work in progress.
Even if there is no specific adapter available, remember that Spring Integration is a thin wrapper around POJOs. You'll be able to access JDBC in any component e.g. your service activators.
See here for a solution based on a polling inbound channel adapter too.