talkbits service architecture and deployment

Talkbits service architecture and deployment.

by Aleksei Kornev

Get stuff done...

Typical application

Architecture of talkbits service

One way to configure service, logs, metrics.

One way to package and deploy service.

One way to lunch service.

Bundled in one-jar.

One delivery unit. Contains:

Java service

In a single executable fat-jar.

Installation script

[Re]installs service on the machine, registers it in /etc/init.d

Init.d script

Contains instructions to start, stop, restart JVM and get quick status.

Delivery

Logging

Confuguration

• SLF4J as an API, all other libraries redirected

• Logback as a logging implementation

• Each service logs to /var/log/talkbits/... (application logs, GC logs)

• Daily rotation policy applied

• Also sent to loggly.com for aggregation, grouping etc.

Aggregation

• loggly.com

• sshfs for analyzing logs by means of linux tools such as grep, tail, less, etc.

Aggregation alternatives

Splunk.com, Flume, Scribe, etc...

Metrics

Application metrics and health checks are implemented with CodaHale lib (metrics.codahale.com). Codahale reports metrics via JMX.

Jolokia JVM agent (www.jolokia.org/agent/jvm.html) exposes JMX beans via REST (JSON / HTTP), using JVMs internal HTTP server.

Monitoring agent use jolokia REST interface to fetch metrics and send them to monitoring system.

All metrics are divided into common metrics (HW, JVM, etc) and service-specific metrics.

Deployment

Fabric (http://fabfile.org) used for environments provisioning and services deployment.

Process

• Fabric script provisions new env (or uses existing) by cluster scheme

• Amazon instances are automatically tagged with services list (i.e., instance roles)

• Fabric script reads instance roles and deploys (redeploys) appropriate components.

MonitoringAs monitoring platform we chose Datadoghq.com. Datadog is a SaaS which is easy to integrate into your infrastucture. Datadog agent is opensourced and implemented in Python. There are many predefined checksets (plugins, or integrations) for popular products out of the box - including JVM, Cassandra, Zookeeper and ElasticSearch.

Datadog provides REST API.

Alternatives

• Nagios, Zabbix - need to have bearded admin in team. We wanted to go SaaS and outsource infrastructure as far as possible.

• Amazon CloudWatch, LogicMonitor, ManageEngine, etc.

Process

Each service has own monitoring agent instance on a single machine. If node has 'monitoring-agent' role in the roles tag of EC2 instance, monitoring agent will be installed for each service on this node.

Talkbits cluster structure

QA

Aleksei Kornevaleksei.kornev@gmail.com

Max Alexejevmalexejev@gmail.com