Development

How to deploy single-node Hadoop setup in AWS

2015/02/04 AWS, Big Data, Development, DevOps, Operations No comments , , , , , ,

Common issue in the Software Development Lifecycle is the need to quickly bootstrap vanilla environment, deploy some code onto it, run it and then scrap it. This is a core concept in Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). It is a stepping stone towards immutable infrastructure. Properly automated implementation can also save time (no need to configure it manually) and money (no need to track potential regression issues in the development process).

Over the course of several years, found this to be extremely useful when used in BigData projects that use Hadoop. Installation of Hadoop is not always straight-forward. It depends on various internal and external components (JDK, Map-Reduce Framework, HDFS, etc). It can be messy. Different components communicate over various ports and protocols. HDFS uses somewhat clumsy semantics to deal with files and directories. For those and similar reasons we decided to present our take on Hadoop installation on a single node for development purposes.

The following shell script is simplified, fully functional skeleton implementation that will install Hadoop on a c3.xlarge, Fedora 20 node in AWS and run a test job on it:

Additional notes:

  • Please, edit the AWS_PROFILE variable. AWS CLI commands depend on this!
  • Activity log is kept in /tmp/test-hadoop-setup.log and will be recreated with every new run of the script.
  • In case of normal execution, all allocated resources will be cleaned upon termination.
  • This script is ready to be used as Jenkins build-and-deploy job.
  • Since the single-node Hadoop/HDFS is terminated, output data that goes to HDFS should be transferred out of the instance before termination!

Example run should look like:

Hopefully, this short introduction will advance your efforts to automate development tasks in BigData projects!

If you want to discuss more complex scenarios including automated deployments over multi-node Hadoop clusters, AWS Elastic MapReduce, AWS DataPipeline or other components of the BigData ecosystem, do not hesitate to Contact Us!

References

UserData Template for Ubuntu 14.04 EC2 Instances in AWS

2015/01/27 AWS, Development, DevOps, Operations No comments , , , ,

In any elastic environment there is a recurring issue: How to quickly spin up new boxes? Over time multiple options emerge. Many environments will rely on a pre-baked machine instances. In Amazon AWS those are called Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs), in Joyent’s SDC – images, but no matter the name they present pre-build, (mostly) pre-configured digital artifact that the underlying cloud layer will bootstrap and execute. They are fast to bootstrap, but limited. Hard to manage different versions, hard to switch virtualization technologies (PV vs. HVM, AWS vs. Joyent, etc), hard to deal with software versioning. Managing elastic environment with pre-baked images is probably the fastest way to start, but probably the most expensive way in the long run.

Another option is to use some sort of configuration management system. Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible … a lot of choices. Those are flexible, but depending on the usage scenarios can be slow and may require additional “interventions” to work properly. There are two additional “gotchas” that are not commonly discussed. First, those tools will force some sort in-house configuration/pseudo-programming language and terminology. Second, security is a tricky concept to implement within such system. Managing elastic environments with configuration management systems is definitely possible, but comes with some dependencies and prerequisites you should account for in the design phase.

Third option, AWS UserData / Joyent script, is a reasonable compromise. This is effectively a script that executes one upon virtual machine creation. It allows you to configure the instance, attach/configure storages, install software, etc. There are obvious benefits to that approach:

  • Treat that script like any other coding artifact, use version control, code reviews, etc;
  • It is easily modifiable upon need or request;
  • It can be used with virtually any instance type;
  • It is a single source of truth for the instance configuration;
  • It integrates nicely with the whole Control Plane concept.

Here is a basic template for Ubuntu 14.04 used with reasonable success to cover wide variety of deployment needs:

Trivial. Yet, incorporates a lot in just ~200 lines of code:

  1. Disk layout management;
  2. Package repositories configuration;
  3. Basic tool set and third party software installation;
  4. Service reconfiguration (NTP, Automatic security updates);
  5. System reconfiguration (limits, sysctl, users, directories, crontab);
  6. Post-reboot startup configuration;
  7. Identity discovery and self-tagging;

As added bonus, the cloud-init package will properly log all output during the script execution in /var/log/cloud-init-output.log for failure investigations. Current script uses -ex bash parameters, which means it will explicitly echo all executed commands (-x) and exit at first sign of unsuccessful command execution (-e).

NOTE: There is one important component, purposefully omitted from the template UserData, the log file management. We plan on discussing that in a separate article.

References

Small Tip: How to use –block-device-mappings to manage instance volumes with AWS CLI

2014/11/26 AWS, Development, DevOps, Operations, Small Tip , , , , ,

This post will present one of the less popular features in the AWS CLI tool set, how to deal with EC2 instance volumes through the use of –block-device-mappings parameter. Previous post, Small Tip: Use AWS CLI to create instances with bigger root partitions already presents one of the common use cases, modifying the instance root partition size. However, use of ‘–block-device-mappings’ can go far beyond this simple feature.

Default documentation (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/run-instances.html) although a good start is somewhat limited. Several tips and tricks will be presented here.

The location of the JSON block device mapping specification can be quite flexible. The mappings can be supplied:

1. Using command line directly:

2. Using file as a source:

3. Using URL as a source:

Source: http://understeer.hatenablog.com/entry/2013/10/18/223618

Other common scenarios:

1. To reorder default ephemeral volumes to ensure stability of the environment:

NOTE: Useful for additional UserData processing or deployments with hardcoded settings.

2. To allocate additional EBS Volume with specific size (100GB), to be associated with the EC2 instance:

NOTE: Useful for cases where cheaper instance types are outfitted with big volumes (Disk intensive tasks run on low-CPU/MEM instance types).

3. To allocate new volume from Snapshot ID:

NOTE: Useful to pre-loading newly created instances with specific disk data and still retaining the ability to modify the local copy.

4. To omit mapping of a particular Device Name:

NOTE: Useful to overwrite default AWS behavior.

5. To allocate new EBS Volume with explicit termination behavior (Keep after instance termination):

NOTE: Useful to keep instance data after termination, additional cost may be significant if those volumes are not released after examination.

6. To allocate new, encrypted, EBS Volume with Reserved IOPS:

NOTE: Useful to set minimum required performance levels (I/O Operations Per Second) for the specified volume.

Outlined functionality should cover wide range of potentially use cases for DevOps engineers who want to use automation to customize their infrastructure. Flexible instance volume management is a key ingredient for successful implementation of the ‘Infrastructure-as-Code’ paradigm!

References

How to implement multi-cloud deployment for scalability and reliability

2014/07/18 AWS, Development, DevOps, Operations, theCloud , , , , , , , , ,

Introduction

This post will present interesting approach to scalability and reliability:

How to implement multi-cloud application deployment ?!

There are many reasons why this is interesting topic. Avoiding provider lockdown, reducing cloud provider outage impact, increasing world-wide coverage, disaster recovery / preparedness are only some of them. The obvious benefits of multi-cloud deployment are increased reliability and outage impact minimization. However, there are drawbacks too: supporting different sets of code to accommodate similar, but different services, increased cost, increased infrastructure complexity, different tools … Yet, despite the drawbacks, the possible benefits far outweigh the negatives!

In the following article a simple service will be deployed in automated fashion over two different Cloud Service Providers: Amazon AWS and Joyent. Third provider, CloudFlare, will be used to service DNS requests. The choice of providers is not random. They are chosen because of particular similarities and because the ease of use. All of those providers have consistent, comprehensive APIs that allow automation through programming in parallel to the command line tools.

Preliminary information

The service setup, described here, although synthetic, is representative of multiple usage scenarios. More complex scenarios are also possible. Special care should be taken to address use of common resources or non-replicable resources/states. Understand the dependencies of your application architecture before using multi-cloud setup. Or contact Xi Group Ltd. to aid you in this process!

The following Cloud Service Providers will be used to deploy executable code on:

DNS requests will be served by CloudFlare. The test domain is: scalability.expert

Required tools are:

Additional information can be found in AWS CLI, Joyent CloudAPI Documentation and CloudFlare ClientAPI.

Implementation Details

A service, website for www.scalability.expert, has to be deployed over multiple clouds. For simplicity, it is assumed that this is a static web site, served by NginX. It will run on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Instance types chosen in both AWS and Joyent are pretty limited, but should provide enough computing power to run NginX and serve static content. CloudFlare must be configured with basic settings for the DNS zone it will serve (in this case, the free CloudFlare account is used).

Each computing instance, when bootstrapped or restarted, will start the NginX and register itself in CloudFlare. At that point it should be able to receive client traffic. Upon termination or shutdown, each instance should remove its own entries from CloudFlare thus preventing DNS zone pollution with dead entries. In a previous article, How to implement Service Discovery in the Cloud, it was discussed how DNS-SD can be implemented for similar setup with increased client complexity. In a multi-tier architecture this a proper solution. However, lack of control over the client browser may prove that a simplistic solution, like the one described here, is a better choice.

CloudFlare

CloudFlare setup uses the free account and one domain, scalability.expert, is configured:

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 1.18.32 PM

Basic configuration includes only one entry for the zone name:

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 1.19.03 PM

As seen by the orange cloud icon, the requests for this record will be routed through CloudFlare’s network for inspection and analysis!

AWS UserData / Joyent Script

To automate the process of configuring instances, the following UserData script will be used:

This UserData script contains three components:

  1. Lines 0 – 62: Boilerplate, OS update, installation and configuration of NginX;

  2. Lines 64 – 215: cloudflare-submit.sh, main script that will be called on startup and shutdown of the instance. cloudflare-submit.sh will register the instance’s public IP address with CloudFlare and set required protection. By default, protection and acceleration is off. Additional configuration is required to make this script work for your setup, account details must be configured in the specified variables!

  3. Lines 217 – 228: Setting proper script permissions, configuring automatic start of cloudflare-submit.sh and executing it to register with CloudFlare.

Code is reasonably straight-forward. init.d startup script is divided to multiple functions and output is redirected to a log file for debugging purposes. External dependencies are kept to a minimum. Distinguishing between AWS EC2 and Joyent instances is done by analyzing the instance ID. In AWS, all EC2 instances have instance IDs starting with ‘i-‘, while Joyent uses (by the looks of it) some sort of UUID. This part of the logic is particularly important if the code should be extended to support other cloud providers!

Both AWS and Joyent offer Ubuntu 14.04 support, so the same code can be use to configure the instances in automated fashion. This is particularly handy when it comes to data driven instance management and the DRY principle. Command line tools for both cloud providers also offer similar syntax, which makes it easier to utilize this functionality.

Amazon AWS

Staring new instances within Amazon AWS is straight-forward, assuming awscli is properly configured:

Joyent

Starting news instances within Joyent is somewhat more complex, but there is comprehensive documentation:

This particular example will start new SmartMachine instance using the 4dad8aa6-2c7c-e20a-be26-c7f4f1925a9a package (g3-devtier-0.25-kvm, 3rd generation, virtual machine (KVM) with 256MB RAM) and 286b0dc0-d09e-43f2-976a-bb1880ebdb6c (ubuntu-certified-14.04) image. SSH key details are supplied through the specific combinations of Web-interface settings and SSH key signature. For the list of available packages (instance types) and images (software stacks) consult the API: ListPackages, ListImages.

NOTE: Joyent offers rich Metadata support, which can be quite flexible tool when managing large number of instances!

Successful service configuration

Successful service configuration will result in proper DNS entries to be added to the scalability.expert DNS zone in CloudFlare:

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 4.12.43 PM

After configured TTL, those should be visible world-wide:

As seen, both AWS (54.83.175.90) and Joyent (165.225.137.102) IP addresses are returned, i.e. DNS Round-Robin. Service can simply be tested with:

Resulting calls can be seen in the NginX log files on both instances:

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 5.30.50 PM

NOTE: CloudFlare protection and acceleration features are explicitly disabled in this example! It is strongly suggested to enabled them for production purposes!

Conclusion

It should be clear now, that whenever software architecture follows certain design principles and application is properly decoupled in multiple tiers, the whole system can be deployed within multiple cloud providers. DevOps principles for automated deployment can be implemented in this environment as well. The overall system is with improved scalability, reliability and in case of data driven elastic deployments, even cost! Proper design is key, but the technology provided by companies like Amazon and Joyent make it easier to turn whiteboard drawings into actual systems with hundreds of nodes!

References

Small Tip: AWS announces T2 instance types

2014/07/04 AWS, Development, DevOps, Operations, Small Tip , , , , , , ,

One of the oldest and probably one of the most popular instance types, the t1.micro was recently upgraded by AWS. Three new instance types were introduced to fill the gap between t1.micro and the current-next, m3.medium. The new generation is called T2, uses only HVM based virtualization and comes with EBS only store support. There are three new instance types:

  1. t2.micro
  2. t2.small
  3. t2.medium

Those instance types are all “Burstable Performance Instances” which means they are suitable for unsustained loads. This is also supported by the EBS Only store, which effectively means that high-volume I/O is out of the question. The fact that those instances are all using HVM-based virtualization, however, supports quick SCALE-UP to more potent instance types, if needs arise. One notable remark here is that T2 instances are VPC-only, which is a strong indication of the will to move everything into VPCs nowadays. AWS wants you to start using VPCs from the start!

The instance resource matrix now looks like this:

Instance Type Virtualization Type CPU Cores Memory Storage
t1.micro PV 1 0.613 GB EBS Only
t2.micro HVM 1 1 GB EBS Only
m1.small PV 1 1.7 GB EBS Only
t2.small HVM 1 2 GB EBS Only
m3.medium HVM 1 3.75 GB EBS + SSD
t2.medium HVM 2 4 GB EBS Only

As stated by AWS, the target uses for the new, T2 instance type family, includes:

  • Development environments;
  • Private experimentation;
  • Educational use;
  • Build servers / Code repositories;
  • Low-traffic web applications;
  • Small databases.

To evaluate the meaning of “Burstable Performance Instances“, here are CPU benchmark results on several instance instance types:

Instance Type DES crypts/s MD5 crypts/s Blowfish crypts/s Generic crypts/s
t1.micro ~ 2 407 000 ~ 6 869 ~ 442 ~ 187 257
t2.micro ~ 4 757 000 ~ 14 164 ~ 851 ~ 344 928
m1.small ~ 1 218 000 ~ 3 480 ~ 222 ~ 92 870
t2.small ~ 4 993 000 ~ 14 245 ~ 854 ~ 347 961
m3.medium ~ 2 272 000 ~ 6 429 ~ 386 ~ 158 342
t2.medium ~ 5 045 000 ~ 14 592 ~ 878 ~ 356 544

All instances use detault settings for storage, Amazon Linux AMI 2014.03.2, John The Ripper 1.8.0, measuring real crypts with many salts! The test is fairly synthetic, but answers the key question: What difference does it make to have a Burstable instance type? And the answer: If CPU load is not sustainable, it’s more than twice as fast!

Price-wise the new instance types are also better. Cost reduction of On Demand prices of more than 35% allows you to run t2.micro for less than 10 USD/m! Watch out, DigitalOcean! Obviously, Amazon wants change the already established “AWS for business, DigitalOcean for home” mantra into “AWS Everywhere”.

In conclusion, the new, T2 instance type family, closes the gap between unacceptably low performance instance type (t1.micro) and too expensive instances types (m1.small, m3.medium) which creates the sweet-spot for entry users, cloud enthusiast and home users. As someone said: “Now you have an instance type to run WordPress on!”

DevOps Shell Script Template

2014/07/03 Development, DevOps, Operations No comments , , , , ,

In everyday life of a DevOps engineer you will have to create multiple pieces of code. Some of those will be run once, others … well others will live forever. Although it may be compelling to just put all the commands in a text editor, save the result and execute it, one should always consider the “bigger picture”. What will happen if your script is run on another OS, on another Linux distribution, or even on a different version of the same Linux distribution?! Another point of view is to think what will happen if somehow your neat 10-line-script has to be executed on say 500 servers?! Can you be sure that all the commands will run successfully there? Can you even be sure that all the commands will even be present? Usually … No!

Faced with similar problems on a daily basis we started devising simple solutions and practices to address them. One of those is the process of standardizing the way different utilities behave, the way they take arguments and report errors. Upon further investigation it became clear that a pattern can be extracted and synthesized in a series of template, one can use in daily work to keep common behavior between different utilities and components.

Here is the basic template used in shell scripts:

Nothing fancy. Basic framework that does the following:

  1. Lines 3 – 13: Make sure basic documentation, dependency list and example usage patterns are provided with the script itself;
  2. Lines 15 – 16: Define meaningful return codes to allow other utils to identify possible execution problems and react accordingly;
  3. Lines 18 – 27: Basic help/usage() function to provide the user with short guidance on how to use the script;
  4. Lines 29 – 52: Dependency checks to make sure all utilities the script needs are available and executable in the system;
  5. Lines 54 – 77: Argument parsing of everything passed on the command line that supports both short and long argument names;
  6. Lines 79 – 91: Validity checks of the argument values that should make sure arguments are passed contextually correct values;
  7. Lines 95 – N: Actual programming logic to be implemented …

This template is successfully used in a various scenarios: command line utilities, Nagios plugins, startup/shutdown scripts, UserData scripts, daemons implemented in shell script with the help of start-stop-daemon, etc. It is also used to allow deployment on multiple operating systems and distribution versions. Resulting utilities and system components are more resilient, include better documentation and dependency sections, provide the user with similar and intuitive way to get help or pass arguments. Error handling is functional enough to go beyond the simple OK / ERROR state. And all of those are important feature when components must be run in highly heterogenous environments such as most cloud deployments!

Small Tip: How to run non-deamon()-ized processes in the background with SupervisorD

2014/06/26 Development, DevOps, Operations, Small Tip , , , , , , , ,

The following article will demonstrate how to use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and SupervisorD to manage the not-so-uncommon case of long running services that expect to be running in active console / terminal. Those are usually quickly / badly written pieces of code that do not use daemon(), or equivalent function, to properly go into background but instead run forever in the foreground. Over the years multiple solutions emerged, including quite the ugly ones (nohup … 2>&1 logfile &). Luckily, there is a better one, and it’s called SupervisorD. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS it even comes as a package and it should be part of your DevOps arsenal of tools!

In a typical Python / Web-scale environment multiple components will be implemented in a de-coupled, micro-services, REST-based architecture. One of the popular frameworks for REST is Bottle. And there are multiple approaches to build services with Bottle when full-blown HTTP Server is available (Apache, NginX, etc.) or if performance matters. All of those are valid and somewhat documented. But still, there is the case (and it more common than one would think) when developer will create Bottle server to handle simple task and it will propagate into production, using ugly solution like Screen/TMUX or even nohup. Here is a way to put this under proper control.

Test Server code: test-server.py

Test server configuration file: test-server.conf

Manual execution of the server code will looks like this:

When the controlling terminal is lost the server will be terminated. Obviously, this is neither acceptable, nor desirable behavior.

With SupervisorD (sudo aptitude install supervisor) the service can be properly managed using simple configuration file.

Example SupervisorD configuration file: /etc/supervisor/conf.d/test-server.conf

To start the service, execute:

To verify successful service start:

SupervisorD will redirect stdout and stderr to properly named log files:

Those log files can be integrated with a centralized logging architecture or processed for error / anomaly detection separately.

SupervisorD also comes with handy, command-line control utility, supervisorctl:

With some additional effort SupervisorD can react to various types of events (http://supervisord.org/events.html) which bring it one step closer to full process monitoring & notification solution!

References

How to implement Service Discovery in the Cloud

2014/06/17 AWS, Development, DevOps, theCloud No comments , , , , , , , ,

Introduction

Service Discovery is not new technology. Unfortunately, it is barely understood and rarely implemented. It is a problem that many system architects face and it is key to multiple desirable qualities of a modern, cloud enabled, elastic distributed system such as reliability, availability, maintainability. There are multiple ways to approach service discovery:

  • Hardcode service locations;
  • Develop proprietary solution;
  • Use existing technology.

Hardcoding is still the common case. How often do you encounter hardcoded URLs in configuration files?! Developing proprietary solution becomes popular too. Multiple companies decided to address Service Discovery by implementing some sort of distributed key-value store. Amongst the popular ones: Etsy’s etcd, Heroku’s Doozer, Apache ZooKeeper, Google’s Chubby. Even Redis can used for such purposes. But for many cases additional software layers and programming complexity is not needed. There is already existing solution based on DNS. It is called DNS-SD and is defined in RFC6763.

DNS-SD utilizes PTR, SRV and TXT DNS records to provide flexible service discovery. All major DNS implementations support it. All major cloud providers support it. DNS is well established technology, well understood by both Operations and Development personnel with strong support in programming languages and libraries. It is highly-available by replication.

How does DNS-SD work?

DNS-SD uses three DNS records types: PTR, SRV, TXT:

  • PTR record is defined in RFC1035 as “domain name pointer”. Unlike CNAME records no processing of the contents is performed, data is returned directly.
  • SRV record is defined in RFC2782 as “service locator”. It should provide protocol agnostic way to locate services, in contrast to the MX records. It contains four components: priority, weight, port and target.
  • TXT record is defined in RFC1035 as “text string”.

There are multiple specifics around protocol and service naming conventions that are beyond the scope of this post. For more information please refer to RFC6763. For the purposes of this article, it is assumed that a proprietary TCP-based service, called theService that has different reincarnations runs on TCP port 4218 on multiple hosts. The basic idea is:

  1. Create a pointer record for _theSerivce that contains all available incarnations of the service;
  2. For each incarnation create SRV record (where the service is located) and TXT record (any additional information for the client) that specify the service details.

This is what sample configuration looks like in AWS Route53 for the unilans.net. domain:
Screen Shot 2014-06-14 at 10.41.42 PM

Using nslookup results can be verified:

Now a client that wants to use incarnation1 of theService has means to access it (Host: host1.unilans.net, Port: 4218).

Load-balaing can be implementing by adding another entry in the service locator record with the same priority and weight:
Screen Shot 2014-06-14 at 10.42.28 PM

Resulting DNS lookup:

In a similar way, fail-over can be implemented by using different priority (or load distribution using different weights):
Screen Shot 2014-06-14 at 10.54.41 PM

Resulting DNS lookup:

NOTE: With DNS the client is the one to implement the load-balacing or the fail-over (although there are exceptions to this rule)!

Benefits of using DNS-SD for Service Discovery

This technology can be used to support multiple version of a service. Using the built-in support for different reincarnations of the same service, versioning can be implemented in clean granular way. Common problem in REST system, usually solved by nasty URL schemes or rewriting URLs. With DNS-SD required metadata can be passed through the TXT records and multiple versions of the communication protocol can be supported, each in contained environment … No name space pollution, no clumsy URL schemes, no URL rewriting …

This technology can be utilized to reduce complexity while building distributed systems. The clients will most certainly go through the process of name resolution anyway, so why not incorporate service discover in it?! Instead of dealing with external system (installation, operation, maintenance) and all the possible issues (hard to configure, hard to maintain, immature, fault-intollerant, requires additional libraries in the codebase, etc), incorporate this with the name resolution. DNS is well supported on virtually all operating systems and with all programming languages that provide network programming abilities. System architecture complexity is reduced because subsystem that already exists is providing additional services, instead of introducing new systems.

This technology can be utilized to increase reliability / fault-tolerance. Reliability / fault-tolerance can be easily increased by serving multiple entries with the service locator records. Priority can be used by the client to go through the list of entries in controlled manner and weight to balance the load between the service providers on each priority level. The combination of backend support (control plane updating DNS-SD records) and reasonably intelligent clients (implementing service discovery and priority/weight parsing) should give granular control over the fail-over and load-balancing processes in the communication between multiple entities.

This technology supports system elasticity. Modern cloud service providers have APIs to control DNS zones. In this article, AWS Route53 will be used to demonstrate how elastic service can be introduced through DNS-SD to clients. Backend service scaling logic can modify service locator records to reflect current service state as far as DNS zone modification API is available. This is just part of the control plane for the service …

Bonus point: DNS also gives you simple, replicated key-value store through TXT records!

Implementation of Service Discovery with DNS-SD, AWS Route53, AWS IAM and AWS EC2 UserData

Following is a set of steps and sample code to implement Service Discovery in AWS, using Route53, IAM and EC2.

Manual configuration

1. Create PTR and TXT Records for theService in Route53:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 2.07.22 PM

This is a simple example for one service with one incarnation (v1).

NOTE: There is no SRV since the service is currently not running anywhere! Active service providers will create/update/delete SRV entries.

2. Create IAM role for EC2 instances to be able to modify DNS records in desired Zone:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 2.24.34 PM

Use the following policy:

… where XXXXYYYYZZZZ is your hosted zone ID!

Automated JOIN/LEAVE in service group

Manual settings, outlined in the previous section give the basic framework of the DNS-SD setup. There is no SRV record since there are no active instances providing the service. Ideally, each active service provider will register/de-register with the service when available. This is key here: DNS-SD can be integrated cleanly with the elastic nature of the cloud. Once this integration is at place, all clients will only need to resolve DNS records in order to obtain list of active service providers. For demonstration purposes the following script was created:

Copy of the code can be downloaded from https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/blog.xi-group.com/aws-route53-iam-ec2-dns-sd/dns-sd.py

This code, given DNS zone, service name and service port, will update necessary DNS records to join or leave the service group.

Starting with initial state:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 4.59.40 PM

Executing JOIN:

Result:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 4.59.07 PM

Executing LEAVE:

Result:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 4.59.40 PM

Domain-specific hostname is created, service location record (SRV) is created with proper port and hostname. When host leaves the service group, domain-specific hostname is removed, so is the entry in the SRV record, or the whole record if this is the last entry.

Fully automated setup

UserData will be used to fully automate the process. There are many options: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible and all of those can be used, but the UserData solution is with reduced complexity, no external dependencies and can be directly utilized by other AWS Services like CloudFormation, AutoScalingGroups, etc.

The full UserData content is as follows:

Copy of the code can be downloaded from https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/blog.xi-group.com/aws-route53-iam-ec2-dns-sd/userdata.sh

Starting 3 test instances to verify functionality:

Resulting changes to Route53:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 7.21.05 PM

Three new boxes self-registered in the Service group. Stopping manually one leads to de-registration:
Screen Shot 2014-06-16 at 7.22.19 PM

Elastic systems are possible to implement with DNS-SD! Note however, that the DNS records are limited to 65536 bytes, so the amount of entries that can go into SRV record, although big, is limited!

Client code

To demonstrate DNS-SD resolution, the following sample code was created:

Copy of the code can be downloaded from https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/blog.xi-group.com/aws-route53-iam-ec2-dns-sd/client.py

Why would that be better?! Yes, there is added complexity in the name resolution process. But, more importantly, details needed to find the service are agnostic to its location, or specific to the client. Service-specific infrastructure can change, but the client will not be affected, as long as the discovery process is performed.

Sample run:

VoilĂ ! Reliable Service Discovery in elastic systems!

Additional Notes

Some additional notes and well-knowns:

  • Examples in this article could be extended to support fail-over or more sophisticated forms of load-balancing. Current random.choice() solution should be good enough for the generic case;

  • More complex setup with different priorities and weights can be demonstrated too;

  • Service health-check before DNS-SD registration can be demonstrated too;

  • Non-HTTP service can be demonstrated to use DNS-SD. Technology is application-agnostic.

  • TXT contents are not used throughout this article. Those can be used to carry additional meta-data (NOTE: This is public! Anyone can query your DNS TXT records with this setup!).

Conclusion

Quick implementation of DNS-SD with AWS Route53, IAM and EC2 was presented in this article. It can be used as a bare-bone setup that can be further extended and productized. It solves common problem in elastic systems: Service Discovery! All key components are implemented in either Python or Shell script with minimal dependencies (sudo aptitude install awscli, python-boto, python-requests, python-dnspython), although the implementation is not dependent on a particular programming language.

References