WSO2 API Manager Clustering configuration - wso2

I'm trying to install and configure a highly availability setup for the WSO2 API Manager. I've been reading through this document: http://docs.wso2.org/wiki/display/Cluster/Clustering+API+Manager and in there it explains to break up the 4 components of the application into separate folders and that these 4 components can run on a single server. I'm not sure why this is needed. All I really want to do is take 2 servers, install the full application on both of them (without breaking the application up into 4 different pieces) and cluster them together between two servers with an Elastic Load Balancer in front of them.
What is the purpose of splitting up the multiple components on the same server if they all run out of a single installation? I'm looking for the simplest way to provide fail over capability to this application if one server goes down. Any insight into their methodology would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

The article you've linked describes on distributing different components of API Manager. If you look at the very end of that article there's a link to clustering configuration doc. In a production deployment usually it is encouraged that the 4 components are run on different nodes rather than having everything in a node and having multiple such nodes. That's why it goes on explaining breaking it down to separate components. The official AM doc below has a page on different deployment patterns.
You can go through the following articles to get a better understanding on clustering API Manager.
http://docs.wso2.org/wiki/display/AM140/Clustered+Deployment
http://sanjeewamalalgoda.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-do-clustering-and-enable-replicate.html

My 2cts:
The documentation mentioned in the remarks, explains how WSO2 sees the world of clustering. Spread the different functionality over different JVM's. This sounds logical from architectural point of view. A dis-advantages is that the diffent applications need to me administrated as well by operations. This makes the technical architecture rather complex.
In our situation, we defined 2 different servers with extra CPU and memory, on these servers we have installed the full WSO2 API Manager and defined the cluster configuration. Everything provisioned via Puppet.
Just a straightforward install, all data-source pointing to one schema in an Oracle database.
And...it is working; Our Developers happy, Operations happy, Architect department happy

Related

Deploy hyperledger on AWS - production setup

My company is currently evaluating hyperledger(fabric) and we're using it for our POC. It looks very promising and we're targeting rolling out to production in next few months.
We're targeting AWS as our production environment.
However, we're struggling to find good tutorial/practices/recommendations about operating hyperledger network in such environment.
I'm aware that Cello is aiming to solve/ease deploying/monitoring hyperledger network but i also read that its not production ready yet. Question is, should we even consider looking at Cello at this point?
If not, what are our alternatives? Docker swarm, kubernetes?
I also didn't find information about recommended instance types. I understand this is application and AWS specific but what are the minimal system requirements
(memory&CPU&network) for example for 'peer' node (our application is not network intensive, nor a lot of transactions will be submitted per hour/day, only few of them per day).
Another question is where to create those instances on AWS from geographical&decentralization point of view. Does it make sense all of them to be created in same region? Or, we must create instances running in different regions?
Tnx a lot.
Igor.
yes, look at Cello.. if nothing else it will help you see the aws deployment model.
really nothing special..
design the desired system, peers, orderer, gateways, etc..
then decide who many ec2 instance u need to support that.
as for WHERE (region).. depends on where the connecting application is and what kind of fault tolerance you need for your business model.
one of the businesses I am working with wants a minimum of 99.99999 % availability. so, multi-region is critical. its just another ec2 instance with sockets open from different hosts..
aws doesn't provide much in terms of support for hyperledger. they have some templates which allow you to setup the VMs initially, but that's stuff you can do yourself as well.
you are right, the documentation is very light and most of the time confusing. I got to the point where I can start from scratch with a brand new VM and got everything ready and deploy my own network definition and chaincode and have the scripts to do that.
IBM cloud has much better support for hyperledger however. you can design your network visually, you can download your connection profiles, deploy and instantiate chaincode, create and join channels, handle certificates, pretty much everything you need to run and support such a network. It's light years ahead of AWS. They even have a full CI / CD pipepline that you could replicate for your own project. if you look at their marbles demo, you'll see what i mean.
Cello is definitely worth looking at, with the caveat that it's incubation meaning, not real yet, not production ready and not really useful until it becomes a fully fledged product.

WSO2 APIM Clustering Configuration

I am using WSO2 APIM 1.10.0 on a single server deployment and would like to move to a clustering one. Looking at this documentation I could found a lot of information, howevre something is boring me; do I really have to always do all of it?
I mean, I don't want to split all my workers in multiple instances, all I want is configure two full setup configurations (key manager + publisher + store + gateway), each one on its own host and make sure I can put a load balance in front of it.
Thre requiremenst are simple: I would like to share the load on both of them, and guarantee a better availability in case of one of the hosts goes down. Is it a MUST break down the whole installation on both nodes so I have to start each component independently with offset ports configured?
I coud see that on version 2.0.0 a lot have been simplified, any way to reach the same on 1.10.0 one?
Regards
Splitting into profiles is not mandatory. This is designed in this way to scale API Manager based on the TPS. If you have a low TPS count and prefer to have 2 node HA setup, you can do the following.
Cluster the two nodes using wka, aws, etc.
Use dep-sync to share API artifacts between two nodes.
Use one node as the Publisher. You need to handle the publisher node traffic using single node. This is to avoid getting SVN conflicts.
You can serve API requests from both nodes.
You do not want to always use the same deployment pattern mentioned in the docuemtnation that you have pointed there. There are various Other deployment patterns that you can use according to the scalability and the requirement of yours.
Please refer the following documentation [1] for different deployment patterns you can use for WSO2 API Manager and [2] for more information on worker Manager separation and Load balancing.
[1] https://docs.wso2.com/display/CLUSTER44x/API+Manager+Deployment+Patterns
[2] https://docs.wso2.com/display/CLUSTER44x/Separating+the+Worker+and+Manager+Nodes

django deployment with java and c++

I have created a django app that contains c++ for some of the views as well as a java library. How would I deploy this app? What kind of hosting service allows for multiple languages? I have looked at EC2, GAE, and several platforms (like heroku) but I can't seem to find a definitive solution.
I have never deployed anything to the web so a simple explanation would be much appreciated.
PaaS stuff is probably not your best bet. If you want the scalability and associated buzzwords(muh 99.9999999999% availability because my servers are hosted in a parallel dimension without electrical storms, power outages, hurricanes, earthquakes, or nuclear holocausts) that comes with hosting your application on a huge web company's platform, check out IaaS(Infrastructure as a service) systems like Google's Compute Engine or AWS. With these you just get a virtual server (or servers), running your Linux distro of choice, and you can install and run whatever you please on them without being constrained to a specific platform like App Engine or Heroku(where you have to basically write your app to specifically run on that platform). If you plan on consuming a ton of bandwidth/resources from the get-go, you will almost certainly get a better deal using a dedicated server(s) from a small company.
Interested in what specifically you are executing C++ for in a Django view. Image/video processing?
Well. Deployment is not really something where a simple explanation helps much.
First I would check what the requirements to the operating system are (compilers, dependencies,…). That will maybe reduce the options quickly.
I guess that with a setup containing C++ & Java artifacts, the usual PaaS (GaE, Heroku,…) offerings will not be sufficient because they define the stack. And a mixture of Python/C++/Java is rather uncommon I'd say.
Choosing an IaaS offering (EC2, …) may be an option. There you can run your whole self-defined stack and have the possibility of easier scaling.
Hosting the application on your own server(s) is also always possible. Check your data protection regulations to find out if it's not even a requirement.
There are a lot of ways to get the Django application to run. The Django documentation has some information about deployment. If you have certain special requirements, uwsgi may be a good application server.
You may also want a web server in front of the application. Possibilities range from using uwsgi's built-in http server or using e.g. Nginx with uwsgi.
All in all every component of the whole "deployment" has hundereds of bells and whistels and it's not easy to give advice without knowing specific requirements and properties of the system itself. You'll also probably need a database you have to deploy.
But before deploying it to the web, it's also important to have a solid build process to assemble all the parts. And not only on the development machine. With three languages involved this should be the first step solve. If it easily and automagically deploys in a development environment, moving it to a server is easier.

Building event stack on WSO2

I want to deploy an event processing stack, based on WSO2, but can't figure the Feature installation process.
I've downloaded latest Carbon (4.0.2) and want to install probably ESB, BRS, CEP, BAM and maybe later API Management.
I've connected to the Turing feature repository
2 questions:
in the available features list I don't see BAM or BRS, although ESB, CEP and API are there. What do I need to see these other parts ?
when I select CEP and ESB for installation I get a "install modified" and no features are selected.I imagine this is something to do with feature version incompatibility
if I just select ESB, the installation seems to proceed but the server won't restart (hangs waiting for one of the Synapse services.
It feels like I have the wrong process to determine what set of features/versions I need. How should I proceed ?
Carbon does not like to play well with it's other components. I've never been able to successfully use Carbon to manage any WSO2 stack. Each time I've setup/deployed a WSO2 stack I've ended up manually configuring the separate components config files individually. Usually starting with the ESB first, then adding in the CEP then the BAM.
You must also make sure they start in the correct order and that the config files don't stomp on each other (make sure your port offsets are set).
You don't need Carbon to run any instance of the WSO2 stack, simply 'install' it (unzip the wso2X.zip file) then make sure the service starts (call wso2X/bin/wso2server.sh start) and that's about it for the general setup, after that you need to configure each component to play nice with each other component (meaning you need to hook your BAM and CEP into your ESB, etc.) there isn't a lot of 'auto' config or discovery so it's usually easier to go the manual route with WSO2.
Also note that WSO2 products are Java extensions (essentially wrappers) around other Apache products (like Tomcat/Synapse) so usually if you are having a problem with WSO2, its because the underlying system (Tomcat/Synapse) was not properly configured (though that is no fault of your own as the WSO2 documentation does not make any mention of ensuring the base system is configured properly).
Also note that in my testing of WSO2 products, they consume huge amounts of memory (could not run more than the ESB and BAM on one machine because of the 8GB+ memory eaten by each) and a trouble ticket had to be put in to rectify a memory leak found in WSO2's Java modules, not sure if that was ever fixed.
Not trying to negate WSO2, but just be warned that it's not a pretty undertaking and you might fare better with other 'cloud' options if you have a choice.
edit: I've had to test out different 'cloud' stacks (with different types of 'plugins' or web services if you will) and how interoperable they were; as it turns out, they're pretty interoperable if YOU have total control over the individual stacks, otherwise the biggest downfall of any of the stacks that I found was simply documentation ... I don't care if a program has bugs or issues, as long as they are properly documented with possible workarounds (if any) so that I am aware of what is happening on my stack. Since WSO2's products were just Java wrappers for the Apache versions of their offerings (i.e. WSO2's ESB == Apache Synapse), any problems that occurred where usually solved in Apache's documentation (what little they had for certain problems) while WSO2's documentation had a lot of copy/paste issues (if they had any documentation beyond version 1). It was usually easier to just download and install the actual Apache offerings over WSO2's offerings then afterwards install WSO2's products and point them to the valid Apache configs/installs.
I did some testing with the Microsoft stack with Azure and general IIS/.NET offerings of equivalent services (The IIS/.NET equivalents of an ESB/CEP/BAM/etc. for what could be found). On the MS side, the documentation was enough (and there's enough people buying into the hype of cloud right now) that I could stand up most of the services semi-easy. I say semi-easy because of the misnomer (or my misunderstanding) of the 'ease of use' of 'cloud' services. I also found a product called Neuron ESB which is a .NET ESB offering, though I didn't do any thing with it during my testing so I can't speak to it.
Testing Amazon's offerings turned out the be some of the easier to setup and configure; the biggest issue with what I was testing for AWS was general internet latency.
Most of this is personal conjecture and I highly recommend you evaluate each as the 'cloud' space is constantly changing and each cloud platform has something slightly different to offer.
TLDR: the cloud space has a lot to offer and one should really consider what it is they are trying to achieve in the long run then evaluate each platforms offerings to see which fits. That being said, documentation and internal vendor interoperability (i.e. the vendor's products ability to easily communicate with each other) definitely help a product's 're-usability' factor.
Turing feature repository is not compatible with Carbon kernel 4.0.2. You can download Carbon kernel 4.2.0 and connect to Turing feature repository.

Identifying ASP.NET web service references

At my day job we have load balanced web servers which talk to load balanced app servers via web services (and lately WCF). At any given time, we have 4-6 different teams that have the ability to add new web sites or services or consume existing services. We probably have about 20-30 different web applications and corresponding services.
Unfortunately, given that we have no centralized control over this due to competing priorities, org structures, project timelines, financial buckets, etc., it is quite a mess. We have a variety of services that are reused, but a bunch that are specific to a front-end.
Ideally we would have better control over this situation, and we are trying to get control over it, but that is taking a while. One thing we would like to do is find out more about what all of the inter-relationships between web sites and the app servers.
I have used Reflector to find dependencies among assemblies, but would like to be able to see the traffic patterns between services.
What are the options for trying to map out web service relationships? For the most part, we are mainly talking about internal services (web to app, app to app, batch to app, etc.). Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to approach it:
Analyze assemblies for any web references. The drawback here is that not everything is a web reference and I'm not sure how WCF connections are listed. However, this would at least be a start for finding 80% of the connections. Does anyone know of any tools that can do that analysis? Like I said, I've used Reflector for assembly references but can't find anything for web references.
Possibly tap into IIS and passively monitor the traffic coming in and out and somehow figure out what is being called and where from. We are looking at enterprise tools that could help but it would be a while before they are implemented (and cost a lot). But is there anything out there that could help out quickly and cheaply? One tool in particular (AmberPoint) can tap into IIS on the servers and monitor inbound and outbound traffic, adds a little special sauce and begin to build a map of the traffic. Very nice, but costs a bundle.
I know, I know, how the heck did you get into this mess in the first place? Beats me, just trying to help us get control of it and get out of it.
Thanks,
Matt
The easiest way is to look through the logs, but if that doesn't include the referrer than you may also want to monitor what is going out from your web to the app server. You can use tools like Wireshark or Microsoft Network Monitor to see this traffic.
The other "solution" and I use this loosely is to bind a specific web server to app server and then run through a bundle and see what it is hitting on the app server. You could probably do this in a test environment to lesson the effects on the users of the site.
You need a service registry (UDDI??)... If you had a means to catalog these services and their consumers, it would make this job of dependency discovery a lot easier. That is not an easy solution, though. It takes time and documentation to get a catalog in place.
I think the quickest solution would be to query your IIS logs and find source URLs which originate from your own servers. You would at least be able to track down which servers your consumers are coming from.
Also, if you already have some kind of authentication mechanism in place, you could trace who is using a particular service based on login.
You are right about AmberPoint. There are other tools that catalog the service traffic and provide reports showing what is happening to your services. Systinet, SOA Software and Actional also has a products similar to Amberpoint but Amberpoint has a free-ware version, I believe.