Not everyone can afford their own secret mastermind datacenter lair, with monocle and Persian cat. Frank Scholten introduces minimesos, the Mesos experimentation and testing tool for running and testing Mesos on a laptop.
Apache Mesos for Beginners: 3 Videos to Help You Get Started
How do you get started learning Apache Mesos? In this series highlighting presentations from MesosCon North America, we have showcased several large complex Mesos projects that elegantly solve difficult problems (see Mesos Large-Scale Solutions, below).
In those talks, Uber, Twitter, Verizon Labs, and other large vendors shared how they use Mesos to manage complex configurations, provide scalability and reliability, simplify application development and deployment, and amp up their continuous integration and delivery systems.
They are all wonderful demos about great technologies, but as you watch the videos, you may wonder “How do I get my hands on this? I don’t have a datacenter or a team of engineers. What if I want to become a contributor? How do I make this all go in my own little test lab?”
The talks highlighted in this article will help you get started. Aaron Williams, Joris Van Remoorter, and Michael Park of Mesosphere, and Frank Scholten of Container Solutions share how to run Mesos on a laptop, how to become a contributor, and the basic architecture of a Mesos-based datacenter.
It’s Complicated, Okay (or Let’s Talk Openly about Apache Mesos’ OSS Neighbors, Friends, and Rivals)
Aaron Williams, Mesosphere
Apache Mesos is not a complete datacenter solution. In good Unix tradition, Mesos does one thing and does it well: it enables you to program against your datacenter like it is a single pool of resources. So you need a datacenter, which includes hardware, and perhaps virtual machines, containers, application servers, storage servers, network resources, monitoring and alerting, and everything else you need to do your work.
Williams points out how the role of the modern datacenter has changed with this quotation by Satya Nadella: “Every business will become a software business, build applications, use advanced analytics and provide SaaS services.”
Anyone who has worked in IT is familiar with the management mindset that IT is a sadly necessary expense and something they wish they didn’t need to fund. But, that is not true, and never has been. “It’s not good enough to be producing great products anymore. You have to have the great software behind it in order to make those products successful… Now isn’t just a thing that sits off in IT somewhere… Now, it’s becoming something that everyone can use as a competitive weapon. Mesos is really helping to make that happen, so we’re going to talk about how that business value always bleeds back into the kinds of decisions that we’re making along the way,” Williams says.
Watch Williams’ complete presentation below to learn about some of the open source software that works well with Mesos, some that doesn’t, and a complete architectural diagram.
Minimesos: The Experimentation and Testing Tool for Apache Mesos
Frank Scholten, Container Solutions
Not everyone can afford their own secret mastermind datacenter lair, with monocle and Persian cat. Frank Scholten introduces minimesos, the Mesos experimentation and testing tool for running and testing Mesos on a laptop.
How does it work? Scholten says “Maybe you want to try it out locally first before setting up a huge cluster; with minimesos you can quickly do this. It has a command-line API and Java API, so you can run straight from Java within a unit test, or you can run from the CLI, start it up and then destroy it and it’s gone. The whole thing runs in Docker, so it’s easy to install because it will just pull a bunch of images and then it runs.”
minimesos provides a good set of functionality, including schedulers, Mesos agents, ZooKeeper, and logging. You can also try the online demo.
Watch Scholten’s talk below to learn minimesos’ architecture, and how to run it.
Contributing to Apache Mesos: Where to Begin
Joris Van Remoortere and Michael Park, Mesosphere
Which open source project has contributors, shepherds, reviewers, and committers? Apache Mesos, of course. Mesos has attracted a rather amazing number and diversity of contributors, and managing all of those contributions is a sizable challenge. For all the rhetoric about the importance of community to OSS, it is not a magic solution, but rather a lot of work to harness the energies of a large, active community.
As a contributor, your experience might be a little frustrating. “When you first write your patch for open source projects you probably feel pretty good, pretty excited, and you want to show your patch to the world. By the time you post it on Reviewboard, you’re feeling pretty slick. You feel like you just crushed this bug, waiting for some responses,” says Van Remoortere.
“Then reviewers come along, right? Kind of feels like a stampede. Maybe they left 27 comments on your review and you’re not feeling so good, but you start tackling them. Then they just keep coming, right? After you finish all your reviews, more people come along, open more issues, make more comments, and it feels like it’s never-ending,” he says. Or worse, your shiny patch is ignored.
Contributing to a large complex project involves a fair bit of bureaucracy. There are standards and procedures to follow. The Mesos project provides a lot of help and support for contributors, so watch Van Remoortere and Park’s talk below to learn the right way to become a Mesos contributor.
Mesos Large-Scale Solutions
Please enjoy the previous blogs in this series, and watch this spot for more blogs on ingenious and creative ways to hack Mesos for large-scale tasks.
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4 Unique Ways Uber, Twitter, PayPal, and Hubspot Use Apache Mesos
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How Verizon Labs Built a 600 Node Bare Metal Mesos Cluster in Two Weeks
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Running Distributed Applications at Scale on Mesos from Twitter and CloudBees
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Apache Spark Creator Matei Zaharia Describes Structured Streaming in Spark 2.0
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Open Source Is Key to the Modern Data Center, Says EMC’s Joshua Bernstein
Apache, Apache Mesos, and Mesos are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in the United States and/or other countries. MesosCon is run in partnership with the ASF.
Wave 2 Wi-Fi: Enabling Multi-Gigabit Wireless Internet
Based on the IEEE 802.11ac standard, the key feature of Wave 2 Wi-Fi, which recently gained Wi-Fi Alliance certification, is MU-MIMO
As consumers simultaneously adopt smart home solutions coupled with gigabit-speed home internet, devices featuring Wave 2 Wi-Fi technologies are purpose-built to simultaneously support multiple connected users.
And with Wave 2 Wi-Fi recently gaining certification from the industry-wide Wi-Fi Alliance, supporting products are well-positioned to see increased uptake by conservative enterprise IT customers. Although Wave 2 products have been available for more than a year, the certification is a mark of interoperability thats important for business buyers.
Read more at RCR Wireless News
Nginx monitoring, when, how and what
When we talk about NGINX, we are clear on the fact that we’re discussing one of the applications that has been revolutionizing the web server industry. It has not only grown bigger in terms of use than other solutions like IIS, but also it’s taking a big chunk of the pie from the general web server market (lead by Apache), with over 140 million servers running on this application.
Due to the growth in the number of web servers that run NGINX, it’s becoming more necessary to not only monitor these systems, but also they should integrate in the global monitoring for any IT infrastructure.
To perform a correct monitoring scheme on NGINX, the software offers two possible alternatives:
- its module nginx_status, included with all versions of NGINX
- the recently launched NGINX Plus Status Module, available on the paid version of the app.
Next, we’ll list the different traits corresponding to each of the different ways we can monitor NGINX, in order to end up giving you some recommendations on when to use one or another and how to use them.
NGINX Status Module
In order to activate this module we need to insert a URL we’ll associate to the monitoring module in the NGINX configuration.
location /server-status
{
stub_status on;
access_log off;
allow 127.0.0.1;
deny all;
}
With this directive and, after having configured NGINX to allow it to show monitoring data via the parameter –with-http_stub_status_module, we’ll be able to access the /server-status URL for our server, receiving varied data related to our server’s status. Data like the number of active connections, amount of queued queries, amount or read/write requests, and number of active customers.
Nginx Plus Status Module
This is the module that NGINX has developed to be able to offer a larger amount of information on our server’s status. One of the large advantages that this module has is that, apart from giving a lot more information, it also offers a console to be able to check your NGINX server’s status in real time.
Apart from being able to see all the information on a dashboard, this module allows us to access the following data that the previous module wouldn’t allow: both information related to the number of mistaken requests and code (4xx, 5xx…) such as information on the cache, that’s shown with this module.
Another extra feature on the NGINX Plus Status module is that it allows users to see the performance data grouped according to ‘zones’.
Nginx status, Nginx Plus Status or simple monitoring
On this occasion the question has to be if we wish to install the Open Source edition of NGINX, or if we’ll choose to pay for NGINX Plus. When it comes to taking this decision we must know how to fundamentally stick to the needs that our web infrastructure has, rather than basing the decision on the monitoring process itself. Do we need load balancing? How about persistent login? Is our server reset so complex that we need to change immediately change configurations without resetting? If the answer to these questions is “yes”, then you should probably think about purchasing an NGINX Plus license.
Whether we have the Plus version of NGINX or not, it is highly recommendable that you perform good monitoring on your web infrastructure, regardless of what size it is, because if you’re on the Internet, your platform’s unavailability can generate costs that, on many occasions cannot be measured.
If your infrastructure is simple and only runs simple web pages, it’s quite recommendable to use HTTP monitoring services such as uptimerobot, for example. Going straight to the point: is my webpage active, yes or no? In this case, we wouldn’t need monitoring via NGINX and its status module.
In case our infrastructure is more complex, we have various databases, or a network with multiple nodes, routers or switches; then it’s recommended we use a server monitoring software.
This software will allow adding all your network elements on to the same monitoring dashboard, and will send alerts based on their status. When there’s an issue in our systems, it’s very important that we know where it’s coming from and what’s causing it as soon as possible, in order to counteract the possible issues generated from unavailability.
For this case, if we have the Plus version of NGINX, it’s quite recommendable to include the NGINX Plus Status module on our monitoring dashboard. For Pandora FMS this can be done following the steps in the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf16qhc9OK8
In case you don’t have the paid version of NGINX we recommend you create a script that helps the monitoring system digest the information coming from the NGINX Status module. The main data can be obtained by calling on the URL where the NGINX Status module has been configured. Other important data like response times and error codes will require us to resort to the server logs and process them through a script in order to be able to show them on our alert and monitoring console. For further information, read this article on NGINX monitoring.
We hope this was all useful and that after reading this article, whatever your infrastructure is, you feel ready to monitor it correctly.