Posts Tagged Spring Boot

Integrating Search Capabilities with Actions for Google Assistant, using GKE and Elasticsearch: Part 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Cloud, GCP, Java Development, JavaScript, Serverless, Software Development on September 24, 2018

Introduction

Voice and text-based conversational interfaces, such as chatbots, have recently seen tremendous growth in popularity. Much of this growth can be attributed to leading Cloud providers, such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, who now provide affordable, end-to-end development, machine learning-based training, and hosting platforms for conversational interfaces.

Cloud-based machine learning services greatly improve a conversational interface’s ability to interpret user intent with greater accuracy. However, the ability to return relevant responses to user inquiries, also requires interfaces have access to rich informational datastores, and the ability to quickly and efficiently query and analyze that data.

In this two-part post, we will enhance the capabilities of a voice and text-based conversational interface by integrating it with a search and analytics engine. By interfacing an Action for Google Assistant conversational interface with Elasticsearch, we will improve the Action’s ability to provide relevant results to the end-user. Instead of querying a traditional database for static responses to user intent, our Action will access a Near Realtime (NRT) Elasticsearch index of searchable documents. The Action will leverage Elasticsearch’s advanced search and analytics capabilities to optimize and shape user responses, based on their intent.

Action Preview

Here is a brief YouTube video preview of the final Action for Google Assistant, integrated with Elasticsearch, running on an Apple iPhone.

Architecture

If you recall from part one of this post, the high-level architecture of our search engine-enhanced Action for Google Assistant resembles the following. Most of the components are running on Google Cloud.

Source Code

All open-sourced code for this post can be found on GitHub in two repositories, one for the Spring Boot Service and one for the Action for Google Assistant. Code samples in this post are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Development Process

In part two of this post, we will tie everything together by creating and integrating our Action for Google Assistant:

Create the new Actions for Google Assistant project using the Actions on Google console;
Develop the Action’s Intents and Entities using the Dialogflow console;
Develop, deploy, and test the Cloud Function to GCP;

Let’s explore each step in more detail.

New ‘Actions on Google’ Project

With Elasticsearch running and the Spring Boot Service deployed to our GKE cluster, we can start building our Actions for Google Assistant. Using the Actions on Google web console, we first create a new Actions project.

The Directory Information tab is where we define metadata about the project. This information determines how it will look in the Actions directory and is required to publish your project. The Actions directory is where users discover published Actions on the web and mobile devices.

The Directory Information tab also includes sample invocations, which may be used to invoke our Actions.

Actions and Intents

Our project will contain a series of related Actions. According to Google, an Action is ‘an interaction you build for the Assistant that supports a specific intent and has a corresponding fulfillment that processes the intent.’ To build our Actions, we first want to create our Intents. To do so, we will want to switch from the Actions on Google console to the Dialogflow console. Actions on Google provides a link for switching to Dialogflow in the Actions tab.

We will build our Action’s Intents in Dialogflow. The term Intent, used by Dialogflow, is standard terminology across other voice-assistant platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service and LUIS. In Dialogflow, will be building Intents — the Find Multiple Posts Intent, Find Post Intent, Find By ID Intent, and so forth.

Below, we see the Find Post Intent. The Find Post Intent is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a single post about a topic, for example, ‘Find a post about Docker.’ The Intent shown below contains a fair number, but indeed not an exhaustive list, of training phrases. These represent possible ways a user might express intent when invoking the Action.

Below, we see the Find Multiple Posts Intent. The Find Multiple Posts Intent is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a list of posts about a topic, for example, ‘I’m interested in Docker.’ Similar to the Find Post Intent above, the Find Multiple Posts Intent contains a list of training phrases.

Dialog Model Training

According to Google, the greater the number of natural language examples in the Training Phrases section of Intents, the better the classification accuracy. Every time a user interacts with our Action, the user’s utterances are logged. Using the Training tab in the Dialogflow console, we can train our model by reviewing and approving or correcting how the Action handled the user’s utterances.

Below we see the user’s utterances, part of an interaction with the Action. We have the option to review and approve the Intent that was called to handle the utterance, re-assign it, or delete it. This helps improve our accuracy of our dialog model.

Dialogflow Entities

Each of the highlighted words in the training phrases maps to the facts parameter, which maps to a collection of @topic Entities. Entities represent a list of intents the Action is trained to understand. According to Google, there are three types of entities: ‘system’ (defined by Dialogflow), ‘developer’ (defined by a developer), and ‘user’ (built for each individual end-user in every request) objects. We will be creating ‘developer’ type entities for our Action’s Intents.

Automated Expansion

We do not have to define all possible topics a user might search for, as an entity. By enabling the Allow Automated Expansion option, an Agent will recognize values that have not been explicitly listed in the entity list. Google describes Agents as NLU (Natural Language Understanding) modules.

Entity Synonyms

An entity may contain synonyms. Multiple synonyms are mapped to a single reference value. The reference value is the value passed to the Cloud Function by the Action. For example, take the reference value of ‘GCP.’ The user might ask Google about ‘GCP’. However, the user might also substitute the words ‘Google Cloud’ or ‘Google Cloud Platform.’ Using synonyms, if the user utters any of these three synonymous words or phrase in their intent, the reference value, ‘GCP’, is passed in the request.

But, what if the post contains the phrase, ‘Google Cloud Platform’ more frequently than, or instead of, ‘GCP’? If the acronym, ‘GCP’, is defined as the entity reference value, then it is the value passed to the function, even if you ask for ‘Google Cloud Platform’. In the use case of searching blog posts by topic, entity synonyms are not an effective search strategy.

Elasticsearch Synonyms

A better way to solve for synonyms is by using the synonyms feature of Elasticsearch. Take, for example, the topic of ‘Istio’, Istio is also considered a Service Mesh. If I ask for posts about ‘Service Mesh’, I would like to get back posts that contain the phrase ‘Service Mesh’, but also the word ‘Istio’. To accomplish this, you would define an association between ‘Istio’ and ‘Service Mesh’, as part of the Elasticsearch WordPress posts index.

Searches for ‘Istio’ against that index would return results that contain ‘Istio’ and/or contain ‘Service Mesh’; the reverse is also true. Having created and applied a custom synonyms filter to the index, we see how Elasticsearch responds to an analysis of the natural language style phrase, ‘What is a Service Mesh?’. As shown by the tokens output in Kibana’s Dev Tools Console, Elasticsearch understands that ‘service mesh’ is synonymous with ‘istio’.

If we query the same five fields as our Action, for the topic of ‘service mesh’, we get four hits for posts (indexed documents) that contain ‘service mesh’ and/or ‘istio’.

Actions on Google Integration

Another configuration item in Dialogflow that needs to be completed is the Dialogflow’s Actions on Google integration. This will integrate our Action with Google Assistant. Google currently provides more than fifteen different integrations, including Google Assistant, Slack, Facebook Messanger, Twitter, and Twilio, as shown below.

To configure the Google Assistant integration, choose the Welcome Intent as our Action’s Explicit Invocation intent. Then we designate our other Intents as Implicit Invocation intents. According to Google, this Google Assistant Integration allows our Action to reach users on every device where the Google Assistant is available.

Action Fulfillment

When a user’s intent is received, it is fulfilled by the Action. In the Dialogflow Fulfillment console, we see the Action has two fulfillment options, a Webhook or an inline-editable Cloud Function, edited inline. A Webhook allows us to pass information from a matched intent into a web service and get a result back from the service. Our Action’s Webhook will call our Cloud Function on GCP, using the Cloud Function’s URL endpoint (we’ll get this URL in the next section).

Google Cloud Functions

Our Cloud Function, called by our Action, is written in Node.js. Our function, index.js, is divided into four sections, which are: constants and environment variables, intent handlers, helper functions, and the function’s entry point. The helper functions are part of the Helper module, contained in the helper.js file.

Constants and Environment Variables

The section, in both index.js and helper.js, defines the global constants and environment variables used within the function. Values that reference environment variables, such as SEARCH_API_HOSTNAME are defined in the .env.yaml file. All environment variables in the .env.yaml file will be set during the Cloud Function’s deployment, described later in this post. Environment variables were recently released, and are still considered beta functionality (gist).

The npm module dependencies declared in this section are defined in the dependencies section of the package.json file. Function dependencies include Actions on Google, Firebase Functions, Winston, and Request (gist).

Intent Handlers

The intent handlers in this section correspond to the intents in the Dialogflow console. Each handler responds with a SimpleResponse, BasicCard, and Suggestion Chip response types, or Simple Response, List, and Suggestion Chip response types. These response types were covered in part one of this post. (gist).

The Welcome Intent handler handles explicit invocations of our Action. The Fallback Intent handler handles both help requests, as well as cases when Dialogflow is unable to handle the user’s request.

As described above in the Dialogflow section, the Find Post Intent handler is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a single post about a topic. For example, ‘Find a post about Docker’. To fulfill the user request, the Find Post Intent handler, calls the Helper module’s getPostByTopic function, passing the topic requested and specifying a result set size of one post with the highest relevance score higher than an arbitrary value of 1.0.

Similarly, the Find Multiple Posts Intent handler is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a list of posts about a topic; for example, ‘I’m interested in Docker’. To fulfill the user request, the Find Multiple Posts Intent handler, calls the Helper module’s getPostsByTopic function, passing the topic requested and specifying a result set size of a maximum of six posts with the highest relevance scores greater than 1.0

The Find By ID Intent handler is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a specific, unique posts ID; for example, ‘Post ID 22141’. To fulfill the user request, the Find By ID Intent handler, calls the Helper module’s getPostById function, passing the unique Post ID (gist).

Entry Point

The entry point creates a way to handle the communication with Dialogflow’s fulfillment API (gist).

Helper Functions

The helper functions are part of the Helper module, contained in the helper.js file. In addition to typical utility functions like formatting dates, there are two functions, which interface with Elasticsearch, via our Spring Boot API, getPostsByTopic and getPostById. As described above, the intent handlers call one of these functions to obtain search results from Elasticsearch.

The getPostsByTopic function handles both the Find Post Intent handler and Find Multiple Posts Intent handler, described above. The only difference in the two calls is the size of the response set, either one result or six results maximum (gist).

Both functions use the request and request-promise-native npm modules to call the Spring Boot service’s RESTful API over HTTP. However, instead of returning a callback, the request-promise-native module allows us to return a native ES6 Promise. By returning a promise, we can use async/await with our Intent handlers. Using async/await with Promises is a newer way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js. The asynchronous programming model, using promises, is described in greater detail in my previous post, Building Serverless Actions for Google Assistant with Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage.

ThegetPostById function handles both the Find By ID Intent handler and Option Intent handler, described above. This function is similar to the getPostsByTopic function, calling a Spring Boot service’s RESTful API endpoint and passing the Post ID (gist).

Cloud Function Deployment

To deploy the Cloud Function to GCP, use the gcloud CLI with the beta version of the functions deploy command. According to Google, gcloud is a part of the Google Cloud SDK. You must download and install the SDK on your system and initialize it before you can use gcloud. Currently, Cloud Functions are only available in four regions. I have included a shell script, deploy-cloud-function.sh, to make this step easier. It is called using the npm run deploy function. (gist).

The creation or update of the Cloud Function can take up to two minutes. Note the output indicates the environment variables, contained in the .env.yaml file, have been deployed. The URL endpoint of the function and the function’s entry point are also both output.

If you recall, the URL endpoint of the Cloud Function is required in the Dialogflow Fulfillment tab. The URL can be retrieved from the deployment output (shown above). The Cloud Function is now deployed and will be called by the Action when a user invokes the Action.

What is Deployed

The .gcloudignore file is created the first time you deploy a new function. Using the the .gcloudignore file, you limit the files deployed to GCP. For this post, of all the files in the project, only four files, index.js, helper.js, package.js, and the PNG file used in the Action’s responses, need to be deployed. All other project files are ear-marked in the .gcloudignore file to avoid being deployed.

Simulation Testing and Debugging

With our Action and all its dependencies deployed and configured, we can test the Action using the Simulation console on Actions on Google. According to Google, the Action Simulation console allows us to manually test our Action by simulating a variety of Google-enabled hardware devices and their settings.

Below, in the Simulation console, we see the successful display of our Programmatic Ponderings Search Action for Google Assistant containing the expected Simple Response, List, and Suggestion Chips response types, triggered by a user’s invocation of the Action.

The simulated response indicates that the Google Cloud Function was called, and it responded successfully. That also indicates the Dialogflow-based Action successfully communicated with the Cloud Function, the Cloud Function successfully communicated with the Spring Boot service instances running on Google Kubernetes Engine, and finally, the Spring Boot services successfully communicated with Elasticsearch running on Google Compute Engine.

If we had issues with the testing, the Action Simulation console also contains tabs containing the request and response objects sent to and from the Cloud Function, the audio response, a debug console, any errors, and access to the logs.

Stackdriver Logging

In the log output below, from our Cloud Function, we see our Cloud Function’s activities. These activities including information log entries, which we explicitly defined in our Cloud Function using the winston and @google-cloud/logging-winston npm modules. According to Google, the author of the module, Stackdriver Logging for Winston provides an easy to use, higher-level layer (transport) for working with Stackdriver Logging, compatible with Winston. Developing an effective logging strategy is essential to maintaining and troubleshooting your code in Development, as well as Production.

Conclusion

In this two-part post, we observed how the capabilities of a voice and text-based conversational interface, such as an Action for Google Assistant, may be enhanced through integration with a search and analytics engine, such as Elasticsearch. This post barely scraped the surface of what could be achieved with such an integration. Elasticsearch, as well as other leading Lucene-based search and analytics engines, such as Apache Solr, have tremendous capabilities, which are easily integrated to machine learning-based conversational interfaces, resulting in a more powerful and a more intuitive end-user experience.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients, or Google.

Actions for Google Assistant, Cloud Function, Dialogflow, docker, Elasticsearch, GCP, GKE, Google Assistant, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Serverless, Spring Boot, Spring Data Elasticsearch, WordPress

Integrating Search Capabilities with Actions for Google Assistant, using GKE and Elasticsearch: Part 1

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Cloud, GCP, Java Development, JavaScript, Serverless, Software Development on September 20, 2018

Introduction

Action Preview

Here is a brief YouTube video preview of the final Action for Google Assistant, integrated with Elasticsearch, running on an Apple iPhone.

Google Technologies

The high-level architecture of our search engine-enhanced Action for Google Assistant will look as follows.

Here is a brief overview of the key technologies we will incorporate into our architecture.

Actions on Google

According to Google, Actions on Google is the platform for developers to extend the Google Assistant. Actions on Google is a web-based platform that provides a streamlined user-experience to create, manage, and deploy Actions. We will use the Actions on Google platform to develop our Action in this post.

Dialogflow

According to Google, Dialogflow is an enterprise-grade NLU platform that makes it easy for developers to design and integrate conversational user interfaces into mobile apps, web applications, devices, and bots. Dialogflow is powered by Google’s machine learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions are part of Google’s event-driven, serverless compute platform, part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google Cloud Functions are analogous to Amazon’s AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Features include automatic scaling, high availability, fault tolerance, no servers to provision, manage, patch or update, and a payment model based on the function’s execution time.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment, available on GCP, for deploying containerized applications. According to Google, Kubernetes Engine is a reliable, efficient, and secure way to run Kubernetes clusters in the Cloud.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a leading, distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch is a product of Elastic, the company behind the Elastic Stack, which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, X-Pack, and Elastic Cloud. Elasticsearch provides a distributed, multitenant-capable, full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is similar to Apache Solr in terms of features and functionality. Both Solr and Elasticsearch is based on Apache Lucene.

Other Technologies

In addition to the major technologies highlighted above, the project also relies on the following:

Google Container Registry – As an alternative to Docker Hub, we will store the Spring Boot API service’s Docker Image in Google Container Registry, making deployment to GKE a breeze.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager – Google Cloud Deployment Manager allows users to specify all the resources needed for application in a declarative format using YAML. The Elastic Stack will be deployed with Deployment Manager.
Google Compute Engine – Google Compute Engine delivers scalable, high-performance virtual machines (VMs) running in Google’s data centers, on their worldwide fiber network.
Google Stackdriver – Stackdriver aggregates metrics, logs, and events from our Cloud-based project infrastructure, for troubleshooting. We are also integrating Stackdriver Logging for Winston into our Cloud Function for fast application feedback.
Google Cloud DNS – Hosts the primary project domain and subdomains for the search engine and API. Google Cloud DNS is a scalable, reliable and managed authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google.
Google VPC Network Firewall – Firewall rules provide fine-grain, secure access controls to our API and search engine. We will several firewall port openings to talk to the Elastic Stack.
Spring Boot – Pivotal’s Spring Boot project makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Java applications, such as our Spring Boot service.
Spring Data Elasticsearch – Pivotal Software’s Spring Data Elasticsearch project provides easy integration to Elasticsearch from our Java-based Spring Boot service.

Demonstration

To demonstrate an Action for Google Assistant with search engine integration, we need an index of content to search. In this post, we will build an informational Action, the Programmatic Ponderings Search Action, that responds to a user’s interests in certain technical topics, by returning post suggestions from the Programmatic Ponderings blog. For this demonstration, I have indexed the last two years worth of blog posts into Elasticsearch, using the ElasticPress WordPress plugin.

Source Code

Development Process

This post will focus on the development and integration of the Action for Google Assistant with Elasticsearch, via a Google Cloud Function, Kubernetes Engine, and the Spring Boot API service. The post is not intended to be a general how-to on developing for Actions for Google Assistant, Google Cloud Platform, Elasticsearch, or WordPress.

Building and integrating the Action will involve the following steps:

Design the Action’s conversation model;
Provision the Elastic Stack on Google Compute Engine using Deployment Manager;
Create an Elasticsearch index of blog posts;
Provision the Kubernetes cluster on GCP with GKE;
Develop and deploy the Spring Boot API service to Kubernetes;

Covered in Part Two of the Post:

Create the new Actions project using the Actions on Google;
Develop the Action’s Intents using the Dialogflow;
Develop, deploy, and test the Cloud Function to GCP;

Let’s explore each step in more detail.

Conversational Model

The conversational model design of the Programmatic Ponderings Search Action for Google Assistant will have the option to invoke the Action in two ways, with or without intent. Below on the left, we see an example of an invocation of the Action – ‘Talk to Programmatic Ponderings’. Google Assistant then responds to the user for more information (intent) – ‘What topic are you interested in reading about?’.

Below on the left, we see an invocation of the Action, which includes the intent – ‘Ask Programmatic Ponderings to find a post about Kubernetes’. Google Assistant will respond directly, both verbally and visually with the most relevant post.

When a user requests a single result, for example, ‘Find a post about Docker’, Google Assistant will include Simple Response, Basic Card, and Suggestion Chip response types for devices with a display. This is shown in the center, above. The user may continue to ask for additional facts or choose to cancel the Action at any time.

When a user requests multiple results, for example, ‘I’m interested in Docker’, Google Assistant will include Simple Response, List, and Suggestion Chip response types for devices with a display. An example of a List Response is shown in the center of the previous set of screengrabs, above. The user will receive up to six results in the list, with a relevance score of 1.0 or greater. The user may choose to click on any of the post results in the list, which will initiate a new search using the post’s unique ID, as shown on the right, in the first set of screengrabs, above.

The conversational model also understands a request for help and to cancel the interaction.

GCP Account and Project

The following steps assume you have an existing GCP account and you have created a project on GCP to house the Cloud Function, GKE Cluster, and Elastic Stack on Google Compute Engine. The post also assumes that you have the latest Google Cloud SDK installed on your development machine, and have authenticated your identity from the command line (gist).

Elasticsearch on GCP

There are a number of options available to host Elasticsearch. Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, offers the Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed, scalable, and reliable service on AWS and GCP. AWS also offers their own managed Elasticsearch Service. I found some limitations with AWS’ Elasticsearch Service, which made integration with Spring Data Elasticsearch difficult. According to AWS, the service supports HTTP but does not support TCP transport.

For this post, we will stand up the Elastic Stack on GCP using an offering from the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. A well-known provider of packaged applications for multiple Cloud platforms, Bitnami, offers the ELK Stack (the previous name for the Elastic Stack), running on Google Compute Engine.

GCP Marketplace Solutions are deployed using the Google Cloud Deployment Manager. The Bitnami ELK solution is a complete stack with all the necessary software and software-defined Cloud infrastructure to securely run Elasticsearch. You select the instance’s zone(s), machine type, boot disk size, and security and networking configurations. Using that configuration, the Deployment Manager will deploy the solution and provide you with information and credentials for accessing the Elastic Stack. For this demo, we will configure a minimally-sized, single VM instance to run the Elastic Stack.

Below we see the Bitnami ELK stack’s components being created on GCP, by the Deployment Manager.

Indexed Content

With the Elastic Stack fully provisioned, I then configured WordPress to index the last two years of the Programmatic Pondering blog posts to Elasticsearch on GCP. If you want to follow along with this post and content to index, there is plenty of open source and public domain indexable content available on the Internet – books, movie lists, government and weather data, online catalogs of products, and so forth. Anything in a document database is directly indexable in Elasticsearch. Elastic even provides a set of index samples, available on their GitHub site.

Firewall Ports for Elasticseach

The Deployment Manager opens up firewall ports 80 and 443. To index the WordPress posts, I also had to open port 9200. According to Elastic, Elasticsearch uses port 9200 for communicating with their RESTful API with JSON over HTTP. For security, I locked down this firewall opening to my WordPress server’s address as the source. (gist).

The two existing firewall rules for port opening 80 and 443 should also be locked down to your own IP address as the source. Common Elasticsearch ports are constantly scanned by Hackers, who will quickly hijack your Elasticsearch contents and hold them for ransom, in addition to deleting your indexes. Similar tactics are used on well-known and unprotected ports for many platforms, including Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Kibana

Once the posts are indexed, the best way to view the resulting Elasticsearch documents is through Kibana, which is included as part of the Bitnami solution. Below we see approximately thirty posts, spread out across two years.

Each Elasticsearch document, representing an indexed WordPress blog post, contains over 125 fields of information. Fields include a unique post ID, post title, content, publish date, excerpt, author, URL, and so forth. All these fields are exposed through Elasticsearch’s API, and as we will see, will be available to our Spring Boot service to query.

Spring Boot Service

To ensure decoupling between the Action for Google Assistant and Elasticsearch, we will expose a RESTful search API, written in Java using Spring Boot and Spring Data Elasticsearch. The API will expose a tailored set of flexible endpoints to the Action. Google’s machine learning services will ensure our conversational model is trained to understand user intent. The API’s query algorithm and Elasticsearch’s rich Lucene-based search features will ensure the most relevant results are returned. We will host the Spring Boot service on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Will use a Spring Rest Controller to expose our RESTful web service’s resources to our Action’s Cloud Function. The current Spring Boot service contains five /elastic resource endpoints exposed by the ElasticsearchPostController class . Of those five, two endpoints will be called by our Action in this demo, the /{id} and the /dismax-search endpoints. The endpoints can be seen using the Swagger UI. Our Spring Boot service implements SpringFox, which has the option to expose the Swagger interactive API UI.

The /{id} endpoint accepts a unique post ID as a path variable in the API call and returns a single ElasticsearchPost object wrapped in a Map object, and serialized to a JSON payload (gist).

Below we see an example response from the Spring Boot service to an API call to the /{id} endpoint, for post ID 22141. Since we are returning a single post, based on ID, the relevance score will always be 0.0 (gist).

This controller’s /{id} endpoint relies on a method exposed by the ElasticsearchPostRepository interface. The ElasticsearchPostRepository is a Spring Data Repository , which extends ElasticsearchRepository. The repository exposes the findById() method, which returns a single instance of the type, ElasticsearchPost, from Elasticsearch (gist).

The ElasticsearchPost class is annotated as an Elasticsearch Document, similar to other Spring Data Document annotations, such as Spring Data MongoDB. The ElasticsearchPost class is instantiated to hold deserialized JSON documents stored in ElasticSeach stores indexed data (gist).

Dis Max Query

The second API endpoint called by our Action is the /dismax-search endpoint. We use this endpoint to search for a particular post topic, such as ’Docker’. This type of search, as opposed to the Spring Data Repository method used by the /{id} endpoint, requires the use of an ElasticsearchTemplate. The ElasticsearchTemplate allows us to form more complex Elasticsearch queries than is possible using an ElasticsearchRepository class. Below, the /dismax-search endpoint accepts four input request parameters in the API call, which are the topic to search for, the starting point and size of the response to return, and the minimum relevance score (gist).

The logic to create and execute the ElasticsearchTemplate is handled by the ElasticsearchService class. The ElasticsearchPostController calls the ElasticsearchService. The ElasticsearchService handles querying Elasticsearch and returning a list of ElasticsearchPost objects to the ElasticsearchPostController. The dismaxSearch method, called by the /dismax-search endpoint’s method constructs the ElasticsearchTemplate instance, used to build the request to Elasticsearch’s RESTful API (gist).

To obtain the most relevant search results, we will use Elasticsearch’s Dis Max Query combined with the Match Phrase Query. Elastic describes the Dis Max Query as:

‘a query that generates the union of documents produced by its subqueries, and that scores each document with the maximum score for that document as produced by any subquery, plus a tie breaking increment for any additional matching subqueries.’

In short, the Dis Max Query allows us to query and weight (boost importance) multiple indexed fields, across all documents. The Match Phrase Query analyzes the text (our topic) and creates a phrase query out of the analyzed text.

After some experimentation, I found the valid search results were returned by applying greater weighting (boost) to the post’s title and excerpt, followed by the post’s tags and categories, and finally, the actual text of the post. I also limited results to a minimum score of 1.0. Just because a word or phrase is repeated in a post, doesn’t mean it is indicative of the post’s subject matter. Setting a minimum score attempts to help ensure the requested topic is featured more prominently in the resulting post or posts. Increasing the minimum score will decrease the number of search results, but theoretically, increase their relevance (gist).

Below we see the results of a /dismax-search API call to our service, querying for posts about the topic, ’Istio’, with a minimum score of 2.0. The search resulted in a serialized JSON payload containing three ElasticsearchPost objects (gist).

Understanding Relevance Scoring

When returning search results, such as in the example above, the top result is the one with the highest score. The highest score should denote the most relevant result to the search query. According to Elastic, in their document titled, The Theory Behind Relevance Scoring, scoring is explained this way:

‘Lucene (and thus Elasticsearch) uses the Boolean model to find matching documents, and a formula called the practical scoring function to calculate relevance. This formula borrows concepts from term frequency/inverse document frequency and the vector space model but adds more-modern features like a coordination factor, field length normalization, and term or query clause boosting.’

In order to better understand this technical explanation of relevance scoring, it is much easy to see it applied to our example. Note the first search result above, Post ID 21867, has the highest score, 5.91989. Knowing that we are searching five fields (title, excerpt, tags, categories, and content), and boosting certain fields more than others, how was this score determined? Conveniently, Spring Data Elasticsearch’s SearchRequestBuilder class exposed the setExplain method. We can see this on line 12 of the dimaxQuery method, shown above. By passing a boolean value of true to the setExplain method, we are able to see the detailed scoring algorithms used by Elasticsearch for the top result, shown above (gist).

What this detail shows us is that of the five fields searched, the term ‘Istio’ was located in four of the five fields (all except ‘categories’). Using the practical scoring function described by Elasticsearch, and taking into account our boost values, we see that the post’s ‘excerpt’ field achieved the highest score of 5.9198895 (score of 1.6739764 * boost of 3.0).

Being able to view the scoring explanation helps us tune our search results. For example, according to the details, the term ‘Istio’ appeared 100 times (termFreq=100.0) in the main body of the post (the ‘content’ field). We might ask ourselves if we are giving enough relevance to the content as opposed to other fields. We might choose to increase the boost or decrease other fields with respect to the ‘content’ field, to produce higher quality search results.

Google Kubernetes Engine

With the Elastic Stack running on Google Compute Engine, and the Spring Boot API service built, we can now provision a Kubernetes cluster to run our Spring Boot service. The service will sit between our Action’s Cloud Function and Elasticsearch. We will use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to manage our Kubernete cluster on GCP. A GKE cluster is a managed group of uniform VM instances for running Kubernetes. The VMs are managed by Google Compute Engine. Google Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Google’s data centers, on their worldwide fiber network.

A GKE cluster can be provisioned using GCP’s Cloud Console or using the Cloud SDK, Google’s command-line interface for Google Cloud Platform products and services. I prefer using the CLI, which helps enable DevOps automation through tools like Jenkins and Travis CI (gist).

Below is the command I used to provision a minimally sized three-node GKE cluster, replete with the latest available version of Kubernetes. Although a one-node cluster is sufficient for early-stage development, testing should be done on a multi-node cluster to ensure the service will operate properly with multiple instances running behind a load-balancer (gist).

Below, we see the three n1-standard-1 instance type worker nodes, one in each of three different specific geographical locations, referred to as zones. The three zones are in the us-east1 region. Multiple instances spread across multiple zones provide single-region high-availability for our Spring Boot service. With GKE, the Master Node is fully managed by Google.

Building Service Image

In order to deploy our Spring Boot service, we must first build a Docker Image and make that image available to our Kubernetes cluster. For lowest latency, I’ve chosen to build and publish the image to Google Container Registry, in addition to Docker Hub. The Spring Boot service’s Docker image is built on the latest Debian-based OpenJDK 10 Slim base image, available on Docker Hub. The Spring Boot JAR file is copied into the image (gist).

To automate the build and publish processes with tools such as Jenkins or Travis CI, we will use a simple shell script. The script builds the Spring Boot service using Gradle, then builds the Docker Image containing the Spring Boot JAR file, tags and publishes the Docker image to the image repository, and finally, redeploys the Spring Boot service container to GKE using kubectl (gist).

Below we see the latest version of our Spring Boot Docker image published to the Google Cloud Registry.

Deploying the Service

To deploy the Spring Boot service’s container to GKE, we will use a Kubernetes Deployment Controller. The Deployment Controller manages the Pods and ReplicaSets. As a deployment alternative, you could choose to use CoreOS’ Operator Framework to create an Operator or use Helm to create a Helm Chart. Along with the Deployment Controller, there is a ConfigMap and a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. The ConfigMap contains environment variables that will be available to the Spring Boot service instances running in the Kubernetes Pods. Variables include the host and port of the Elasticsearch cluster on GCP and the name of the Elasticsearch index created by WordPress. These values will override any configuration values set in the service’s application.yml Java properties file.

The Deployment Controller creates a ReplicaSet with three Pods, running the Spring Boot service, one on each worker node (gist).

To properly load-balance the three Spring Boot service Pods, we will also deploy a Kubernetes Service of the Kubernetes ServiceType, LoadBalancer. According to Kubernetes, a Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them (gist).

Below, we see three instances of the Spring Boot service deployed to the GKE cluster on GCP. Each Pod, containing an instance of the Spring Boot service, is in a load-balanced pool, behind our service load balancer, and exposed on port 80.

Testing the API

We can test our API and ensure it is talking to Elasticsearch, and returning expected results using the Swagger UI, shown previously, or tools like Postman, shown below.

Communication Between GKE and Elasticsearch

Similar to port 9200, which needed to be opened for indexing content over HTTP, we also need to open firewall port 9300 between the Spring Boot service on GKE and Elasticsearch. According to Elastic, Elasticsearch Java clients talk to the Elasticsearch cluster over port 9300, using the native Elasticsearch transport protocol (TCP).

Again, locking this port down to the GKE cluster as the source is critical for security (gist).

Part Two

In part one we have examined the creation of the Elastic Stack, the provisioning of the GKE cluster, and the development and deployment of the Spring Boot service to Kubernetes. In part two of this post, we will tie everything together by creating and integrating our Action for Google Assistant:

Create the new Actions project using the Actions on Google console;
Develop the Action’s Intents using the Dialogflow console;
Develop, deploy, and test the Cloud Function to GCP;

If you’re interested in comparing the development of an Action for Google Assistant with that of Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s LUIS-enabled chatbots, in addition to this post, I would recommend the previous three posts in this conversation interface series:

All three article’s demonstrations leverage their respective Cloud platform’s machine learning-based Natural language understanding (NLU) services. All three take advantage of their respective Cloud platform’s NoSQL database and object storage services. Lastly, all three of the article’s demonstrations are written in a common language, Node.js.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients, or Google.

1 Comment

Deploying Spring Boot Apps to AWS with Netflix Nebula and Spinnaker: Part 2 of 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Build Automation, Cloud, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 12, 2018

In Part One of this post, we examined enterprise deployment tools and introduced two of Netflix’s open-source deployment tools, the Nebula Gradle plugins, and Spinnaker. In Part Two, we will deploy a production-ready Spring Boot application, the Election microservice, to multiple Amazon EC2 instances, behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). We will use a fully automated DevOps workflow. The build, test, package, bake, deploy process will be handled by the Netflix Nebula Gradle Linux Packaging Plugin, Jenkins, and Spinnaker. The high-level process will involve the following steps:

Configure Gradle to build a production-ready fully executable application for Unix systems (executable JAR)
Using deb-s3 and GPG Suite, create a secure, signed APT (Debian) repository on Amazon S3
Using Jenkins and the Netflix Nebula plugin, build a Debian package, containing the executable JAR and configuration files
Using Jenkins and deb-s3, publish the package to the S3-based APT repository
Using Spinnaker (HashiCorp Packer under the covers), bake an Ubuntu Amazon Machine Image (AMI), replete with the executable JAR installed from the Debian package
Deploy an auto-scaling set of Amazon EC2 instances from the baked AMI, behind an ELB, running the Spring Boot application using both the Red/Black and Highlander deployment strategies
Be able to repeat the entire automated build, test, package, bake, deploy process, triggered by a new code push to GitHub

The overall build, test, package, bake, deploy process will look as follows.

DevOps Architecture

Spinnaker’s modern architecture is comprised of several independent microservices. The codebase is written in Java and Groovy. It leverages the Spring Boot framework¹. Spinnaker’s configuration, startup, updates, and rollbacks are centrally managed by Halyard. Halyard provides a single point of contact for command line interaction with Spinnaker’s microservices.

Spinnaker can be installed on most private or public infrastructure, either containerized or virtualized. Spinnaker has links to a number of Quickstart installations on their website. For this demonstration, I deployed and configured Spinnaker on Azure, starting with one of the Azure Spinnaker quick-start ARM templates. The template provisions all the necessary Azure resources. For better performance, I chose upgraded the default VM to a larger Standard D4 v3, which contains 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory. I would recommend at least 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory at a minimum for Spinnaker.

Another Azure VM, in the same virtual network as the Spinnaker VM, already hosts Jenkins, SonarQube, and Nexus Repository OSS.

From Spinnaker on Azure, Debian Packages are uploaded to the APT package repository on AWS S3. Spinnaker also bakes Amazon Machine Images (AMI) on AWS. Spinnaker provisions the AWS resources, including EC2 instances, Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups, Launch Configurations, and Security Groups. The only resources you need on AWS to get started with Spinnaker are a VPC and Subnets. There are some minor, yet critical prerequisites for naming your VPC and Subnets.

Other external tools include GitHub for source control and Slack for notifications. I have built and managed everything from a Mac, however, all tools are platform agnostic. The Spring Boot application was developed in JetBrains IntelliJ.

Source Code

All source code for this post can be found on GitHub. The project’s README file contains a list of the Election service’s endpoints.

Code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

APT Repository

After setting up Spinnaker on Azure, I created an APT repository on Amazon S3, using the instructions provided by Netflix, in their Code Lab, An Introduction to Spinnaker: Hello Deployment. The setup involves creating an Amazon S3 bucket to serve as an APT (Debian) repository, creating a GPG key for signing, and using deb-s3 to manage the repository. The Code Lab also uses Aptly, a great tool, which I skipped for brevity.

GPG Key

On the Mac, I used GPG Suite to create a GPG (GNU Privacy Guard or GnuPG) automatic signing key for my APT repository. The key is required by Spinnaker to verify the Debian packages in the repository, before installation.

The Ruby Gem, deb-s3, makes management of the Debian packages easy and automatable with Jenkins. Jenkins uploads the Debian packages, using a deb-s3 command, such as the following (gist). In this post, Jenkins calls the command from the shell script, upload-deb-package.sh, which is included in the GitHub project.

The Jenkins user requires access to the signing key, to build and upload the Debian packages. I created my GPG key on my Mac, securely copied the key to my Ubuntu-based Jenkins VM, and then imported the key for the Jenkins user. You could also create your key on Ubuntu, directly. Make sure you backup your private key in a secure location!

Nebula Packaging Plugin

Next, I set up a Gradle task in my build.gradle file to build my Debian packages using the Netflix Nebula Gradle Linux Packaging Plugin. Although Debian packaging tasks could become complex for larger application installations, this task for this post is pretty simple. I used many of the best-practices suggested by Spring for Production-grade deployments. The best-practices guide recommends file location, file modes, and file user and group ownership. I create the JAR as a fully executable JAR, meaning it is started like any other executable and does not have to be started with the standard java -jar command.

In the task, shown below (gist), the JAR and the external configuration file (optional) are copied to specific locations during the deployment and symlinked, as required. I used the older SysVInit system (init.d) to enable the application to automatically starts on boot. You should probably use systemctl for your services with Ubuntu 16.04.

You can use the ar (archive) command (i.e., ar -x spring-postgresql-demo_4.5.0_all.deb), to extract and inspect the structure of a Debian package. The data.tar.gz file, displayed below in Atom, shows the final package structure.

Base AMI

Next, I baked a base AMI for Spinnaker to use. This base AMI is used by Spinnaker to bake (re-bake) the final AMI(s) used for provisioning the EC2 instances, containing the Spring Boot Application. The Spinnaker base AMI is built from another base AMI, the official Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image. I installed the OpenJDK 8 package on the AMI, which is required to run the Java-based Election service. Lastly and critically, I added information about the location of my S3-based APT Debian package repository to the list of configured APT data sources, and the GPG key required for package verification. This information and key will be used later by Spinnaker to bake AMIʼs, using this base AMI. The set-up script, base_ubuntu_ami_setup.sh, which is included in the GitHub project.

Jenkins

This post uses a single Jenkins CI/CD pipeline. Using a Webhook, the pipeline is automatically triggered by every git push to the GitHub project. The pipeline pulls the source code, builds the application, and performs unit-tests and static code analysis with SonarQube. If the build succeeds and the tests pass, the build artifact (JAR file) is bundled into a Debian package using the Nebula Packaging plugin, uploaded to the S3 APT repository using s3-deb, and archived locally for Spinnaker to reference. Once the pipeline is completed, on success or on failure, a Slack notification is sent. The Jenkinsfile, used for this post is available in the project on Github.

Below is a traditional Jenkins view of the CI/CD pipeline, with links to unit test reports, SonarQube results, build artifacts, and GitHub source code.

Below is the same pipeline viewed using the Jenkins Blue Ocean plugin.

It is important to perform sufficient testing before building the Debian package. You donʼt want to bake an AMI and deploy EC2 instances, at a cost, before finding out the application has bugs.

Spinnaker Setup

First, I set up a new Spinnaker Slack channel and a custom bot user. Spinnaker details the Slack set up in their Notifications and Events Guide. You can configure what type of Spinnaker events trigger Slack notifications.

AWS Spinnaker User

Next, I added the required Spinnaker User, Policy, and Roles to AWS. Spinnaker uses this access to query and provision infrastructure on your behalf. The Spinnaker User requires Power User level access to perform all their necessary tasks. AWS IAM set up is detailed by Spinnaker in their Cloud Providers Setup for AWS. They also describe the setup of other cloud providers. You need to be reasonably familiar with AWS IAM, including the PassRole permission to set up this part. As part of the setup, you enable AWS for Spinnaker and add your AWS account using the Halyard interface.

spin45

Spinnaker Security Groups

Next, I set up two Spinnaker Security Groups, corresponding to two AWS Security Groups, one for the load balancer and one for the Election service. The load balancer security group exposes port 80, and the Election service security group exposes port 8080.

Spinnaker Load Balancer

Next, I created a Spinnaker Load Balancer, corresponding to an Amazon Classic Load Balancer. The Load Balancer will load-balance the Election service EC2 instances. Below you see a Load Balancer, balancing a pair of active EC2 instances, the result of a Red/Black deployment.

Spinnaker can currently create both AWS Classic Load Balancers as well as Application Load Balancers (ALB).

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Spinnaker Pipeline

This post uses a single, basic Spinnaker Pipeline. The pipeline bakes a new AMI from the Debian package generated by the Jenkins pipeline. After a manual approval stage, Spinnaker deploys a set of EC2 instances, behind the Load Balancer, which contains the latest version of the Election service. Spinnaker finishes the pipeline by sending a Slack notification.

Jenkins Integration

The pipeline is triggered by the successful completion of the Jenkins pipeline. This is set in the Configuration stage of the pipeline. The integration with Jenkins is managed through Spinnaker’s Igor service.

Bake Stage

Next, in the Bake stage, Spinnaker bakes a new AMI, containing the Debian package generated by the Jenkins pipeline. The stageʼs configuration contains the package name to reference.

The stageʼs configuration also includes a reference to which Base AMI to use, to bake the new AMIs. Here I have used the AMI ID of the base Spinnaker AMI, I created previously.

Deploy Stage

Next, the Deploy stage deploys the Election service, running on EC2 instances, provisioned from the new AMI, which was baked in the last stage. To configure the Deploy stage, you define a Spinnaker Server Group. According to Spinnaker, the Server Group identifies the deployable artifact, VM image type, the number of instances, autoscaling policies, metadata, Load Balancer, and a Security Group.

The Server Group also defines the Deployment Strategy. Below, I chose the Red/Black Deployment Strategy (also referred to as Blue/Green). This strategy will disable, not terminate the active Server Group. If the new deployment fails, we can manually or automatically perform a Rollback to the previous, currently disabled Server Group.

Letʼs Start Baking!

With set up complete, letʼs kick off a git push, trigger and complete the Jenkins pipeline, and finally trigger the Spinnaker pipeline. Below we see the pipelineʼs Bake stage has been started. Spinnakerʼs UI lets us view the Bakery Details. The Bakery, provided by Spinnakerʼs Rosco service, bakes the AMIs. Rosco uses HashiCorp Packer to bake the AMIs, using standard Packer templates.

Below we see Spinnaker (Rosco/Packer) locating the Base Spinnaker AMI we configured in the Pipelineʼs Bake stage. Next, we see Spinnaker sshʼing into a new EC2 instance with a temporary keypair and Security Group and starting the Election service Debian package installation.

Continuing, we see the latest Debian package, derived from the Jenkins pipelineʼs archive, being pulled from the S3-based APT repo. The package is verified using the GPG key and then installed. Lastly, we see a new AMI is created, containing the deployed Election service, which was initially built and packaged by Jenkins. Note the AWS Resource Tags created by Spinnaker, as shown in the Bakery output.

The base Spinnaker AMI and the AMIs baked by Spinnaker are visible in the AWS Console. Note the naming conventions used by Spinnaker for the AMIs, the Source AMI used to build the new APIs, and the addition of the Tags, which we saw being applied in the Bakery output above. The use of Tags indirectly allows full traceability from the deployed EC2 instance all the way back to the original code commit to git by the Developer.

Red/Black Deployments

With the new AMI baked successfully, and a required manual approval, using a Manual Judgement type pipeline stage, we can now begin a Red/Black deployment to AWS.

Using the Server Group configuration in the Deploy stage, Spinnaker deploys two EC2 instances, behind the ELB.

Below, we see the successful results of the Red/Black deployment. The single Spinnaker Cluster contains two deployed Server Groups. One group, the previously active Server Group (RED), comprised of two EC2 instances, is disabled. The ‘RED’ EC2 instances are unregistered with the load balancer but still running. The new Server Group (BLACK), also comprised of two EC2 instances, is now active and registered with the Load Balancer. Spinnaker will spread EC2 instances evenly across all Availability Zones in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

From the AWS Console, we can observe four running instances, though only two are registered with the load-balancer.

Here we see each deployed Server Group has a different Auto Scaling Group and Launch Configuration. Note the continued use of naming conventions by Spinnaker.

There can be only one, Highlander!

Now, in the Deploy stage of the pipeline, we will switch the Server Groupʼs Strategy to Highlander. The Highlander strategy will, as you probably guessed by the name, destroy all other Server Groups in the Cluster. This is more typically used for lower environments, like Development or Test, where you are only interested in the next version of the application for testing. The Red/Black strategy is more applicable to Production, where you want the opportunity to quickly rollback to the previous deployment, if necessary.

Following a successful deployment, below, we now see the first two Server Groups have been terminated, and a third Server Group in the Cluster is active.

In the AWS Console, we can confirm the four previous EC2 instances have been successfully terminated as a result of the Highlander deployment strategy, and two new instances are running.

As well, the previous Auto Scaling Groups and Launch Configurations have been deleted from AWS by Spinnaker.

As expected, the Classic Load Balancer only contains the two most recent EC2 instances from the last Server Group deployed.

Confirming the Deployment

Using the DNS address of the load balancer, we can hit the Election service endpoints, on either of the EC2 instances. All API endpoints are listed in the Projectʼs README file. Below, from a web browser, we see the candidates resource returning candidate information, retrieved from the Electionʼs PostgreSQL RDS database Test instance.

Similarly, from Postman, we can hit the load balancer and get back election information from the elections resource, using an HTTP GET.

I intentionally left out a discussion of the service’s RDS database and how configuration management was handled with Spring Profiles and Spring Cloud Config. Both topics were out of scope for this post.

Conclusion

Although this was a brief, whirlwind overview of deployment tools, it shows the power of delivery tools like Spinnaker, when seamlessly combined with other tools, like Jenkins and the Nebula plugins. Together, these tools are capable of efficiently, repeatably, and securely deploying large numbers of containerized and non-containerized applications to a variety of private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

¹ Running Spinnaker on Compute Engine

AWS, CD, CI, Continuous Delivery, continuous deployment, Debian, GitOps, hashicorp, Jenkins, Packer, Spinnaker, Spring, Spring Boot

1 Comment

Deploying Spring Boot Apps to AWS with Netflix Nebula and Spinnaker: Part 1 of 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Build Automation, Continuous Delivery, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 10, 2018

Listening to DevOps industry pundits, you might be convinced everyone is running containers in Production (or by now, serverless). Although containerization is growing at a phenomenal rate, several recent surveys¹ indicate less than 50% of enterprises are deploying containers in Production. Filter those results further with the fact, of those enterprises, only a small percentage of their total application portfolios are containerized, let alone in Production.

As a DevOps Consultant, I regularly work with corporations whose global portfolios are in the thousands of applications. Indeed, some percentage of their applications are containerized, with less running in Production. However, a majority of those applications, even those built on modern, light-weight, distributed architectures, are still being deployed to bare-metal and virtualized public cloud and private data center infrastructure, for a variety of reasons.

Enterprise Deployment

Due to the scale and complexity of application portfolios, many organizations have invested in enterprise deployment tools, either commercially available or developed in-house. The enterprise deployment tool’s primary objective is to standardize the process of securely, reliably, and repeatably packaging, publishing, and deploying both containerized and non-containerized applications to large fleets of virtual machines and bare-metal servers, across multiple, geographically dispersed data centers and cloud providers. Enterprise deployment tools are particularly common in tightly regulated and compliance-driven organizations, as well as organizations that have undertaken large amounts of M&A, resulting in vastly different application technology stacks.

Better-known examples of commercially available enterprise deployment tools include IBM UrbanCode Deploy (aka uDeploy), XebiaLabs XL Deploy, CA Automic Release Automation, Octopus Deploy, and Electric Cloud ElectricFlow. While commercial tools continue to gain market share³, many organizations are tightly coupled to their in-house solutions through years of use and fear of widespread process disruption, given current economic, security, compliance, and skills-gap sensitivities.

Deployment Tool Anatomy

Most Enterprise deployment tools are compatible with standard binary package types, including Debian (.deb) and Red Hat (RPM) Package Manager (.rpm) packages for Linux, NuGet (.nupkg) packages for Windows, and Node Package Manager (.npm) and Bower for JavaScript. There are equivalent package types for other popular languages and formats, such as Go, Python, Ruby, SQL, Android, Objective-C, Swift, and Docker. Packages usually contain application metadata, a signature to ensure the integrity and/or authenticity², and a compressed payload.

Enterprise deployment tools are normally integrated with open-source packaging and publishing tools, such as Apache Maven, Apache Ivy/Ant, Gradle, NPM, NuGet, Bundler, PIP, and Docker.

Binary packages (and images), built with enterprise deployment tools, are typically stored in private, open-source or commercial binary (artifact) repositories, such as Spacewalk, JFrog Artifactory, and Sonatype Nexus Repository. The latter two, Artifactory and Nexus, support a multitude of modern package types and repository structures, including Maven, NuGet, PyPI, NPM, Bower, Ruby Gems, CocoaPods, Puppet, Chef, and Docker.

Mature binary repositories provide many features in addition to package management, including role-based access control, vulnerability scanning, rich APIs, DevOps integration, and fault-tolerant, high-availability architectures.

Lastly, enterprise deployment tools generally rely on standard package management systems to retrieve and install cryptographically verifiable packages and images. These include YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified), APT (aptitude), APK (Alpine Linux), NuGet, Chocolatey, NPM, PIP, Bundler, and Docker. Packages are deployed directly to running infrastructure, or indirectly to intermediate deployable components as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), Google Compute Engine machine images, VMware machines, Docker Images, or CoreOS rkt.

Open-Source Alternative

One such enterprise with an extensive portfolio of both containerized and non-containerized applications is Netflix. To standardize their deployments to multiple types of cloud infrastructure, Netflix has developed several well-known open-source software (OSS) tools, including the Nebula Gradle plugins and Spinnaker. I discussed Spinnaker in my previous post, Managing Applications Across Multiple Kubernetes Environments with Istio, as an alternative to Jenkins for deploying container workloads to Kubernetes on Google (GKE).

As a leader in OSS, Netflix has documented their deployment process in several articles and presentations, including a post from 2016, ‘How We Build Code at Netflix.’ According to the article, the high-level process for deployment to Amazon EC2 instances involves the following steps:

Code is built and tested locally using Nebula
Changes are committed to a central git repository
Jenkins job executes Nebula, which builds, tests, and packages the application for deployment
Builds are “baked” into Amazon Machine Images (using Spinnaker)
Spinnaker pipelines are used to deploy and promote the code change

The Nebula plugins and Spinnaker leverage many underlying, open-source technologies, including Pivotal Spring, Java, Groovy, Gradle, Maven, Apache Commons, Redline RPM, HashiCorp Packer, Redis, HashiCorp Consul, Cassandra, and Apache Thrift.

Both the Nebula plugins and Spinnaker have been battle tested in Production by Netflix, as well as by many other industry leaders after Netflix open-sourced the tools in 2014 (Nebula) and 2015 (Spinnaker). Currently, there are approximately 20 Nebula Gradle plugins available on GitHub. Notable core-contributors in the development of Spinnaker include Google, Microsoft, Pivotal, Target, Veritas, and Oracle, to name a few. A sign of its success, Spinnaker currently has over 4,600 Stars on GitHub!

Part Two: Demonstration

In Part Two, we will deploy a production-ready Spring Boot application, the Election microservice, to multiple Amazon EC2 instances, behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). We will use a fully automated DevOps workflow. The build, test, package, bake, deploy process will be handled by the Netflix Nebula Gradle Linux Packaging Plugin, Jenkins, and Spinnaker. The high-level process will involve the following steps:

Configure Gradle to build a production-ready fully executable application for Unix systems (executable JAR)
Using deb-s3 and GPG Suite, create a secure, signed APT (Debian) repository on Amazon S3
Using Jenkins and the Netflix Nebula plugin, build a Debian package, containing the executable JAR and configuration files
Using Jenkins and deb-s3, publish the package to the S3-based APT repository
Using Spinnaker (HashiCorp Packer under the covers), bake an Ubuntu Amazon Machine Image (AMI), replete with the executable JAR installed from the Debian package
Deploy an auto-scaling set of Amazon EC2 instances from the baked AMI, behind an ELB, running the Spring Boot application using both the Red/Black and Highlander deployment strategies
Be able to repeat the entire automated build, test, package, bake, deploy process, triggered by a new code push to GitHub

The overall build, test, package, bake, deploy process will look as follows.

References

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

¹ Recent Surveys: Forrester, Portworx, Cloud Foundry Survey
² Courtesy Wikipedia – rpm
³ XebiaLabs Kicks Off 2017 with Triple-Digit Growth in Enterprise DevOps

AWS, CD, CI, Continuous Delivery, continuous deployment, Debian, GitOps, hashicorp, Jenkins, Packer, Spinnaker, Spring, Spring Boot

1 Comment

Developing Cloud-Native Data-Centric Spring Boot Applications for Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Cloud, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Java Development, PCF, Software Development on March 23, 2018

In this post, we will explore the development of a cloud-native, data-centric Spring Boot 2.0 application, and its deployment to Pivotal Software’s hosted Pivotal Cloud Foundry service, Pivotal Web Services. We will add a few additional features, such as Spring Data, Lombok, and Swagger, to enhance our application.

According to Pivotal, Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Applications. Spring Boot takes an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries. Spring Boot 2.0 just went GA on March 1, 2018. This is the first major revision of Spring Boot since 1.0 was released almost 4 years ago. It is also the first GA version of Spring Boot that provides support for Spring Framework 5.0.

Pivotal Web Services’ tagline is ‘The Agile Platform for the Agile Team Powered by Cloud Foundry’. According to Pivotal, Pivotal Web Services (PWS) is a hosted environment of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). PWS is hosted on AWS in the US-East region. PWS utilizes two availability zones for redundancy. PWS provides developers a Spring-centric PaaS alternative to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and OpsWorks. With PWS, you get the reliability and security of AWS, combined with the rich-functionality and ease-of-use of PCF.

To demonstrate the feature-rich capabilities of the Spring ecosystem, the Spring Boot application shown in this post incorporates the following complimentary technologies:

Spring Boot Actuator: Sub-project of Spring Boot, adds several production grade services to Spring Boot applications with little developer effort
Spring Data JPA: Sub-project of Spring Data, easily implement JPA based repositories and data access layers
Spring Data REST: Sub-project of Spring Data, easily build hypermedia-driven REST web services on top of Spring Data repositories
Spring HATEOAS: Create REST representations that follow the HATEOAS principle from Spring-based applications
Springfox Swagger 2: We are using the Springfox implementation of the Swagger 2 specification, an automated JSON API documentation for API’s built with Spring
Lombok: The @Data annotation generates boilerplate code that is typically associated with simple POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) and beans: @ToString, @EqualsAndHashCode, @Getter, @Setter, and @RequiredArgsConstructor

Source Code

All source code for this post can be found on GitHub. To get started quickly, use one of the two following commands (gist).

For this post, I have used JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and Git Bash on Windows for development. However, all code should be compatible with most popular IDEs and development platforms. The project assumes you have Docker and the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) installed locally.

Code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Demo Application

The Spring Boot application demonstrated in this post is a simple election-themed RESTful API. The app allows API consumers to create, read, update, and delete, candidates, elections, and votes, via its exposed RESTful HTTP-based resources.

The Spring Boot application consists of (7) JPA Entities that mirror the tables and views in the database, (7) corresponding Spring Data Repositories, (2) Spring REST Controller, (4) Liquibase change sets, and associated Spring, Liquibase, Swagger, and PCF configuration files. I have intentionally chosen to avoid the complexities of using Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) for brevity, albeit a security concern, and directly expose the entities as resources.

Controller Resources

This application is a simple CRUD application. The application contains a few simple HTTP GET resources in each of the two controller classes, as an introduction to Spring REST controllers. For example, the CandidateController contains the /candidates/summary and /candidates/summary/{election} resources (shown below in Postman). Typically, you would expose your data to the end-user as controller resources, as opposed to exposing the entities directly. The ease of defining controller resources is one of the many powers of Spring Boot.

Paging and Sorting

As an introduction to Spring Data’s paging and sorting features, both the VoteRepository and VotesElectionsViewRepository Repository Interfaces extend Spring Data’s PagingAndSortingRepository<T,ID> interface, instead of the default CrudRepository<T,ID> interface. With paging and sorting enabled, you may both sort and limit the amount of data returned in the response payload. For example, to reduce the size of your response payload, you might choose to page through the votes in blocks of 25 votes at a time. In that case, as shown below in Postman, if you needed to return just votes 26-50, you would append the /votes resource with ?page=1&size=25. Since paging starts on page 0 (zero), votes 26-50 will on page 1.

Swagger

This project also includes the Springfox implementation of the Swagger 2 specification. Along with the Swagger 2 dependency, the project takes a dependency on io.springfox:springfox-swagger-ui. The Springfox Swagger UI dependency allows us to view and interactively test our controller resources through Swagger’s browser-based UI, as shown below.

All Swagger configuration can be found in the project’s SwaggerConfig Spring Configuration class.

Gradle

This post’s Spring Boot application is built with Gradle, although it could easily be converted to Maven if desired. According to Gradle, Gradle is the modern tool used to build, automate and deliver everything from mobile apps to microservices.

Data

In real life, most applications interact with one or more data sources. The Spring Boot application demonstrated in this post interacts with data from a PostgreSQL database. PostgreSQL, or simply Postgres, is the powerful, open-source object-relational database system, which has supported production-grade applications for 15 years. The application’s single elections database consists of (6) tables, (3) views, and (2) function, which are both used to generate random votes for this demonstration.

Spring Data makes interacting with PostgreSQL easy. In addition to the features of Spring Data, we will use Liquibase. Liquibase is known as the source control for your database. With Liquibase, your database development lifecycle can mirror your Spring development lifecycle. Both DDL (Data Definition Language) and DML (Data Manipulation Language) changes are versioned controlled, alongside the Spring Boot application source code.

Locally, we will take advantage of Docker to host our development PostgreSQL database, using the official PostgreSQL Docker image. With Docker, there is no messy database installation and configuration of your local development environment. Recreating and deleting your PostgreSQL database is simple.

To support the data-tier in our hosted PWS environment, we will implement ElephantSQL, an offering from the Pivotal Services Marketplace. ElephantSQL is a hosted version of PostgreSQL, running on AWS. ElephantSQL is referred to as PostgreSQL as a Service, or more generally, a Database as a Service or DBaaS. As a Pivotal Marketplace service, we will get easy integration with our PWS-hosted Spring Boot application, with near-zero configuration.

Docker

First, set up your local PostgreSQL database using Docker and the official PostgreSQL Docker image. Since this is only a local database instance, we will not worry about securing our database credentials (gist).

Your running PostgreSQL container should resemble the output shown below.

Data Source

Most IDEs allow you to create and save data sources. Although this is not a requirement, it makes it easier to view the database’s resources and table data. Below, I have created a data source in IntelliJ from the running PostgreSQL container instance. The port, username, password, and database name were all taken from the above Docker command.

Liquibase

There are multiple strategies when it comes to managing changes to your database. With Liquibase, each set of changes are handled as change sets. Liquibase describes a change set as an atomic change that you want to apply to your database. Liquibase offers multiple formats for change set files, including XML, JSON, YAML, and SQL. For this post, I have chosen SQL, specifically PostgreSQL SQL dialect, which can be designated in the IntelliJ IDE. Below is an example of the first changeset, which creates four tables and two indexes.

As shown below, change sets are stored in the db/changelog/changes sub-directory, as configured in the master change log file (db.changelog-master.yaml). Change set files follow an incremental naming convention.

The empty PostgreSQL database, before any Liquibase changes, should resemble the screengrab shown below.

To automatically run Liquibase database migrations on startup, the org.liquibase:liquibase-core dependency must be added to the project’s build.gradle file. To apply the change sets to your local, empty PostgreSQL database, simply start the service locally with the gradle bootRun command. As the app starts after being compiled, any new Liquibase change sets will be applied.

You might ask how does Liquibase know the change sets are new. During the initial startup of the Spring Boot application, in addition to any initial change sets, Liquibase creates two database tables to track changes, the databasechangelog and databasechangeloglock tables. Shown below are the two tables, along with the results of the four change sets included in the project, and applied by Liquibase to the local PostgreSQL elections database.

Below we see the contents of the databasechangelog table, indicating that all four change sets were successfully applied to the database. Liquibase checks this table before applying change sets.

ElephantSQL

Before we can deploy our Spring Boot application to PWS, we need an accessible PostgreSQL instance in the Cloud; I have chosen ElephantSQL. Available through the Pivotal Services Marketplace, ElephantSQL currently offers one free and three paid service plans for their PostgreSQL as a Service. I purchased the Panda service plan as opposed to the free Turtle service plan. I found the free service plan was too limited in the maximum number of database connections for multiple service instances.

Previewing and purchasing an ElephantSQL service plan from the Pivotal Services Marketplace, assuming you have an existing PWS account, literally takes a single command (gist).

The output of the command should resemble the screengrab below. Note the total concurrent connections and total storage for each plan.

To get details about the running ElephantSQL service, use the cf service elections command.

From the ElephantSQL Console, we can obtain the connection information required to access our PostgreSQL elections database. You will need the default database name, username, password, and URL.

Service Binding

Once you have created the PostgreSQL database service, you need to bind the database service to the application. We will bind our application and the database, using the PCF deployment manifest file (manifest.yml), found in the project’s root directory. Binding is done using the services section (shown below).

The key/value pairs in the env section of the deployment manifest will become environment variables, local to the deployed Spring Boot service. These key/value pairs in the manifest will also override any configuration set in Spring’s external application properties file (application.yml). This file is located in the resources sub-directory. Note the SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE: test environment variable in the manifest.yml file. This variable designates which Spring Profile will be active from the multiple profiles defined in the application.yml file.

Deployment to PWS

Next, we run gradle build followed by cf push to deploy one instance of the Spring Boot service to PWS and associate it with our ElephantSQL database instance. Below is the expected output from the cf push command.

Note the route highlighted below. This is the URL where your Spring Boot service will be available.

To confirm your ElephantSQL database was populated by Liquibase when PWS started the deployed Spring application instance, we can check the ElephantSQL Console’s Stats tab. Note the database tables and rows in each table, signifying Liquibase ran successfully. Alternately, you could create another data source in your IDE, connected to ElephantSQL; this can be helpful for troubleshooting.

To access the running service and check that data is being returned, point your browser (or Postman) to the URL returned from the cf push command output (see second screengrab above) and hit the /candidates resource. Obviously, your URL, referred to as a route by PWS, will be different and unique. In the response payload, you should observe a JSON array of eight candidate objects. Each candidate was inserted into the Candidate table of the database, by Liquibase, when Liquibase executed the second of the four change sets on start-up.

With Spring Boot Actuator and Spring Data REST, our simple Spring Boot application has dozens of resources exposed automatically, without extensive coding of resource controllers. Actuator exposes resources to help manage and troubleshoot the application, such as info, health, mappings (shown below), metrics, env, and configprops, among others. All Actuator resources are exposed explicitly, thus they can be disabled for Production deployments. With Spring Boot 2.0, all Actuator resources are now preceded with /actuator/ .

According to Pivotal, Spring Data REST builds on top of Spring Data repositories, analyzes an application’s domain model and exposes hypermedia-driven HTTP resources for aggregates contained in the model, such as our /candidates resource. A partial list of the application’s exposed resources are listed in the GitHub project’s README file.

In Spring’s approach to building RESTful web services, HTTP requests are handled by a controller. Spring Data REST automatically exposes CRUD resources for our entities. With Spring Data JPA, POJOs like our Candidate class are annotated with @Entity, indicating that it is a JPA entity. Lacking a @Table annotation, it is assumed that this entity will be mapped to a table named Candidate.

With Spring’s Data REST’s RESTful HTTP-based API, traditional database Create, Read, Update, and Delete commands for each PostgreSQL database table are automatically mapped to equivalent HTTP methods, including POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.

Below is an example, using Postman, to create a new Candidate using an HTTP POST method.

Below is an example, using Postman, to update a new Candidate using an HTTP PUT method.

With Spring Data REST, we can even retrieve data from read-only database Views, as shown below. This particular JSON response payload was returned from the candidates_by_elections database View, using the /election-candidates resource.

Scaling Up

Once your application is deployed and you have tested its functionality, you can easily scale out or scale in the number instances, memory, and disk, with the cf scale command (gist).

Below is sample output from scaling up the Spring Boot application to two instances.

Optionally, you can activate auto-scaling, which will allow the application to scale based on load.

Following the PCF architectural model, auto-scaling is actually another service from the Pivotal Services Marketplace, PCF App Autoscaler, as seen below, running alongside our ElephantSQL service.

With PCF App Autoscaler, you set auto-scaling minimum and maximum instance limits and define scaling rules. Below, I have configured auto-scaling to scale out the number of application instances when the average CPU Utilization of all instances hits 80%. Conversely, the application will scale in when the average CPU Utilization recedes below 40%. In addition to CPU Utilization, PCF App Autoscaler also allows you to set scaling rules based on HTTP Throughput, HTTP Latency, RabbitMQ Depth (queue depth), and Memory Utilization.

Furthermore, I set the auto-scaling minimum number of instances to two and the maximum number of instances to four. No matter how much load is placed on the application, PWS will not scale above four instances. Conversely, PWS will maintain a minimum of two running instances at all times.

Conclusion

This brief post demonstrates both the power and simplicity of Spring Boot to quickly develop highly-functional, data-centric RESTful API applications with minimal coding. Further, when coupled with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring developers have a highly scalable, resilient cloud-native application hosting platform.

Cloud, Cloud Native, ElephantSQL, microservice, PCF, Pivotal, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Postgres, PostgreSQL, PWS, RESTful, Spring, Spring Boot

Eventual Consistency: Decoupling Microservices with Spring AMQP and RabbitMQ

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in DevOps, Java Development, Software Development on May 15, 2017

Introduction

In a recent post, Decoupling Microservices using Message-based RPC IPC, with Spring, RabbitMQ, and AMPQ, we moved away from synchronous REST HTTP for inter-process communications (IPC) toward message-based IPC. Moving to asynchronous message-based communications allows us to decouple services from one another. It makes it easier to build, test, and release our individual services. In that post, we did not achieve fully asynchronous communications. Although, we did achieve a higher level of service decoupling using message-based Remote Procedure Call (RPC) IPC.

In this post, we will fully decouple our services using the distributed computing model of eventual consistency. More specifically, we will use a message-based, event-driven, loosely-coupled, eventually consistent architectural approach for communications between services.

What is eventual consistency? One of the best definitions of eventual consistency I have read was posted on microservices.io. To paraphrase, ‘using an event-driven, eventually consistent approach, each service publishes an event whenever it updates its data. Other services subscribe to events. When an event is received, a service updates its data.’

Example of Eventual Consistency

Imagine, Service A, the Customer service, inserts a new customer record into its database. Based on that ‘customer created’ event, Service A publishes a message containing the new customer object, serialized to JSON, to the lightweight, persistent, New Customer message queue.

Service B, the Customer Onboarding service, a subscriber to the New Customer queue, consumes and deserializes Service A’s message. Service B may or may not perform a data transformation of the Customer object to its own Customer data model. Service B then inserts the new customer record into its own database.

In the above example, it can be said that the customer records in Service B’s database are eventually consistent with the customer records in Service A’s database. Service A makes a change and publishes a message in response to the event. Service B consumes the message and makes the same change. Eventually (likely within milliseconds), Service B’s customer records are consistent with Service A’s customer records.

Why Eventual Consistency?

So what does this apparent added complexity and duplication of data buy us? Consider the advantages. Service B, the Onboarding service, requires no knowledge of, or a dependency on, Service A, the Customer service. Still, Service B has a current record of all the customers that Service A maintains. Instead of making repeated and potentially costly RESTful HTTP calls or RPC message-based calls to or from Service A to Service B for new customers, Service B queries its database for a list of customers.

The value of eventual consistency increases factorially as you scale a distributed system. Imagine dozens of distinct microservices, many requiring data from other microservices. Further, imagine multiple instances of each of those services all running in parallel. Decoupling services from one another, through asynchronous forms of IPC, messaging, and event-driven eventual consistency greatly simplifies the software development lifecycle and operations.

Demonstration

In this post, we could use a few different architectural patterns to demonstrate message passing with RabbitMQ and Spring AMQP. They including Work Queues, Publish/Subscribe, Routing, or Topics. To keep things as simple as possible, we will have a single Producer, publish messages to a single durable and persistent message queue. We will have a single Subscriber, a Consumer, consume the messages from that queue. We focus on a single type of event message.

Sample Code

To demonstrate Spring AMQP-based messaging with RabbitMQ, we will use a reference set of three Spring Boot microservices. The Election Service, Candidate Service, and Voter Service are all backed by MongoDB. The services and MongoDB, along with RabbitMQ and Voter API Gateway, are all part of the Voter API.

The Voter API Gateway, based on HAProxy, serves as a common entry point to all three services, as well as serving as a reverse proxy and load balancer. The API Gateway provides round-robin load-balanced access to multiple instances of each service.

All the source code found this post’s example is available on GitHub, within a few different project repositories. The Voter Service repository contains the Voter service source code, along with the scripts and Docker Compose files required to deploy the project. The Election Service repository, Candidate Service repository, and Voter API Gateway repository are also available on GitHub. There is also a new AngularJS/Node.js Web Client, to demonstrate how to use the Voter API.

For this post, you only need to clone the Voter Service repository.

Deploying Voter API

All components, including the Spring Boot services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, API Gateway, and the Web Client, are individually deployed using Docker. Each component is publicly available as a Docker Image, on Docker Hub. The Voter Service repository contains scripts to deploy the entire set of Dockerized components, locally. The repository also contains optional scripts to provision a Docker Swarm, using Docker’s newer swarm mode, and deploy the components. We will only deploy the services locally for this post.

To clone and deploy the components locally, including the Spring Boot services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and the API Gateway, execute the following commands. If this is your first time running the commands, it may take a few minutes for your system to download all the required Docker Images from Docker Hub.

If everything was deployed successfully, you should observe six running Docker containers, similar to the output, below.

Using Voter API

The Voter Service, Election Service, and Candidate Service GitHub repositories each contain README files, which detail all the API endpoints each service exposes, and how to call them.

In addition to casting votes for candidates, the Voter service can simulate election results. Calling the /simulation endpoint, and indicating the desired election, the Voter service will randomly generate a number of votes for each candidate in that election. This will save us the burden of casting votes for this demonstration. However, the Voter service has no knowledge of elections or candidates. The Voter service depends on the Candidate service to obtain a list of candidates.

The Candidate service manages electoral candidates, their political affiliation, and the election in which they are running. Like the Voter service, the Candidate service also has a /simulation endpoint. The service will create a list of candidates based on the 2012 and 2016 US Presidential Elections. The simulation capability of the service saves us the burden of inputting candidates for this demonstration.

The Election service manages elections, their polling dates, and the type of election (federal, state, or local). Like the other services, the Election service also has a /simulation endpoint, which will create a list of sample elections. The Election service will not be discussed in this post’s demonstration. We will examine communications between the Candidate and Voter services, only.

REST HTTP Endpoint

As you recall from our previous post, Decoupling Microservices using Message-based RPC IPC, with Spring, RabbitMQ, and AMPQ, the Voter service exposes multiple, almost identical endpoints. Each endpoint uses a different means of IPC to retrieve candidates and generates random votes.

Calling the /voter/simulation/http/{election} endpoint and providing a specific election, prompts the Voter service to request a list of candidates from the Candidate service, based on the election parameter you input. This request is done using synchronous REST HTTP. The Voter service uses the HTTP GET method to request the data from the Candidate service. The Voter service then waits for a response.

The Candidate service receives the HTTP request. The Candidate service responds to the Voter service with a list of candidates in JSON format. The Voter service receives the response payload containing the list of candidates. The Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Message-based RPC Endpoint

Similarly, calling the /voter/simulation/rpc/{election} endpoint and providing a specific election, prompts the Voter service to request the same list of candidates. However, this time, the Voter service (the client) produces a request message and places in RabbitMQ’s voter.rpc.requests queue. The Voter service then waits for a response. The Voter service has no direct dependency on the Candidate service; it only depends on a response to its request message. In this way, it is still a form of synchronous IPC, but the Voter service is now decoupled from the Candidate service.

The request message is consumed by the Candidate service (the server), who is listening to that queue. In response, the Candidate service produces a message containing the list of candidates serialized to JSON. The Candidate service (the server) sends a response back to the Voter service (the client) through RabbitMQ. This is done using the Direct reply-to feature of RabbitMQ or using a unique response queue, specified in the reply-to header of the request message, sent by the Voter Service.

The Voter service receives the message containing the list of candidates. The Voter service deserializes the JSON payload to candidate objects. The Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, identical to the previous example, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

New Endpoint

Calling the new /voter/simulation/db/{election} endpoint and providing a specific election, prompts the Voter service to query its own MongoDB database for a list of candidates.

But wait, where did the candidates come from? The Voter service didn’t call the Candidate service? The answer is message-based eventual consistency. Whenever a new candidate is created, using a REST HTTP POST request to the Candidate service’s /candidate/candidates endpoint, a Spring Data Rest Repository Event Handler responds. Responding to the candidate created event, the event handler publishes a message, containing a serialized JSON representation of the new candidate object, to a durable and persistent RabbitMQ queue.

The Voter service is listening to that queue. The Voter service consumes messages off the queue, deserializes the candidate object, and saves it to its own voters database, to the candidate collection. For this example, we are saving the incoming candidate object as is, with no transformations. The candidate object model for both services is identical.

When /voter/simulation/db/{election} endpoint is called, the Voter service queries its voters database for a list of candidates. They Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, identical to the previous two examples, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Exploring the Code

We will not review the REST HTTP or RPC IPC code in this post. It was covered in detail, in the previous post. Instead, we will explore the new code required for eventual consistency.

Spring Dependencies

To use AMQP with RabbitMQ, we need to add a project dependency on org.springframework.boot.spring-boot-starter-amqp. Below is a snippet from the Candidate service’s build.gradle file, showing project dependencies. The Voter service’s dependencies are identical.

AMQP Configuration

Next, we need to add a small amount of RabbitMQ AMQP configuration to both services. We accomplish this by using Spring’s @Configuration annotation on our configuration classes. Below is the abridged configuration class for the Voter service.

And here, the abridged configuration class for the Candidate service.

Event Handler

With our dependencies and configuration in place, we will define the CandidateEventHandler class. This class is annotated with the Spring Data Rest @RepositoryEventHandler and Spring’s @Component. The @Component annotation ensures the event handler is registered.

The class contains the handleCandidateSave method, which is annotated with the Spring Data Rest @HandleAfterCreate. The event handler acts on the Candidate object, which is the first parameter in the method signature.

Responding to the candidate created event, the event handler publishes a message, containing a serialized JSON representation of the new candidate object, to the candidates.queue queue. This was the queue we configured earlier.

Consuming Messages

Next, we let’s switch to the Voter service’s CandidateListService class. Below is an abridged version of the class with two new methods. First, the getCandidateMessage method listens to the candidates.queue queue. This was the queue we configured earlier. The method is annotated with theSpring AMQP Rabbit @RabbitListener annotation.

The getCandidateMessage retrieves the new candidate object from the message, deserializes the message’s JSON payload, maps it to the candidate object model and saves it to the Voter service’s database.

The second method, getCandidatesQueueDb, retrieves the candidates from the Voter service’s database. The method makes use of the Spring Data MongoDB Aggregation package to return a list of candidates from MongoDB.

RabbitMQ Management Console

The easiest way to observe what is happening with the messages is using the RabbitMQ Management Console. To access the console, point your web browser to localhost, on port 15672. The default login credentials for the console are guest/guest. As you successfully produce and consume messages with RabbitMQ, you should see activity on the Overview tab.

Recall we said the queue, in this example, was durable. That means messages will survive the RabbitMQ broker stopping and starting. In the below view of the RabbitMQ Management Console, note the six messages persisted in memory. The Candidate service produced the messages in response to six new candidates being created. However, the Voter service was not running, and therefore, could not consume the messages. In addition, the RabbitMQ server was restarted, after receiving the candidate messages. The messages were persisted and still present in the queue after the successful reboot of RabbitMQ.

Once RabbitMQ and the Voter service instance were back online, the Voter service successfully consumed the six waiting messages from the queue.

Service Logs

In addition to using the RabbitMQ Management Console, we may obverse communications between the two services by looking at the Voter and Candidate service’s logs. I have grabbed a snippet of both service’s logs and added a few comments to show where different processes are being executed.

First the Candidate service logs. We observe a REST HTTP POST request containing a new candidate. We then observe the creation of the new candidate object in the Candidate service’s database, followed by the event handler publishing a message on the queue. Finally, we observe the response is returned in reply to the initial REST HTTP POST request.

Now the Voter service logs. At the exact same second as the message and the response sent by the Candidate service, the Voter service consumes the message off the queue. The Voter service then deserializes the new candidate object and inserts it into its database.

MongoDB

Using the mongo Shell, we can observe six new 2016 Presidential Election candidates in the Candidate service’s database.

Now, looking at the Voter service’s database, we should find the same six 2016 Presidential Election candidates. Note the Object IDs are the same between the two service’s document sets, as are the rest of the fields (first name, last name, political party, and election). However, the class field is different between the two service’s records.

Production Considerations

The post demonstrated a simple example of message-based, event-driven eventual consistency. In an actual Production environment, there are a few things that must be considered.

We only addressed a ‘candidate created’ event. We would also have to code for other types of events, such as a ‘candidate deleted’ event and a ‘candidate updated’ event.
If a candidate is added, deleted, then re-added, are the events published and consumed in the right order? What about with multiple instances of the Voter service running? Does this pattern guarantee event ordering?
How should the Candidate service react on startup if RabbitMQ is not available
What if RabbitMQ fails after the Candidate services have started?
How should the Candidate service react if a new candidate record is added to the database, but a ‘candidate created’ event message cannot be published to RabbitMQ? The two actions are not wrapped in a single transaction.
In all of the above scenarios, what response should be returned to the API end user?

Conclusion

In this post, using eventual consistency, we successfully decoupled our two microservices and achieved asynchronous inter-process communications. Adopting a message-based, event-driven, loosely-coupled architecture, wherever possible, in combination with REST HTTP when it makes sense, will improve the overall manageability and scalability of a microservices-based platform.

References

All opinions in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current employer or their clients.

µService, DevOps, docker, Eventual Consisteny, inter-process communications, IPC, Java, loosely coupled, Messaging, Microservices, RabbitMQ, Spring Boot

3 Comments

Decoupling Microservices using Message-based RPC IPC, with Spring, RabbitMQ, and AMPQ

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 8, 2017

Introduction

There has been a considerable growth in modern, highly scalable, distributed application platforms, built around fine-grained RESTful microservices. Microservices generally use lightweight protocols to communicate with each other, such as HTTP, TCP, UDP, WebSockets, MQTT, and AMQP. Microservices commonly communicate with each other directly using REST-based HTTP, or indirectly, using messaging brokers.

There are several well-known, production-tested messaging queues, such as Apache Kafka, Apache ActiveMQ, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Pivotal’s RabbitMQ. According to Pivotal, of these messaging brokers, RabbitMQ is the most widely deployed open source message broker.

RabbitMQ supports multiple messaging protocols. RabbitMQ’s primary protocol, the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), is an open standard wire-level protocol and semantic framework for high-performance enterprise messaging. According to Spring, ‘AMQP has exchanges, routes, and queues. Messages are first published to exchanges. Routes define on which queue(s) to pipe the message. Consumers subscribing to that queue then receive a copy of the message.’

Pivotal’s Spring AMQP project applies core Spring concepts to the development of AMQP-based messaging solutions. The project’s libraries facilitate management of AMQP resources while promoting the use of dependency injection and declarative configuration. The project provides a ‘template’ (RabbitTemplate) as a high-level abstraction for sending and receiving messages.

In this post, we will explore how to start moving Spring Boot Java services away from using synchronous REST HTTP for inter-process communications (IPC), and toward message-based IPC. Moving from synchronous IPC to messaging queues and asynchronous IPC decouples services from one another, allowing us to more easily build, test, and release individual microservices.

Message-Based RPC IPC

Decoupling services using asynchronous IPC is considered optimal by many enterprise software architects when developing modern distributed platforms. However, sometimes it is not easy or possible to get away from synchronous communications. Rightly or wrongly, often times services are architected, such that one service needs to retrieve data from another service or services, in order to process its own requests. It can be said, that service has a direct dependency on the other services. Many would argue, services, especially RESTful microservices, should not be coupled in this way.

There are several ways to break direct service-to-service dependencies using asynchronous IPC. We might implement request/async response REST HTTP-based IPC. We could also use publish/subscribe or publish/async response messaging queue-based IPC. These are all described by NGINX, in their article, Building Microservices: Inter-Process Communication in a Microservices Architecture; a must-read for anyone working with microservices. We might also implement an architecture which supports eventual consistency, eliminating the need for one service to obtain data from another service.

So what if we cannot implement asynchronous methods to break direct service dependencies, but we want to move toward message-based IPC? One answer is message-based Remote Procedure Call (RPC) IPC. I realize the mention of RPC might send cold shivers down the spine of many seasoned architected. Traditional RPC has several challenges, many which have been overcome with more modern architectural patterns.

According to Wikipedia, ‘in distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network), which is coded as if it were a normal (local) procedure call, without the programmer explicitly coding the details for the remote interaction.’

Although still a form of RPC and not asynchronous, it is possible to replace REST HTTP IPC with message-based RPC IPC. Using message-based RPC, services have no direct dependencies on other services. A service only depends on a response to a message request it makes to that queue. The services are now decoupled from one another. The requestor service (the client) has no direct knowledge of the respondent service (the server).

RPC with RabbitMQ and AMQP

RabbitMQ has an excellent set of six tutorials, which cover the basics of creating messaging applications, applying different architectural patterns, using RabbitMQ, in several different programming languages. The sixth and final tutorial covers using RabbitMQ for RPC-based IPC, with the request/reply architectural pattern.

Pivotal recently added Spring AMPQ implementations to each RabbitMQ tutorial, based on their Spring AMQP project. If you recall, the Spring AMQP project applies core Spring concepts to the development of AMQP-based messaging solutions.

This post’s RPC IPC example is closely based on the architectural pattern found in the Spring AMQP RabbitMQ tutorial.

Sample Code

To demonstrate Spring AMQP-based RPC IPC messaging with RabbitMQ, we will use a pair of simple Spring Boot microservices. These services, the Voter and Candidate services, have been used in several previous posts, and for training and testing DevOps engineers. Both services are backed by MongoDB. The services and MongoDB, along with RabbitMQ, are all part of the Voter API project. The Voter API project also contains an HAProxy-based API Gateway, which provides indirect, load-balanced access to the two services.

All code necessary to build this post’s example is available on GitHub, within three projects. The Voter Service project repository contains the Voter service source code, along with the scripts and Docker Compose files required to deploy the project. The Candidate Service project repository and the Voter API Gateway project repository are also available on GitHub. For this post, you need only clone the Voter Service project repository.

Deploying Voter API

All components, including the two Spring services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and the API Gateway, are individually deployed using Docker. Each component is publicly available as a Docker Image, on Docker Hub.

The Voter Service repository contains scripts to deploy the entire set of Dockerized components, locally. The repository also contains optional scripts to provision a Docker Swarm, using Docker’s newer swarm mode, and deploy the components. We will only deploy the services locally for this post.

To clone and deploy the components locally, including the two Spring services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and the API Gateway, execute the following commands. If this is your first time running the commands, it may take a few minutes for your system to download all the required Docker Images from Docker Hub.

If everything was deployed successfully, you should see the following output. You should observe five running Docker containers.

Using Voter API

The Voter Service and Candidate Service GitHub repositories both contain README files, which detail all the API endpoints each service exposes, and how to call them.

In addition to casting votes for candidates, the Voter service has the ability to simulate election results. By calling a /simulation endpoint, and indicating the desired election, the Voter service will randomly generate a number of votes for each candidate in that election. This will save us the burden of casting votes for this demonstration. However, the Voter service has no knowledge of elections or candidates. To obtain a list of candidates, the Voter service depends on the Candidate service.

REST HTTP Endpoint

The Voter service exposes two almost identical endpoints. Both endpoints generate random votes. However, below the covers, the two endpoints are very different. Calling the /voter/simulation/http/{election} endpoint, prompts the Voter service to request a list of candidates from the Candidate service, based on the election parameter you input. This request is done using synchronous REST HTTP. The Voter service uses the HTTP GET method to request the data from the Candidate service. The Voter service then waits for a response.

The HTTP request is received by the Candidate service. The Candidate service responds to the Voter service with a list of candidates, in JSON format. The Voter service receives the response containing the list of candidates. The Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate. Finally, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Message-based RPC Endpoint

Similarly, calling the /voter/simulation/rpc/{election} endpoint with a specific election prompts the Voter service to request the same list of candidates. However, this time, the Voter service (the client), produces a request message and places in RabbitMQ’s voter.rpc.requests queue. The Voter service then waits for a response. The Voter service has no direct dependency on the Candidate service. It only depends on a response to its message request. In this way, it is still a form of synchronous IPC, but the Voter service is now decoupled from the Candidate service.

The request message is consumed by the Candidate service (the server), who is listening to that queue. In response, the Candidate service produces a message containing the list of candidates, serialized to JSON. The Candidate service (the server) sends a response back to the Voter service (the client), through RabbitMQ. This is done using the Direct reply-to feature of RabbitMQ or using a unique response queue, specified in the reply-to header of the request message, sent by the Voter Service.

According to RabbitMQ, ‘the direct reply-to feature allows RPC clients to receive replies directly from their RPC server, without going through a reply queue. (“Directly” here still means going through AMQP and the RabbitMQ server; there is no separate network connection between RPC client and RPC server.)’

According to Spring, ‘starting with version 3.4.0, the RabbitMQ server now supports Direct reply-to; this eliminates the main reason for a fixed reply queue (to avoid the need to create a temporary queue for each request). Starting with Spring AMQP version 1.4.1 Direct reply-to will be used by default (if supported by the server) instead of creating temporary reply queues. When no replyQueue is provided (or it is set with the name amq.rabbitmq.reply-to), the RabbitTemplate will automatically detect whether Direct reply-to is supported and use it, or fall back to using a temporary reply queue. When using Direct reply-to, a reply-listener is not required and should not be configured.’ We are using the latest versions of both RabbitMQ and Spring AMQP, which should support Direct reply-to.

The Voter service receives the message containing the list of candidates. The Voter service deserializes the JSON payload to Candidate objects and proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Exploring the RPC Code

We will not examine the REST HTTP IPC code in this post. Instead, we will explore the RPC code. You are welcome to download the source code and explore the REST HTTP code pattern; it uses some advanced features of Spring Boot and Spring Data.

Spring Dependencies

In order to use RabbitMQ, we need to add a project dependency on org.springframework.boot.spring-boot-starter-amqp. Below is a snippet from the Candidate service’s build.gradle file, showing project dependencies. The Voter service’s dependencies are identical.

AMQP Configuration

And here, the configuration class for the Candidate service.

Candidate Service Code

With the dependencies and configuration in place, we define the method in the Voter service, which will request the candidates from the Candidate service, using RabbitMQ. Below is an abridged version of the Voter service’s CandidateListService class, containing the getCandidatesMessageRpc method. This method calls the rabbitTemplate.convertSendAndReceive method (see line 5, below).

Voter Service Code

Next, we define a method in the Candidate service, which will process the Voter service’s request. Below is an abridged version of the CandidateController class, containing the getCandidatesMessageRpc method. This method is decorated with Spring’s @RabbitListener annotation (see line 1, below). This annotation marks c to be the target of a Rabbit message listener on the voter.rpc.requests queue.

Also shown, are the getCandidatesMessageRpc method’s two helper methods, getByElection and serializeToJson. These methods query MongoDB for the list of candidates and serialize the list to JSON.

Demonstration

To demonstrate both the synchronous REST HTTP IPC code and the Spring AMQP-based RPC IPC code, we will make a few REST HTTP calls to the Voter API Gateway. For convenience, I have provided a shell script, demostrate_ipc.sh, which executes all the API calls necessary. I have added sleep commands to slow the output to the terminal down a bit, for easier analysis. The script requires HTTPie, a great time saver when working with RESTful services.

The demostrate_ipc.sh script does three things. First, it calls the Candidate service to generate a group of sample candidates. Next, the script calls the Voter service to simulate votes, using synchronous REST HTTP. Lastly, the script repeats the voter simulation, this time using message-based RPC IPC. All API calls are done through the Voter API Gateway on port 8080. To understand the API calls, examine the script, below.

Below is the list of candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election, generated by the Candidate service. The JSON payload was retrieved using the Voter service’s /voter/candidates/rpc/{election} endpoint. This endpoint uses the same RPC IPC method as the Voter service’s /voter/simulation/rpc/{election} endpoint.

Based on the list of candidates, below are the simulated election results. This JSON payload was retrieved using the Voter service’s /voter/results endpoint.

RabbitMQ Management Console

The easiest way to observe what is happening with our messages is using the RabbitMQ Management Console. To access the console, point your web-browser to localhost, on port 15672. The default login credentials for the console are guest/guest.

As you successfully send and receive messages between the services through RabbitMQ, you should see activity on the Overview tab. In addition, you should see a number of Connections, Channels, Exchanges, Queues, and Consumers.

In the Queues tab, you should find a single queue, the voter.rpc.requests queue. This queue was configured in the Candidate service’s configuration class, shown previously.

In the Exchanges tab, you should see one exchange, voter.rpc, which we configured in both the Voter and the Candidate service’s configuration classes (aka DirectExchange). Also, visible in the Exchanges tab, should be the routing key rpc, which we configured in the Candidate service’s configuration class (aka Binding).

The route binds the exchange to the voter.rpc.requests queue. If you recall Spring’s description, AMQP has exchanges (DirectExchange), routes (Binding), and queues (Queue). Messages are first published to exchanges. Routes define on which queue(s) to pipe the message. Consumers subscribing to that queue then receive a copy of the message.

In the Channels tab, you should note two connections, the single instances of the Voter and Candidate services. Likewise, there are two channels, one for each service. You can differentiate the channels by the presence of the consumer tag. The consumer tag, in this example, amq.ctag-Anv7GXs7ZWVoznO64euyjQ, uniquely identifies the consumer. In this example, the Voter service is the consumer. For a more complete explanation of the consumer tag, check out RabbitMQ’s AMQP documentation.

Message Structure

Messages cannot be viewed directly in the RabbitMQ Management Console. One way I have found to view messages is using your IDE’s debugger. Below, I have added a breakpoint on the Candidate service’ getCandidatesMessageRpc method, using IntelliJ IDEA. You can view the Voter service’s request message, as it is received by the Candidate service.

Note the message payload, the requested election. Note the twelve message header elements. The headers include the AMQP exchange, queue, and binding. The message headers also include the consumer tag. The message also uniquely identifies the reply-to queue to use, if the server does not support Direct reply-to (see earlier explanation).

Service Logs

In addition to the RabbitMQ Management Console, we may obverse communications between the two services, by looking at the Voter and Candidate service’s logs. I have grabbed a snippet of both service’s logs and added a few comments to show where different processes are being executed. First the Voter service logs.

Next, the Candidate service logs.

Performance

What about the performance of Spring AMQP RPC IPC versus REST HTTP IPC? RabbitMQ has proven to be very performant, having been clocked at one million messages per second on GCE. I performed a series of fairly ‘unscientific’ performance tests, completing 250, 500, and then 1,000 requests. The tests were performed on a six-node Docker Swarm cluster with three instances of each service in a round-robin load-balanced configuration, and a single instance of RabbitMQ. The scripts to create the swarm cluster can be found in the Voter service GitHub project.

Based on consistent test results, the speed of the two methods was almost identical. Both methods performed between 3.1 to 3.2 responses per second. For example, the Spring AMQP RPC IPC method successfully completed 1,000 requests in 5 minutes and 11 seconds, while the REST HTTP IPC method successfully completed 1,000 requests in 5 minutes and 18 seconds, 7 seconds slower than the RPC method.

There are many variables to consider, which could dramatically impact IPC performance. For example, RabbitMQ was not clustered. Also, we did not use any type of caching, such as Varnish, Memcached, or Redis. Both these could dramatically increase IPC performance.

There are also several notable differences between the two methods from a code perspective. The REST HTTP method relies on Spring Data Projection combined with Spring Data MongoDB Repository, to obtain the candidate list from MongoDB. Somewhat differently, the RPC method makes use of Spring Data MongoDB Aggregation to return a list of candidates. Therefore, the test results should be taken with a grain of salt.

Production Considerations

The post demonstrated a simple example of RPC communications between two services using Spring AMQP. In an actual Production environment, there are a few things that must be considered, as Pivotal points out:

How should either service react on startup if RabbitMQ is not available? What if RabbitMQ fails after the services have started?
How should the Voter server (the client) react if there are no Candidate service instances (the server) running?
Should the Voter service have a timeout for the RPC response to return? What should happen if the request times out?
If the Candidate service malfunctions and raises an exception, should it be forwarded to the Voter service?
How does the Voter service protect against invalid incoming messages (eg checking bounds of the candidate list) before processing?
In all of the above scenarios, what, if any, response is returned to the API end user?

Conclusion

Although in this post we did not achieve asynchronous inter-process communications, we did achieve a higher level of service decoupling, using message-based RPC IPC. Adopting a message-based, loosely-coupled architecture, whether asynchronous or synchronous, wherever possible, will improve the overall functionality and deliverability of a microservices-based platform.

References

All opinions in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current employer or their clients.

AMQP, DevOps, HTTP, IPC, Messaging, Microservices, RabbitMQ, REST, RPC, Spring Boot

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