I have a use-case to build a centralized log aggregation tool which would work with multiple platforms. Basically the suit of apps in my firm include an Angular based UI, an Ionic based Hybrid mobile app, both interaction with a Java Spring Boot Restful backend as well as a PHP based monolithic internal CRM.
Now I need a way to aggregate logs from all these applications in a centralized location filtered on the severity and the user should have access to them via a UI where he can further group and filter the logs based on App, keywords etc.
https://dzone.com/articles/distributed-logging-architecture-for-microservices
Will a solution like this work independent of the platform or the tech stacks of the Apps whose logs it is aggregating?
What other options are there?
Generally I'd log to JSON. This is just a configuration in your log appender like Monolog in PHP or Logback in Spring Boot.
Then you can use Filebeat to tail those files and store them in Elasticsearch (and you don't have to do any parsing), visualize / search in Kibana, and you're done.
This is the easiest and probably also most versatile solution for the tag elastic-stack.
Related
We are trying to get live configuration data from our kubernetes cluster. Therefore we would like to read the configmaps from each of our services.
Is there a way to exctract this data with a spring microservice which runs alongside the rest of the services?
Or are there other (better?) ways / tools to get this information?
Using Kubernetes APIs you can get the configmaps you need. I am not familiar with the Java client, but here it is:
https://github.com/kubernetes-client/java
You can retrieve a list of configmaps and their contents using these APIs. Your application will need a cluster role and a cluster role binding to allow it reading from configmap resources if you're using RBAC.
To extract information you can just query the Kubernetes API, likely in your case using the Java Kubernetes client. Likely the biggest issue you will face will be ensuring you have read access for the namespace(s) that the ConfigMaps are in.
The bigger question about a 'better way' is trying to understand why you want to read all of the ConfigMaps for your applications. The goal you are trying to accomplish will guide the solution.
We have 13 years old monolithic java application using
Struts 2 for handling UI calls
JDBC/Spring JDBC Template for db calls
Spring DI
Tiles/JSP/Jquery for UI
Two deployables are created out of this single source code.
WAR for online application
JAR for running back-end jobs
The current UI is pretty old. Our goal is to redesign the application using microservices. We have identified modules which can run as separate microservice.
We have following questions in our mind
Which UI framework should we go for (Angular/React or a home grown one). Angular seems to be very slow and we need better performance as far as page loading is concerned.
Should UI/Javascript make call to backend web services directly or should there be a spring controller proxy in deployed WAR which kind of forwards UI calls to APIs. This will also help if a single UI calls requires getting/updating data from different microservice.
How should we cover microservice security aspect
Which load balancer should we go for if we want to have multiple instance of same microservice.
Since its a banking application, our organization does not allow using Elastic Search/Lucene for searching. So need suggestion for reporting using Oracle alone.
How should we run backend jobs?
There will also be a main payment microservice which will create payments. Since payments volume is huge hence it will require multiple instances. How will we manage user logged-in session. Should we go for in-memory distributed session store (may be memcache)
This is a very broad question. You need to get a consultant architect to understand your application in depth, because it is unlikely you will get meaningful in-depth answers here.
However as a rough guideline here are some brief answers:
Which UI framework should we go for (Angular/React or a home grown one). Angular seems to be very slow and we need better performance as far as page loading is concerned.
That depends on what the application actually needs to do. Angular is one of the leading frameworks, and is usually not slow at all. You might be doing something wrong (are you doing too many granular calls? is your backend slow?). React is also a strong contender, but seems to be losing popularity, although that is just a subjective opinion and could be wrong. Angular is a more feature complete framework, while React is more of a combination of tools. You would be just crazy if you think you can do a home grown one and bring it to the same maturity of these ready made tools.
Should UI/Javascript make call to backend web services directly or
should there be a spring controller proxy in deployed WAR which kind
of forwards UI calls to APIs. This will also help if a single UI calls
requires getting/updating data from different microservice.
A lot of larger microservice architectures often involve an API gateway. Then again it depends on your use case. You might also have an issue with CORS, so centralising calls through a proxy / API gateway, even if it is a simple reverse proxy (you don't need to develop it) might be a good idea.
How should we cover microservice security aspect.
Again no idea what your setup looks like. JWT is a common approach. I presume the authentication process itself uses some centralised LDAP / Exchange or similar process. Once you authenticate you can sign a token which you give to the client, which is then passed to the respective micro services in the HTTP authorization headers.
Which load balancer should we go for if we want to have multiple
instance of same microservice.
Depends on what you want. Are you deploying on a cloud based solution like AWS (in which case load balancing is provided by the infrastructure)? Are you going to deploy on a Kubernetes setup where load balancing and scaling is handled as part of its deployment fabric? Do you want client-side load balancing (comes part of Spring Cloud)?
Since its a banking application, our organization does not allow using
Elastic Search/Lucene for searching. So need suggestion for reporting
using Oracle alone.
Without knowledge of how the data on Oracle looks like and what the reporting requirements are, all solutions are possible.
How should we run backend jobs?
Depends on the infrastructure you choose. Everything is possible, from simple cron jobs, to cloud scheduling services, or integrated Java scheduling mechanisms like Quartz.
There will also be a main payment microservice which will create
payments. Since payments volume is huge hence it will require
multiple instances. How will we manage user logged-in session. Should
we go for in-memory distributed session store (may be memcache)
Not really. It will defeat the whole purpose of microservices. JWT tokens will be managed by the client's browser and expire automatically. You don't need to manage user logged-in session in such architectures.
As you have mentioned it's a banking site so security will be first priory. Here I have few suggestions for FE and BE.
FE : You better go with preactjs it's a react like library but much lighter and fast as compare to react. For ui you can go with styled components instead of using some heavy third party lib. This will also enhance performance and obviously CDNs for images and big files.
BE : As per your need you better go with hybrid solution node could be a good option.e.g. for sessions.
Setup an auth server and get you services validate user from there and it will be used in future for any kinda service .e.g. you will expose some kinda client API's.
User case for Auth : you can use redis for session info get user validated from auth server and add info to redis later check if user is logged in from redis this will reduce load from auth server. (I have used same strategy for a crypto exchange and went pretty well)
Load balancer : Don't have good familiarity with java but for node JS PM2 will do that for you not a big deal just one command and it will start multiple instances and will balance on it's own.
In case you have enormous traffic then you better go with some messaging service like rabbitmq this will reduce cost of servers by preventing you from scaling your servers.
BE Jobs : I have done that with node for extensive tasks and went quite well there you can use forking or spanning this will start a new instance for particular job and will be killed after completing it and you can easily generate logs along with that.
For further clarification I'm here :)
We have got a web based Java application which we are planning to migrate to cloud with an intention that multiple clients will be using it in a SaaS based environment. The current architecture of the application is quite asynchronous in nature. There are 4 different modules, each having a database of its own. When there is a need of data exchange between the modules we push the data using Pentaho and make use of a directory structure to store the interim data file, which is then picked up by the other module to populate its database. Given the nature of our application this asynchronous communication is very important for us.
Now we are facing a couple of challenges while migrating this application to cloud:
We are planning to use Multi Tenancy on our database server, but how do we ensure that the flat files we use for transferring the data between different modules are also channelized to their respective tenants in the DB.
Since we are planning to host this in cloud, would seek your views, if keeping a text file on a cloud server would be safe from a data security perspective.
File storage in cloud is safe and you can use control IAM roles setup to control the permissions of a file. Cloud providers like Google (Cloud storage), Amazon (AWS S3), etc provides a secure and scalable infrastructure to maintain files in the cloud.
In general setup, cloud storage provides you with buckets which are tagged with a global unique identification. For a multi-tenant setup you can create multiple buckets for individual tenants and store the necessary data feeds in it. Next, you can have jobs batch or streaming jobs using kettle (Pentaho) to push it to the right database based on the unique bucket definition.
Alternatively, you can also push (like other answers) to a streaming setup (like ActiveMQ, Kafka, etc) with user specific topics and have a streaming service (using java or pentaho) to ingest the data to respective database based on the topic.
Hope this helps :)
I cannot realistically give any specific advice without knowing more
about your system. However, based on my experience, I would
recommend switching to message queues, something like Kafka would
work nicely.
Yes, cloud providers offer enough security for static file storage. You can
limit access however you see fit, for example using AWS S3.
1- The multi tenancy may create a bit of issue while transferring the files. But from what information you have given the process of flat file movement across application will not be impacted. Still you can think of moving to MQ mode for passing the data across.
2-From data security view, AWS provides lot of features at access level, MFA, etc. If it needs to be highly secured i would recommend to get AWS Private cloud where nothing is shared with any one at any level.
I'm developing an API which will connect with several endpoints. The uri for each endpoint is something like this:
rest/services/General/directory1/MapServer/export
rest/services/General/directory2/MapServer/export
rest/services/General/directory3/MapServer/export
rest/services/General/directory4/MapServer/export
and so on...
I don't know if it's possible, but would like to have something like this instead:
rest/services/General/${value}/MapServer/export
and then on my code just call the endpoint above injecting the specific directory that I want on ${value}
Is it possible? Don't know what I'm missing as I googled but couldn't find anything related.
Cheers
You can do so by means of Spring Cloud Config.
Spring Cloud Config provides server and client-side support for
externalized configuration in a distributed system. With the Config
Server you have a central place to manage external properties for
applications across all environments. The concepts on both client and
server map identically to the Spring Environment and PropertySource
abstractions, so they fit very well with Spring applications, but can
be used with any application running in any language. As an
application moves through the deployment pipeline from dev to test and
into production you can manage the configuration between those
environments and be certain that applications have everything they
need to run when they migrate. The default implementation of the
server storage backend uses git so it easily supports labelled
versions of configuration environments, as well as being accessible to
a wide range of tooling for managing the content. It is easy to add
alternative implementations and plug them in with Spring
configuration.
For more details, kindly go through spring documentation here.
I solve the problem using the simplest approach possible. In my code I used the string.replace() method. Was looking for something more robust, but as it was taking lots of time to sort it out how to do it, I decided to go with the string.replace method.
I'm planning a web application where users will be able to upload and process their files. The specifics of the application are irrelevant to my questions, but lets assume that the application will deal with mp3 audio files. I'm going to split my application in two distinct parts: the front-end and the back-end.
The front-end application will be a usual web application serving html pages to users. Typically a user will upload his file and fill an html form to specify which operations he would like to perform on the file. The files will be initially uploaded to a storage facility, such as Amazon S3, and later processed by a back-end server. I'm using Play 2.0.4 framework to develop the front-end application and this is going very well for me. I managed to implement user authorization, drafted most of the UI and also implemented file upload to S3. The application is currently deployed on Heroku without any problems.
For my back-end server I'm considering to use Play 2 framework once again. The back-end server will receive notification (http request) from the front-end server about creation of a new job. Job specification will include a link to the original user file in the storage and arguments describing the job. The job should be added to a queue. Now the most important part is to delegate the actual processing job to a third party program, which most certainly will be a compiled command line utility, such as SoX for the case of audio processing, written by good people using a programming language of their choice. As far as I know it is possible to call an external program from java, pass command line arguments and collect the result. After processing is done, the back-end server will upload processed file back to storage, and send notification (http request) to the front-end application, which will store a link to the processed file and display it to the user at some later time. To be able to use command line utility I'm going to deploy the back-end application to a Amazon EC2 instance with a Typesafe stack installation.
Here are some questions about this basic plan:
Is Play 2 a reasonable choice for the back-end, or should I look into alternatives? One of them seems to be CGI, which according to Wikipedia "is a standard method for web server software to delegate the generation of web content to executable files." Unfortunately I don't have any experience with that.
There shouldn't be any problem implementing a job queue with Play?
Is it possible to install a command line utility on EC2 and call it from Play?
Should I expect any problems installing Typesafe stack on the EC2? This post briefly describes what I'm planning to do https://www.assembla.com/spaces/bufferine/wiki/Typesafe_stack_on_Amazon_EC2
Assuming that in the future the application will grow, how would I split the jobs among multiple instances on EC2? Should I create a separate job-balancing application in between my front-end and back-end?
I would appreciate any advice! Thanks!
Note: I'm using Java api for Play 2 framework, since I'm not familiar with Scala language.
You may consider Akka for processing and it's built in Play2. It will help you to manage tasks easily, and even saving hardware ressources if used with advanced features. There is a Java API that should cover all your needs. And it's not necessary in a backend APP, if you need more power you can scale even better with two same instancies. Play and Akka are stateless, you can just add new instances to scale. To make it run on EC2, just use the play dist command.
And yes, you can install whatever you want in EC2 and call it from your app.
You may like:
http://akka.io/
http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.0/JavaAkka
http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.0/ProductionDist
also, but in scala
http://blog.greweb.fr/2013/01/playcli-play-iteratees-unix-pipe/
http://blog.greweb.fr/2012/11/play-framework-enumerator-outputstream/