Enabling Vamp on Azure Container Service (DC/OS)

Article
12/08/2016

Vamp is an open source, self-hosted platform for managing microservice oriented architectures that rely on
container technology. It help us to enable auto-scaling, canaly releasing, blue-green deployment, self-healing,
and auto-configration of application gateway.

Enabling these functions are tough. You need to configure a lot of things. However, Just installing vamp on DC/OS, it will help you to configure all of them!

On this blog post, I'd like to share how to enable Vamp.io for Azure Container Service (DC/OS).

This article follow the installation instruction, and offical tutorial of vamp.
https://vamp.io/documentation/installation/azure-container-service/
But sometimes, it can be little bit confusing for ACS user. So I'd like to share some tips for the setup.
https://vamp.io/documentation/tutorials/deploy-your-first-blueprint/

1. Deploy Azure Container Service (DC/OS)

Before installing Vamp, you need to deploy Azure Container Service (DC/OS). Please refer this instruction.

/en-us/azure/container-service/container-service-deployment

Also, please make sure to connect ACS cluster. Please refer this instruction, as well.

/en-us/azure/container-service/container-service-connect

I recommend you to download and install dcos cli.
https://docs.mesosphere.com/1.8/usage/cli/install/

Also, I recommend to install ab(apache benchmark). You can use bash for Mac, Windows 10, and Linux.
Install ab command.

 sudo apt-get install apache2-utils

If you already done DC/OS deployment and SSH tunnel, let's get started!

2. Deploy Vamp on DC/OS

You can deploy Vamp by following instruction. However, it won't work.

https://vamp.io/documentation/installation/dcos/

For ACS, you need to use magneticio/vamp:0.9.1-dcos insead of magneticio/vamp:katana-dcos. (8th Dec. 2016)
It will be fixed in near feature, I recommend you to refer latest version of Vamp.
https://hub.docker.com/r/magneticio/vamp/tags/

You need to change vamp.json (STEP2: DEPLOY VAMP) like this.

 {
 "id": "vamp/vamp",
 "instances": 1,
 "cpus": 0.5,
 "mem": 1024,
 "container": {
 "type": "DOCKER",
 "docker": {
 "image": "magneticio/vamp:0.9.1-dcos",
 "network": "BRIDGE",
 "portMappings": [
 {
 "containerPort": 8080,
 "hostPort": 0,
 "name": "vip0",
 "labels": {
 "VIP_0": "10.20.0.100:8080"
 }
 }
 ],
 "forcePullImage": true
 }
 },
 "labels": {
 "DCOS_SERVICE_NAME": "vamp",
 "DCOS_SERVICE_SCHEME": "http",
 "DCOS_SERVICE_PORT_INDEX": "0"
 },
 "env": {
 "VAMP_WAIT_FOR": "https://elasticsearch.marathon.mesos:9200/.kibana",
 "VAMP_PERSISTENCE_DATABASE_ELASTICSEARCH_URL": "https://elasticsearch.marathon.mesos:9200",
 "VAMP_GATEWAY_DRIVER_LOGSTASH_HOST": "elasticsearch.marathon.mesos",
 "VAMP_WORKFLOW_DRIVER_VAMP_URL": "https://10.20.0.100:8080",
 "VAMP_PULSE_ELASTICSEARCH_URL": "https://elasticsearch.marathon.mesos:9200"
 }, 
 "healthChecks": [
 {
 "protocol": "TCP",
 "gracePeriodSeconds": 30,
 "intervalSeconds": 10,
 "timeoutSeconds": 5,
 "portIndex": 0,
 "maxConsecutiveFailures": 0
 }
 ]
}

If you use this vamp.json, you will success the installation. If you failed to deploy once because of you deploy magneticio/vamp:katana-dcos, you need remove elasticsearch container which you have alrady deployed. Because it store vamp configuration. Then re-install elasticsearch and vamp by following vamp installation document.

https://vamp.io/documentation/installation/dcos/

3. Open your public agent port for your application

Then you can deploy your first application. Follow the official tutorial.

https://vamp.io/documentation/tutorials/deploy-your-first-blueprint/

Deployment is fine. However, where can I access the application? Your application is deployed on the DC/OS agent nodes. You need to configure Azure Load Balancer to route vamp gateway agents, which is deployed on DC/OS public agent nodes.
Vamp deploys the vamp gateway agents on every DC/OS agent nodes. Also, you need to configure network security group inbound rules.