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89 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
89 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
# Design
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In the design described below, the "private cloud" platform is:
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* **Highly-available** (_can tolerate the failure of a single component_)
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* **Scalable** (_can add resource or capacity as required_)
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* **Portable** (_run it on your garage server today, run it in AWS tomorrow_)
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* **Secure** (_access protected with LetsEncrypt certificates_)
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* **Automated** (_requires minimal care and feeding_)
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## Design Decisions
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**Where possible, services will be highly available.**
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This means that:
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* At least 3 docker swarm manager nodes are required, to provide fault-tolerance of a single failure.
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* GlusterFS is employed for share filesystem, because it too can be made tolerant of a single failure.
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**Where multiple solutions to a requirement exist, preference will be given to the most portable solution.**
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This means that:
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* Services are defined using docker-compose v3 YAML syntax
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* Services are portable, meaning a particular stack could be shut down and moved to a new provider with minimal effort.
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## Security
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Under this design, the only inbound connections we're permitting to our docker swarm are:
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### Network Flows
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* HTTP (TCP 80) : Redirects to https
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* HTTPS (TCP 443) : Serves individual docker containers via SSL-encrypted reverse proxy
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### Authentication
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* Where the proxied application provides a trusted level of authentication, or where the application requires public exposure,
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## High availability
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### Normal function
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Assuming 3 nodes, under normal circumstances the following is illustrated:
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* All 3 nodes provide shared storage via GlusterFS, which is provided by a docker container on each node. (i.e., not running in swarm mode)
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* All 3 nodes participate in the Docker Swarm as managers.
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* The various containers belonging to the application "stacks" deployed within Docker Swarm are automatically distributed amongst the swarm nodes.
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* Persistent storage for the containers is provide via GlusterFS mount.
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* The **traefik** service (in swarm mode) receives incoming requests (on http and https), and forwards them to individual containers. Traefik knows the containers names because it's able to access the docker socket.
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* All 3 nodes run keepalived, at different priorities. Since traefik is running as a swarm service and listening on TCP 80/443, requests made to the keepalived VIP and arriving at **any** of the swarm nodes will be forwarded to the traefik container (no matter which node it's on), and then onto the target backend.
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### Node failure
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In the case of a failure (or scheduled maintenance) of one of the nodes, the following is illustrated:
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* The failed node no longer participates in GlusterFS, but the remaining nodes provide enough fault-tolerance for the cluster to operate.
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* The remaining two nodes in Docker Swarm achieve a quorum and agree that the failed node is to be removed.
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* The (possibly new) leader manager node reschedules the containers known to be running on the failed node, onto other nodes.
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* The **traefik** service is either restarted or unaffected, and as the backend containers stop/start and change IP, traefik is aware and updates accordingly.
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* The keepalived VIP continues to function on the remaining nodes, and docker swarm continues to forward any traffic received on TCP 80/443 to the appropriate node.
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### Node restore
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When the failed (or upgraded) host is restored to service, the following is illustrated:
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* GlusterFS regains full redundancy
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* Docker Swarm managers become aware of the recovered node, and will use it for scheduling **new** containers
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* Existing containers which were migrated off the node are not migrated backend
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* Keepalived VIP regains full redundancy
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### Total cluster failure
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A day after writing this, my environment suffered a fault whereby all 3 VMs were unexpectedly and simultaneously powered off.
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Upon restore, docker failed to start on one of the VMs due to local disk space issue[^1]. However, the other two VMs started, established the swarm, mounted their shared storage, and started up all the containers (services) which were managed by the swarm.
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In summary, although I suffered an **unplanned power outage to all of my infrastructure**, followed by a **failure of a third of my hosts**... ==all my platforms are 100% available with **absolutely no manual intervention**==.
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[^1]: Since there's no impact to availability, I can fix (or just reinstall) the failed node whenever convenient.
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