[erlang-questions] How do you go to production?

Wed Apr 17 23:31:26 CEST 2019

Piping in since I'm not seeing our deployment procedure mentioned here (I
may have missed emails cause Gmail seems to dislike this ML server).

We push a git tag following semver (a plug-in that'd do something like Helm
does: automatic decision on which part of major minor patch to bump would
be interesting).
This triggers GitlabCI jobs that runs tests and builds docker images at the
same time (so QA/hitfixes don't have to wait for tests, cause skipping
tests isn't easy).
Docker images are built in stages. The release tarball is unpacked into the
base OTP image and weights ~40MB compressed.
It's nice to keep this size small so kubernetes can pull it quick.
We always keep at least two instances running in prod behind the load
balancer so we can deploy progressively.

This only handles 20 requests second though.
Tagging is a manual action.
We don't use relups and in fact I've never worked at a company that did.
It seems canary deployments are enough most of the time. Easier than
thinking of the state changes a relup involves.
In this perspective I think that the "embedded mode" should be the default
mode of development. It'd help catch things earlier and maybe allow for
more aggressive optimisations.
Also we're running elixir.

On Wed 17 Apr 2019 at 22:42, Sölvi Páll Ásgeirsson <solvip@REDACTED> wrote:

> We do a couple of things:
> - package some apps as RPMs for running as metal
> - package things as docker containers to be scheduled by ECS
>
> Generally, we just use ‘rebar3 as prod release’ and copy the resulting
> release into the package.  For RPMs, we use fpm.
>
> I suspect it gets little attention because it’s extremely simple to make a
> prod ready release
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 17 Apr 2019, at 00:15, Lloyd R. Prentice <lloyd@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> Hi Dieter,
>
> Really helpful!
>
> From my poking around, Erlang deployment gets too little attention on the
> web or in the literature— particularly in this age of cloud deployment,
> containers, and distributed systems. So thanks again for your
> nuts-and-bolts overview.
>
> I’d love to read how others have brought Erlang apps and websites into
> production and lessons learned.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Lloyd
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Apr 16, 2019, at 4:24 PM, Dieter Schön <dieter@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> Hi Lloyd,
>
> this week I am not in the office, so I can just try to do a brain dump.
>
> The installation was quite simple, I installed a plain Ubuntu desktop,
>
> and then extracted the erlang tar file into /opt. This is done by one or
> two shell scripts.
>
>
> The erlang app is started on demand by another application, which is
> launched by the
>
> operator.
>
> So I do not have to deal with systemd (which I also do not like very much)
> or the like.
>
> My application could run as a server, but in the current use case there is
> no need for that.
>
>
> For the footprint of the docker container I will have to come back next
> week.
>
> I really have no idea how big it is. In former times I have used
> VirtualBoxes with snapshots
>
> for similar tasks, but if the focus is quite narrow, a docker container is
> far more easier and quicker
>
> than a complete VM.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Dieter
>
>
> On 16.04.19 21:54, lloyd@REDACTED wrote:
>
> Hi Dieter,
>
>
>
> Many thanks for sharing your experience.
>
>
>
> Could you please outline your installation procedure?  Also, the size of
> your Docker application image (RAM footprint) ? I've been considering LXC
> containers, but I'd like to test with Docker.
>
>
>
> All the best,
>
>
>
> Lloyd
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Dieter Schön" <dieter@REDACTED> <dieter@REDACTED>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2019 3:46pm
> To: "Erlang-Questions Questions" <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
> <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
> Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] How do you go to production?
>
>
> Hi,
> here is a case from the other end of the spectrum.
> I developed a protocol converter for a satellite test system, it is
> installed on 2 (in words: two)  PCs.
> For development, I used one application and rebar3. Production is just
> "rebar3 as prod tar" (From a labelled git commit).
> Testing was done on the two PCs, where I used one as the system under test
> and the other as test harness/data generator.
> I was also using wireshark and other third party tools, to prevent
> incestuous behaviour.
> To test the installation procedure I used docker, which was really nice. I
> had a blank machine in two seconds,
> where I could load and execute the installation script from the host. I
> had turnaround cycles from several seconds.
> What else.. the application is quite small. It fits into one erlang
> application. Apart from it, the release only contains the observer and sasl.
> Unit testing was done in EUnit.
>
> This was my first project where I used erlang, and the learning curve was
> quite gentle.
> Kind regards,
> Dieter
>
> Am So., Apr. 14, 2019 11:20 schrieb Max Lapshin <max.lapshin@REDACTED>
> <max.lapshin@REDACTED>:
>
> Hi.
> I'm developing Flussonic for almost 10 years and we have some practices
> for packaging, deploying, running, maintainig that are not well known,
> however they are rather good for us.
> It is interesting how do other people solve this.
> At first, we do not use releases. It is because when we have started our
> long path, using of releases was not very easy.  Couple of days ago I've
> tested it with rebar3 and it is really easier to use. Perhaps we would use
> releases today.
> Next: we use our own fpm script replacement for packaging. I can boast
> that it seems to be the only existing implementation of rpm outside of
> original library, however I'd better never pass this path again. I've
> written it in pre-docker era and frankly speaking it is a traumatic
> experience. However, we are using it for debian and it is really convenient:
> https://github.com/flussonic/epm
> Some time ago we have switched to systemd. I personally consider systemd a
> very badly designed thing that was created without any discussions with
> existing system adminstrators. For example, systemd doesn't offer config
> validation before launch. Another brilliant idea is to offer libsystemd for
> linking into application. Unknown library with unknown quality. What can go
> wrong if you link it into your erlang or java application?
> Sorry, but no. We have systemd.erl:
> https://gist.github.com/maxlapshin/01773f0fca706acdcb4acb77d91d78bb
> Use Type=notify in  youdaemon.service
> After you manage to launch your erlang daemon, you need to collect
> statistics. We had to add some more linux-related tools to fetch: cpu
> usage, disk I/O usage, system ram usage (swap, etc), per-interface network
> statistics, udp errors count, nvidia card usage, etc.
> If this is worthy outsource, I think we can extract it.
> Our os_stat library is linked with our in-erlang pulsedb library. We try
> to maintain as less dependencies as possible, so we collect all ticks from
> monitoring tools inside erlang library pulsedb:
> https://github.com/pulsedb/pulsedb   (maybe should update public branch)
> It can save several thousands metrics with one tick per 1-3 seconds.
> Support is an important part of our business, because customers cannot
> just launch software, they often need help.  We have many people in support
> staff and I do not want to manage their own public ssh keys on customer's
> servers. So we have written an ssh proxy: system that login to customer
> server with one private key and allow support guy to use his own key:
> https://github.com/flussonic/ssh-proxy
> All these things are rather useless for development and many of them are
> not required for in-house development, however it is hard to live without
> them when you sell software.
> What is your experience with such things that standard erlang lacks?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing listerlang-questions@REDACTED://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
-- 

Cheers,
-- 
Pierre Fenoll
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20190417/f99ea13e/attachment.htm>