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Deploying OpenWhisk using Ansible

Getting started

If you want to deploy OpenWhisk locally using Ansible, you first need to install Ansible on your development environment:

Ubuntu users

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install ansible==2.5.2
sudo pip install jinja2==2.9.6

Vagrant users

Nothing to be done, Ansible is already installed during vagrant provisioning. You can skip setup and prereq steps as those have been done by vagrant for you. You may jump directly to Deploying Using CouchDB

Docker for Mac users

sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install ansible==2.5.2
pip install jinja2==2.9.6

Docker for Mac does not provide any official ways to meet some requirements for OpenWhisk. You need to depend on the workarounds until Docker provides official methods.

If you prefer Docker-machine to Docker for mac, you can follow instructions in docker-machine/README.md.

Enable Docker remote API

The remote Docker API is required for collecting logs using the Ansible playbook logs.yml.

Activate docker0 network

This is an optional step for local deployment. The OpenWhisk deployment via Ansible uses the docker0 network interface to deploy OpenWhisk and it does not exist on Docker for Mac environment.

An expedient workaround is to add alias for docker0 network to loopback interface.

sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 172.17.0.1/24

Using Ansible

Caveat: All Ansible commands are meant to be executed from the ansible directory. This is important because that's where ansible.cfg is located which contains generic settings that are needed for the remaining steps.

In all instructions, replace <environment> with your target environment. The default environment is local which works for Ubuntu and Docker for Mac. To use the default environment, you may omit the -i parameter entirely. For older Mac installation using Docker Machine, use -i environments/docker-machine.

In all instructions, replace <openwhisk_home> with the base directory of your OpenWhisk source tree. e.g. openwhisk

Preserving configuration and log directories on reboot

When using the local Ansible environment, configuration and log data is stored in /tmp by default. However, operating system such as Linux and Mac clean the /tmp directory on reboot, resulting in failures when OpenWhisk tries to start up again. To avoid this problem, export the OPENWHISK_TMP_DIR variable assigning it the path to a persistent directory before deploying OpenWhisk.

Setup

The following step must be executed once per development environment. It will generate the hosts configuration file based on your environment settings.

The default configuration does not run multiple instances of core components (e.g., controller, invoker, kafka). You may elect to enable high-availability (HA) mode by passing tne Ansible option -e mode=HA when executing this playbook. This will configure your deployment with multiple instances (e.g., two Kafka instances, and two invokers).

In addition to the host file generation, you need to configure the database for your deployment. This is done by modifying the file ansible/db_local.ini to provide the following properties.

[db_creds]
db_provider=
db_username=
db_password=
db_protocol=
db_host=
db_port=

This file is generated automatically for an ephemeral CouchDB instance during setup.yml. If you want to use Cloudant, you have to modify the file. For convenience, you can use shell environment variables that are read by the playbook to generate the required db_local.ini file as shown below.

export OW_DB=CouchDB
export OW_DB_USERNAME=<your couchdb user>
export OW_DB_PASSWORD=<your couchdb password>
export OW_DB_PROTOCOL=<your couchdb protocol>
export OW_DB_HOST=<your couchdb host>
export OW_DB_PORT=<your couchdb port>

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> setup.yml

Alternatively, if you want to use Cloudant as your datastore:

export OW_DB=Cloudant
export OW_DB_USERNAME=<your cloudant user>
export OW_DB_PASSWORD=<your cloudant password>
export OW_DB_PROTOCOL=https
export OW_DB_HOST=<your cloudant user>.cloudant.com
export OW_DB_PORT=443

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> setup.yml

Install Prerequisites

This step is not required for local environments since all prerequisites are already installed, and therefore may be skipped.`

This step needs to be done only once per target environment. It will install necessary prerequisites on all target hosts in the environment.

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> prereq.yml

Hint: During playbook execution the TASK [prereq : check for pip] can show as failed. This is normal if no pip is installed. The playbook will then move on and install pip on the target machines.

Deploying Using CouchDB

  • Make sure your db_local.ini file is setup for CouchDB then execute:
cd <openwhisk_home>
./gradlew distDocker
cd ansible
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> couchdb.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> initdb.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> wipe.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml

# installs a catalog of public packages and actions
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> postdeploy.yml

# to use the API gateway
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> apigateway.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> routemgmt.yml
  • You need to run initdb.yml every time you do a fresh deploy CouchDB to initialize the subjects database.
  • The wipe.yml playbook should be run on a fresh deployment only, otherwise actions and activations will be lost.
  • Run postdeploy.yml after deployment to install a catalog of useful packages.
  • To use the API Gateway, you'll need to run apigateway.yml and routemgmt.yml.
  • Use ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml to avoid wiping the data store. This is useful to start OpenWhisk after restarting your Operating System.

Limitation

You cannot run multiple CouchDB nodes on a single machine. This limitation comes from Erlang EPMD which CouchDB relies on to find other nodes. To deploy multiple CouchDB nodes, they should be placed on different machines respectively otherwise their ports will clash.

Deploying Using Cloudant

  • Make sure your db_local.ini file is set up for Cloudant. See Setup.
  • Then execute:
cd <openwhisk_home>
./gradlew distDocker
cd ansible
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> initdb.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> wipe.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> apigateway.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml

# installs a catalog of public packages and actions
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> postdeploy.yml

# to use the API gateway
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> apigateway.yml
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> routemgmt.yml
  • You need to run initdb on Cloudant only once per Cloudant database to initialize the subjects database.
  • The initdb.yml playbook will only initialize your database if it is not initialized already, else it will skip initialization steps.
  • The wipe.yml playbook should be run on a fresh deployment only, otherwise actions and activations will be lost.
  • Run postdeploy.yml after deployment to install a catalog of useful packages.
  • To use the API Gateway, you'll need to run apigateway.yml and routemgmt.yml.
  • Use ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml to avoid wiping the data store. This is useful to start OpenWhisk after restarting your Operating System.

Configuring the installation of wsk CLI

There are two installation modes to install wsk CLI: remote and local.

The mode "remote" means to download the wsk binaries from available web links. By default, OpenWhisk sets the installation mode to remote and downloads the binaries from the CLI release page, where OpenWhisk publishes the official wsk binaries.

The mode "local" means to build and install the wsk binaries from local CLI project. You can download the source code of OpenWhisk CLI here. Let's assume your OpenWhisk CLI home directory is $OPENWHISK_HOME/../openwhisk-cli and you've already exported OPENWHISK_HOME to be the root directory of this project. After you download the CLI repository, use the gradle command to build the binaries (you can omit the -PnativeBuild if you want to cross-compile for all supported platforms):

cd "$OPENWHISK_HOME/../openwhisk-cli"
./gradlew releaseBinaries -PnativeBuild

The binaries are generated and put into a tarball in the folder ../openwhisk-cli/release. Then, use the following Ansible command to (re-)configure the CLI installation:

export OPENWHISK_ENVIRONMENT=local  # ... or whatever
ansible-playbook -i environments/$OPENWHISK_ENVIRONMENT edge.yml -e mode=clean
ansible-playbook -i environments/$OPENWHISK_ENVIRONMENT edge.yml \
    -e cli_installation_mode=local \
    -e openwhisk_cli_home="$OPENWHISK_HOME/../openwhisk-cli"

The parameter cli_installation_mode specifies the CLI installation mode and the parameter openwhisk_cli_home specifies the home directory of your local OpenWhisk CLI. (n.b. openwhisk_cli_home defaults to $OPENWHISK_HOME/../openwhisk-cli.)

Once the CLI is installed, you can use it to work with Whisk.

Hot-swapping a Single Component

The playbook structure allows you to clean, deploy or re-deploy a single component as well as the entire OpenWhisk stack. Let's assume you have deployed the entire stack using the openwhisk.yml playbook. You then make a change to a single component, for example the invoker. You will probably want a new tag on the invoker image so you first build it using:

cd <openwhisk_home>
gradle :core:invoker:distDocker -PdockerImageTag=myNewInvoker

Then all you need to do is re-deploy the invoker using the new image:

cd ansible
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> invoker.yml -e docker_image_tag=myNewInvoker

Hint: You can omit the Docker image tag parameters in which case latest will be used implicitly.

Cleaning a Single Component

You can remove a single component just as you would remove the entire deployment stack. For example, if you wanted to remove only the controller you would run:

cd ansible
ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> controller.yml -e mode=clean

Caveat: In distributed environments some components (e.g. Invoker, etc.) exist on multiple machines. So if you run a playbook to clean or deploy those components, it will run on all of the hosts targeted by the component's playbook.

Cleaning an OpenWhisk Deployment

Once you are done with the deployment you can clean it from the target environment.

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml -e mode=clean

Removing all prereqs from an environment

This is usually not necessary, however in case you want to uninstall all prereqs from a target environment, execute:

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> prereq.yml -e mode=clean

Lean Setup

To have a lean setup (no Kafka, Zookeeper and no Invokers as separate entities):

At Deploying Using CouchDB step, replace:

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml

by:

ansible-playbook -i environments/<environment> openwhisk.yml -e lean=true

Troubleshooting

Some of the more common problems and their solution are listed here.

Setuptools Version Mismatch

If you encounter the following error message during ansible execution

ERROR! Unexpected Exception: ... Requirement.parse('setuptools>=11.3'))

your setuptools package is likely out of date. You can upgrade the package using this command:

pip install --upgrade setuptools --user python

Mac Setup - Python Interpreter

The MacOS environment assumes Python is installed in /usr/local/bin which is the default location when using brew. The following error will occur if Python is located elsewhere:

ansible all -i environments/mac -m ping
ansible | FAILED! => {
    "changed": false,
    "failed": true,
    "module_stderr": "/bin/sh: /usr/local/bin/python: No such file or directory\n",
    "module_stdout": "",
    "msg": "MODULE FAILURE",
    "parsed": false
}

An expedient workaround is to create a link to the expected location:

ln -s $(which python) /usr/local/bin/python

Alternatively, you can also configure the location of Python interpreter in environments/<environment>/group_vars.

ansible_python_interpreter: "/usr/local/bin/python"

Failed to import docker-py

After brew install ansible, the following lines are printed out:

==> Caveats
If you need Python to find the installed site-packages:
  mkdir -p ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages
  echo '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages' > ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages/homebrew.pth

Just run the two commands to fix this issue.

Spaces in Paths

Ansible 2.1.0.0 and earlier versions do not support a space in file paths. Many file imports and roles will not work correctly when included from a path that contains spaces. If you encounter this error message during Ansible execution

fatal: [ansible]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "msg": "need more than 1 value to unpack"}

the path to your OpenWhisk ansible directory contains spaces. To fix this, please copy the source tree to a path without spaces as there is no current fix available to this problem.

Changing limits

The default system throttling limits are configured in this file ./group_vars/all and may be changed by modifying the group_vars for your specific environment.

limits:
  invocationsPerMinute: "{{ limit_invocations_per_minute | default(60) }}"
  concurrentInvocations: "{{ limit_invocations_concurrent | default(30) }}"
  firesPerMinute: "{{ limit_fires_per_minute | default(60) }}"
  sequenceMaxLength: "{{ limit_sequence_max_length | default(50) }}"
  • The limits.invocationsPerMinute represents the allowed namespace action invocations per minute.
  • The limits.concurrentInvocations represents the maximum concurrent invocations allowed per namespace.
  • The limits.firesPerMinute represents the allowed namespace trigger firings per minute.
  • The limits.sequenceMaxLength represents the maximum length of a sequence action.

Set the timezone for containers

The default timezone for all system containers is UTC. The timezone may differ from your servers which could make it difficult to inspect logs. The timezone is configured globally in group_vars/all or by passing an extra variable -e docker_timezone=xxx when you run an ansible-playbook.