Juju & Mesos

Fri Nov 18 14:34:24 UTC 2016

I'm mostly working with researchers and people developing early prototypes.
I can't blame them for using technologies that aren't production ready.
That said, I attended pragmatic docker days a while back and there were
some companies, like Yelp, who found a good way to run Docker in production
so it is possible, given you have a boatload of good ops people.

Big Data Europe <https://www.big-data-europe.eu/> seems to be going
towards Docker
containers for scalable Hadoop setups
<https://www.big-data-europe.eu/scalable-sparkhdfs-workbench-using-docker/>.
Not that it's a production ready setup, but with a name like that and H2020
funding, we (big data researchers) can't really ignore them...

Juju is awesome for us (big data researchers) because we have a bunch of
short-lived projects that use Hadoop etc. in a bunch of different setups,
and

   1. we don't want to be writing a new wrapper around the Hadoop chef
   cookbook for every project;
   2. we don't want to be creating a new "Hadoop + X" Docker container for
   every setup.

However, we can't ignore the advantages of Docker vs Juju:

   1. image-based so the same setup is 100% reproducible if you have the
   image;
   2. auto scaling and failure recovery.

So we want the stateless, auto-scalable, auto-recoverable images from
Docker and we want Juju's relations and automatic configuration. So how to
we get docker containers that can be configured at run-time by Juju? Ben is
working on something to configure containers
<https://github.com/bcsaller/layercake>, but afaik, no integration with
Juju planned.

PS: We're interested in Mesos but, as always, our time-to-put-into-it is
limited..

2016-11-18 12:27 GMT+01:00 Tom Barber <tom at spicule.co.uk>:

> I'll fork this so we're not hijacking another thread.
>
> Mesos runs Mesos tasks via frameworks or Docker/Rocket containers
> currently. Annoyingly they used to have a scriptable container endpoint I
> was hoping to knock up a POC against but they removed it, and my C is
> woeful so implementing it will take some time. I also asked on the Mesos
> mailing lists and they couldn't grok the use case, apparently docker does
> everything anyone needs ;)
>
> When I was at the Pentaho meetup last week, there's already a bunch of
> data folk who run DC/OS or Mesos to manage their workloads which sorta
> validated my use case as prior to that it was only theoretical.
>
> There are certainly a bunch of useful docker containers, I wouldn't deny
> that for a second, but the docker reality in production is often a lot like
> the Big Data stuff a few years back, it works but does it work well enough.
> In some places certainly, but in others not so much. We make a lot of use
> of Docker recently on some NASA projects, but I'm under no illusions that
> in reality Juju running containers would be a much improved plan, but they
> already have Mesos etc running so why upset the apple cart? Similarly at
> ApacheCon we had developers praising Docker and Systems Administrators
> saying its the bane of their life.
>
> That said, you don't really see people spin up a scalable hadoop setup in
> Docker because it would be annoying to maintain, but you could easily do
> that in Juju on whatever, or Puppet etc. Of course you can do it, and it
> will become more common over time especially with k8s auto scaling etc for
> sure.
>
> Who said Mesos or DC/OS providers and charms wouldn't get official
> support? That said currently we're just lacking bandwidth to build them(I
> speak entirely as an impartial observer I have no real idea if they'd get
> Canonical support, but why not?) ;)
>
> Tom
>
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 9:59 AM, Merlijn Sebrechts <
> merlijn.sebrechts at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Wait, wouldn't this require juju to have an "mesos" provider, so juju can
>> request lxc containers from mesos? I've heard something like this mentioned
>> at the Summit, will this become a reality? [that would be awesome!]
>>
>> We want support for Docker containers because:
>>  - A lot devs we work with create their prototypes in docker
>>  - There are a bunch of useful docker containers with stuff that isn't
>> charmed yet
>>
>> We want Kubernetes because:
>>  - Auto scaling
>>  - Auto failure recovery
>>  - It has a future beyond Docker
>>  - The Charms are officially supported by Canonical (hence Kubernetes >
>> Mesos)
>>
>>
>> 2016-11-18 10:41 GMT+01:00 Tom Barber <tom at spicule.co.uk>:
>>
>>> What you want Merlijn is LXC on Apache Mesos so you can provision a
>>> Mesos cluster on MAAS and then provision Juju Charms into LXC on the
>>> infinitely scalable cluster! Docker is cool but until it releases the
>>> proper orchestration stuff, it comes a poor second to deploying workloads
>>> with Juju ;)
>>>
>>> That's not a slight at the great work Adam, Chuck and co are doing, but
>>> feedback I got from people at the Pentaho User meetup last weekend and
>>> ApacheCon this week who all get 'stuck' with Docker once the convenience
>>> factor has gone away. Anyway, I digress.... Amazing getting proper Docker
>>> running on LXD as well.
>>>
>>> Tom
>>>
>>>
>>>
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