Healthchecks in the Scala Play Framework The Play framework for Scala is “marketed” as a lightweight framework used all over for folks building microservices and other quick and nimble services. While it may be fast and opinionated, it definitely does not set you up for success in a microservice world. Microservice Necessities Microservices need a … Read more
Okay, this is a bit of a change in direction. We will actually be running WebLogic 12 in Kubernetes. The instructions should work fine for WebLogic 14 (according to Oracle). However, the domain I am testing with we know works in WebLogic 12, and the Docker and Kubernetes setup comes defaulted to WL 12. So … Read more
Today let’s dig a bit into running WebLogic 14 in Kubernetes. History A bit of history, at least from my perspective. Since WebLogic 12, Oracle has “supported” running WebLogic in a Docker container. Before this, WebLogic seemed to not really interact well with Docker, so things like exposing ports did not work. That’s kind of … Read more
Recently we have been running into performance issues with load tests in one of our environments. When digging into the issue with Instana, we do not get much useful information. It just says that the time is spent in “Network”. Instana calculates this network time by seeing when the trace “leaves” one instrumented system, and … Read more
We have a term for those solutions that are unexpected. The solutions that make you scratch your head and just ask “What?” Those solutions that do indeed solve the problem, but could have been done in a much simpler way. We call those solutions “clever”. Clever The clever solutions are the ones that do indeed … Read more
Last time, I brought up the concept of template services. Today I want to share more details on what we do with this concept. Reference Architecture Sometimes you will hear architects talk about a reference architecture. This is the concept of having an established pattern out in the wild with real examples. An architecture that … Read more
When deploying the logging aggregation tool Fluentd to our Kubernetes cluster, Fluentd was failing to start up. It was failing with a permission denied error when trying to create the directory /var/log/fluent. I had Fluentd configured to write its position files in the /var/log/fluent directory. /var/log was mounted as a hostDir, from (predictably) /var/log on the host node, in order to … Read more
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get our logging to behave sensibly with all the microservices we have running in Kubernetes. Some of our apps log in JSON, some log with positional parameters, some log with a key=value, some use a mixed format, where part of the message is positional, and the rest … Read more
The Requirements Our requirements are simple. We run microservices in Docker, using Kubernetes as our deployment platform. We want all of our logs in Splunk. So the requirements are simply to take the logs from our microservice containers, and the logs from Kubernetes itself, and the logs from the host OS, and ship them to … Read more