Aquarium Fish

Main part of the Aquarium distributed p2p system to manage resources. Primarily was developed to manage the dynamic Jenkins CI agents in heterogeneous environment and simplify the infrastructure management, but can be used in various applications to have self-management resources with simple REST API to operate p2p cluster.

Eventually becomes an internal cloud or pool of resources with high availability and business continuity features - an essential part of the modern infrastructure in international companies. It will allow to build the automation without the issues of centralization (by proxying requests to nearby services), complete control of the environments and security provided by sandboxing and dynamic nature of the envs.

The Aquarium system will make the resource management as simple as possible and will unify the dynamic resource management by integrating multiple environment providers (VM, container, native, clouds, etc.) to one entry point of allocating devices which can be used across the organization.

Requirements

In general it can be built and used on any OS/architecture but for now the primary ones are:

• MacOS
• Linux

To run the node you need nothing, but the drivers usually require some apps to be installed into the environment.

Goals

• Completely distributed system
• Run and operate locally with minimal required configuration
• Flexible to use different database engines
• Simple interface for the drivers which provides resources
• Proper sandboxing of the running resources (host only networking by default)
• Compact API with straightforward definitions
• Socks5 and other proxies to redirect the applications to nearby services

Usage

To use the Aquarium Fish you just need to execute the next steps:

• Ensure the driver requirements for needed driver are installed
• Run Fish node
• Obtain the generated admin user token
• With HTTP API:
  • Create Label which describes the resource you want to see
  • Create Application to request the resource
  • Use the allocated resource
  • Destroy the resource when the job is done

To run locally

In order to test the Fish locally with just one node or multiple local nodes:

$ ./aquarium-fish

There is a number of options you can pass to the application, check --help to get them, but the most important ones is:

• --api - is where the Fish API will listen, default is 0.0.0.0:8001 (it also is used for meta so your VMs will be able to ask for the metadata)
• --cfg - use the yaml config to specify the options

If you want to use the secondary node on the same host - provide a simple config with overridden node name, because the first will use hostname as node name:

• local2.yml

  ---
  node_name: test-2
  api_address: 0.0.0.0:8002
  cluster_join:
    - 127.0.0.1:9001

$ ./aquarium-fish --cfg local2.yml

To run as a cluster

TODO #30: This functionality is in active development, the available logic can't handle the cluster.

Just make sure there is a path from one node to at least one another - there is no requirement of seeing the entire cluster for each node, but it need to be able to connect to at least one. More visibility is better up to 8 total - because it's the default limit of cluster connections for the node.

Security

By default Fish generates a simple CA and key/cert pair for Server & Client auth - it just shows the example of cluster communication transport protection via TLS and uses certificate public key as identifier of the cluster node. If a CA certificate is not exists - it will be generated. If node certificate and key are exists, they will be used, but if not - Fish will try to generate them out of CA cert and key. So CA key is not needed for the node if you already generated the node certificate yourself.

TLS encryption is a must, so make sure you know how to generate a CA certificate and control CA to issue the node certificates. Today it's the most secure way to ensure noone will join your cluster without your permission and do not intercept the API & sync communication. Separated CA is used to check that the server (or client) is the one is approved in the cluster.

Maybe in the future Fish will allow to manage the cluster CA and issue certificate for a new node, but for now just check openssl and https://github.com/jcmoraisjr/simple-ca for reference.

Cluster usage

To initialize cluster you need to create users with admin account and create labels you want to use. In order to use the resources manager manually - check the API section and follow the next general directions:

1. Get your user and it's token
2. Check the available labels on the cluster (and create some if you need them)
3. Create Application with description of what kind of resource you need
4. Check the Status of your Application and wait for "ALLOCATED" status
5. Now resource is allocated, it's all yours and, probably, already pinged you
6. When you're done - request Application to deallocate the resource
7. Make sure the Application status is "DEALLOCATED"

To use with Jenkins - you can install Aquarium Net Jenkins cloud plugin to dynamically allocate the required resources. Don't forget to add the served labels to the cloud and you will be ready to go.

Users policy

For now the policy is quite simple - admin user can do anything, regular users can just use the cluster (create application, list their resources and so on). The applications & resources could contain sensitive information (like jenkins agent secret), so user can see just the owned applications and are able to control only them.

Implementation

Go was initially chosen because of go-dqlite, but became quite useful and modern way of making a self-sufficient one-executable service which can cover multiple areas without performance sacrifice. The way it manages dependencies and subroutines, structures logic makes it much better than python for such purpose. Eventually we've moved away from dqlite (#1) but stick with go for good.

Resource drivers are the way nodes managing the resources. For example - if I have VMWare Fusion installed on my machine - I can run Fish and it's VMX driver will automatically detect that it can run VMX images. In case I have docker installed too - I can use both for different workloads or select the ones I actually want to use by --drivers option or via the API.

Internal DB structure

The cluster supports the internal SQL database, which provides a common storage for the node & cluster data. The current schema could be found in OpenAPI format here:

• When the Fish app is running locally: https://0.0.0.0:8001/api/
• YAML specification: https://github.com/adobe/aquarium-fish/blob/main/docs/openapi.yaml

How the cluster choose node for resource allocation

The cluster can't force any node to follow the majority decision, so the rules are providing full consensus.

For now the rule is simple - when all the nodes are voted, each node can find the first node in the vote table that answered "yes". There are a couple of protection mechanisms like "CreateAt" to find the actual first one and "Rand" field as a last resort (if the other params are identical).

In the future to allow to update cluster with the new rules the Rules table will be created and the different versions of the Aquarium Fish could find the common rules and switch them depends on Application request. Rules will be able to lay on top of any information about the node #15.

The election process:

• Once per 5 seconds the node checks the voting process
• If there is Application with status NEW:
  • If no Node Vote for the Application exists
    • Fish creates Vote depends on the current status of the Node and round of the election
  • If all the active cluster Nodes are voted
    • If there is "Yes" Votes
      • Application Election Rule applied to the votes
      • If the current Node is elected
        • If current Node is not executing Application already
          • Set Application status to ELECTED
          • Run the allocate process
      • Else if the current Node is not elected
        • If Application has no NEW status
          • Remove Vote and forget about the Application
        • Else if Vote round timeout is passed
          • Decide the elected node was not took the Application
          • execute next round vote
    • If there is no "Yes" Votes
      • If Vote round delay is passed
        • Increment Vote round and vote again on the current Node status

UI

TODO

Simplify the cluster management, for example adding labels or check the status #8.

Integration tests

To verify that everything works as expected you can run integration tests like that:

$ FISH_PATH=$PWD/aquarium-fish.darwin_amd64 go test -v -failfast -parallel 4 ./tests/...

API

There is a number of ways to communicate with the Fish cluster, and the most important one is API.

You can use curl, for example, to do that:

$ curl -u "admin:YOUR_TOKEN" -X GET 127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/label/
{...json data...}

The current API could be found in OpenAPI format here:

• When the Fish app is running locally: https://0.0.0.0:8001/api/
• YAML specification: https://github.com/adobe/aquarium-fish/blob/main/docs/openapi.yaml

Also check example and tests folder to get more info about the typical API usage.