TIBCO Activespaces on a RANCHER K8s Cluster

With this simple guide we see how to deploy TIBCO Activespaces 4.6 and FTL Server 6.5 along with Monitoring via InfluxDB and Grafana, on a pre-existing cluster controlled by SUSE Rancher 2.6.

For this guide only, we will deploy TIBCO Activespaces and TIBCO FTL Server on a single node, although 2/3 nodes are recommended. However, the Helm Chart covered in this guide provides a number of replicas and nodeaffinity for a production cluster.

An Excel file for sizing the cluster to perfection can be found here and more product info can be found here.

Why SUSE Rancher?

Rancher is a complete software stack for teams adopting containers. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.

Run Kubernetes everywhere

Unified multi-cluster app management

Rancher not only deploys production-grade Kubernetes clusters from datacenter to cloud to the edge, it also unites them with centralized authentication, access control and observability. Rancher lets you streamline cluster deployment on bare metal, private clouds, public clouds or vSphere and secure them using global security policies. Use Helm or our App Catalog to deploy and manage applications across any or all these environments, ensuring multi-cluster consistency with a single deployment.

Rancher received top ratings for:

• Runtime and orchestration
• Security features
• Image management
• Vision
• Roadmap

More info here.

TBCO Activespaces and FTL onpremise

What Is ActiveSpaces?

TIBCO ActiveSpaces uses the concepts of grid computing to provide a scalable, distributed, and durable data grid. The data grid serves as a system of record to store terabytes of data in an enterprise. ActiveSpaces provides a fast, consistent, and fault-tolerant system that supports a high rate of I/O operations in a scalable manner.

For more information about the ActiveSpaces concepts, see the Grid Computing in ActiveSpaces section.

Benefits of ActiveSpaces

ActiveSpaces offers many advantages as compared with a traditional RDBMS.

The following list highlights the benefits of using ActiveSpaces:

• ActiveSpaces performance and customer experience
• Requires minimum investment because the system scales on low cost commodity or virtualized hardware
• Updates data and systems continually and provides immediate and accurate response
• Supports many hardware and software platforms, so programs running on different kinds of computers in a network can communicate seamlessly
• Scales linearly and transparently when nodes are added (An increase in the number of nodes produces a corresponding increase in the memory and processing power available to the data grid)
• Enables smooth and continuous working of your application without code modification or restarts
• Provides location transparency without the hassles of determining where or how to store data and search for it
• Notifies applications automatically as soon as data is modified

The Workflow for a PUT Operation

How Is the Data Stored in a Data Grid?

For more info can you click here.

Create Docker Images

Supported Version

• TIBCO ActiveSpaces 4.6
• TIBCO FTL 6.5
• Docker Community/Enterprise Edition should be most recent version.

Prerequisiti

• Install Docker and make your user in Sudoers.
• A K8s Cluster (k3s o RKE2) with SUSE Rancher running.
• Install Helm official.
• Make sure the docker images repositories are accessible for the cluster.

Prepare Local Enviroment

Prepare the local environment using the following:

• A Linux or MacOS machine equipped for building Docker images;
• TIBCO ActiveSpaces v4.6 and FTL v6.5 installation packages are required. The Enterprise Edition or the Community Edition can be used. The Enterprise Edition must be used if configuring monitoring components. Download the EE from edelivery.tibco.com, and the CE at https://www.tibco.com/products/messaging–event–processing Note: All installation files must be Linux!
• The tibdg_docker_4.6_mon.zip. The zip file contains all of the necessary Docker build files:
  • Create a new directory tibdg_docker_4.6;
  • Unzip tibdg_docker_4.6_mon.zip to tibdg_docker_4.6;
  • Unzip the downloaded TIB_as_4.6.0_linux_x86_64.zip and TIB_ftl_6.5.0_linux_x86_64.zip;
  • Copy all of the rpm files from TIB_as_4.6.0/rpm and TIB_ftl_6.5.0/rpm directories to tibdg_docker_4.6/bin.
• Install Docker on the workstation to build the TIBCO AS4 and FTL images, and ensure it is running.

Attachments

• tibdg_docker_4.6.zip
• tibdg_docker_4.6_mon.zip

Image Creation

Configuration for Monitoring

The FTL ftl–tibftlmonconfig image requires additional configuration before being created. If the monitoring components are not required, this section can be skipped.
Note: A Linux installation of FTL is required for this step.
Use the following to prepare the FTL monitoring configuration component:

• Under the tibdg_docker_4.6/conf directory, create the dashboards directory;
• From the $TIBCO_HOME/FTL/current_version/monitoring/conf/influxdb/dashboards, copy all of the json files to tibdg_docker_4.6/conf/dashboards;
• From the $TIBCO_HOME/FTL/current_version/monitoring/conf/influxdb, copy createdb, continuous_queries, and create_retention files to the tibdg_docker_4.6/conf directory;
• The tibdg_docker_4.6/conf/datasource.json and monitoring-in-docker.json are configured to use host.docker.internal for both the Grafana and Influxdb servers. Change accordingly. If using in Kubernetes, these must be modified to reference the K8 services these servers. A Docker environment variable may also be substituted for the value, and used when running in Docker or Kubernetes.

Image Creation

There is a Dockerfile for each of the ActiveSpaces components, as well as for the FTL Server and monitoring components. All Dockerfiles were built on the Centos8 base image using the TIBCO product rpm packages. If another base image is required, substitute this in the individual Dockerfile.
Note: If the base image used does not support rpm files, then the individual Dockerfile will need additional modification, for the correct installation procedure. This is not covered as part of this document. Additionally, it maybe be possible to make the images smaller by reducing the rpm files in the bin directory to only the required install rpm files for that component.
Once the environment is ready, run run_build.sh to create the seven Docker images.
Note: monitoring components are not required, comment out the build of the three monitoring components.
The images created will be:

• as–operations:4.6.x
• as–tibdg:4.6.x
• as–tibdgadmind:4.6.x
• as–tibdgproxy:4.6.x
• as–tibdgkeeper:4.6.x
• as–tibdgnode:4.6.x
• as–tibdgmonitoring:4.6.x
• ftl–tibftlserver:6.5.x
• ftl–tibftlmonconfig:6.5.x
• ftl–tibftlmongateway:6.5.x

How the images are tagged can be changed by modifying the run_build.sh script. There is also a script delete_build.sh supplied which can be used to delete all images.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces Helm Chart

Introduction

TIBCO ActiveSpaces (abbreviated tibdg for ‘TIBCO Data Grid’) is a distributed, fault-tolerant, key-value store. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes.

Helm Chart

Official Helm Chart available only after prior approval by TIBCO. Contact us.

The following instructions on preparing the Helm Chart and editing the Values.yaml file are taken from the Official README.md.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.9+
• PV (Persistent Volume) provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure
• Make sure the ActiveSpaces Docker images are accessible from the cluster. Either the images must be loaded into a common private registry as outlined here, or the images can be loaded on each node in the cluster.

The docker images should be built following the instructions in scripts/build-images.

The scripts/build-images directory also has instructions for creating the xz files which can be loaded with the docker load command if needed.

docker load -i as-operations-4.7.1.dockerimage.xz
docker load -i as-tibdg-4.7.1.dockerimage.xz
docker load -i as-tibdgnode-4.7.1.dockerimage.xz
docker load -i as-tibdgkeeper-4.7.1.dockerimage.xz
docker load -i as-tibdgproxy-4.7.1.dockerimage.xz
docker load -i as-tibdgadmind-4.7.1.dockerimage.xz

As well, the ftl-tibftlserver image must be loaded or built from the FTL installation directory. The minimum version required for this data grid is: 6.7.1

docker load -i ftl-tibftlserver-6.7.1.dockerimage.xz

The images referenced by the chart can be configured, e.g. if a custom registry path is required.

If you are using the Enterprise Edition of TIBCO ActiveSpaces you have the ability to monitor the data grid.

Load the ftl-tibmonconfig and ftl-tibmongateway docker image from the FTL installation. This compressed image is located in the product’s docker-images directory.

docker load -i ftl-tibmonconfig-6.7.1.dockerimage.xz
docker load -i ftl-tibmongateway-6.7.1.dockerimage.xz

# helm v2:
helm install --name=tibdg-helm .
# helm v3:
helm install tibdg-helm .

# helm v2:
helm install --debug --dry-run --name=tibdg-helm .
# helm v3:
helm install --debug --dry-run tibdg-helm .

# helm v2:
helm delete --purge tibdg-helm
# helm v3:
helm uninstall tibdg-helm

# helm v2:
helm install --set tibdgnode.copysetCount=5 --name=tibdg-helm .
# helm v3:
helm install --set tibdgnode.copysetCount=5 tibdg-helm .

# helm v2:
helm install -f values.yaml --name=tibdg-helm .
# helm v3:
helm install -f values.yaml tibdg-helm .

> cat min.yaml
ftlserver:
  count: 1

tibdgnode:
  copysetSize: 1

tibdgkeeper:
  count: 1

tibdgproxy:
  advertisedIPs: 127.0.0.1
  count: 1

externalAccessMode: LoadBalancer

monitoringEnabled: true

# helm v2:
> helm install -f min.yaml --name=tibdg-helm .
# helm v3:
> helm install -f min.yaml tibdg-helm .

kubectl run -it --rm --restart=Never --image=as-tibdg:4.7.1 tibdg -- \
    -r http://ftlservers:30080 status

kubectl run -it --rm --restart=Never --image=as-operations:4.7.1 operations -- \
    -r http://ftlservers:30080