Fabric Deployment to Profile Git - Automation

Fabric maven plugin offers a wide variety of deployment options for Jboss Fuse. This article explores the deployment method pertaining to modifying the profiles on the Fuse profile GIT.

The two commands which we use to deploy the code in this article are fabric8:zip and fabric8: branch. Documentation on the plugin’s can be found here .

Scenario:

An enterprise project has the below bundles divided in to two profiles.

Common       :  DBCP bundle and MQSql Connector

Web Module : Has Business Related bundles, for e.g., Let us say

·      mvn:com.sundar.fabric8/webbackend/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

·      mvn:com.sundar.fabric8/webfrontend/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

·      mvn:com.sundar.fabric8/soapservices/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

The goal is to generate a profile using fabric8:zip such that all the bundles from common are written to a profile common and the three bundles under the web module are written to web module profile.

Creating Profile Zips

1.   In addition to your regular code maven projects create a new project fabric8-deployment as a parent project.
2.  Create two modules common and web module with any packaging mode you wish (except pom), the main goal here is to generate profile zip files.
3. Modify the parent pom as below.
4. 
   
5. The distribution management section of the pom is needed. I have used a local repository for the example sake , it can be modified accordingly to the needs of the project.
6. In traditional fabric8:zip usage , the fabric8:zip plugin will be associated in the actual bundle builds and thus create a one-one to mapping for a profile and a bundle.
7. In this example the project which defines the fabric8:zip goal is marked to be ignore using the <includeArtifact> tag of the fabric8:zip goal which will then not write the project in to the profile created.
8. Now edit the common module pom to reflect as below.
9. Profile tag in the properties will be used to create the name of the profile.
10. ParentProfiles are mentioned if there is any associated parents for the profiles needed. (common examples are CXF projects might need to be associated with feature-cxf profile).
11. Bundles tag is where all the maven co-ordinates for the bundles and packages which go in to this project are mentioned separated by a space. The common profile in our example needed to have DBCP And MYSQL connectors, so these are added under the bundles tag.
12. Features tag is a place-holder in case any feature need to be added to the tag separated by spaces.
13. Edit the web module pom to reflect as below
14. Now run the fabric8:zip command on the parent project , you should see that the project zips are created individually and aggregated in to the parent target directory
15. You can run the mvn install command to automatically zip the profiles and deploy them to the locations specified in the distributionManagement part of the pom.

The generated profile will look as below

Creating the Project to Deploy the profile to the Git

     Once the profiles are created and installed to a accessible repository, we can now create the fabric8:branch  plugin based project to push these profiles to the repository.

1. Create a project camel-fabric-deployment and edit the pom as below
2. The distribution management section needs to point to the same repository where the profile zip files have been installed for the dependencies to be picked up properly.
3. Add all the profiles, created in the earlier step as dependencies to the project. Observe the classifier and type fields provided to specify the profiles.
4. Provide the branch name as the latest version .
5. Provide the oldBranchName as the current version in the git.
6. PushOnSuccess will determine if the repository needs to be updated on the successful compile or if it has not to be pushed.

Adding any Configuration files to the Profile.

           
We can add the configuration files to the profile within this framework by adding the profileConfigDir to the fabric8:zip goal configurations. The default value for this property is src/main/fabric8 , where in all the configuration files stored in this directory will be copied in to the zip file and subsequently pushed on to the profile via fabric8:branch goal.

            We can even have environment wise files created in each directory and over-ride the value of the profileConfigDir using the system variables. E.g., src/main/fabric8/${environment} and then run the command

Mvn –Denvironment=dev install

To generate the profile zip with only the files under the directory dev to move to the profile. This gives us a cleaner way of managing the property values from environment to environment.

Conclusion: Using the configuration properties provided by the fabric8 maven plugin we can tweak this deployment approach as needed by our environment. This approach has a pit-fall that the json file which describes the dependencies of each project (bundle), which generally gets created by the fabric8: zip goal will not be created. The ignoreArtifact property set to true will over-ride this functionality. Generally depending upon the setup of your project, this way can be safely adopted in to projects running fuse on ensemble in a common set-up.

For Sample Code Click Here

References: Thanks to Richard Stroop ,for clarifying my queries while working on the project.

Using AutoScaler in Fuse

Autoscaling is an easy repeatable way of spinning up fabric containers associated with the profiles . It can be particularly helpful while performing load tests and also to create the containers when new profiles are being deployed to the environment.

• Add the auto-scale profile to the root-container of the fabric (parent container ) not to the child containers.

Profile Requirements  can be defined  in two ways;from the web-console or the command line.

• Command Line : 
• fabric:require-profile-set command is used for defining the requirements for the instances that the profile is applied on 
• fabric:require-profile-set --minimum 1 --maximum 3 some-profile-id which then tells fabric that a minimum of one instance should always be associated with the profile in the fabric environment and also that a maximum of 3 instances can be associated at any given time.
• Web-Console
• Navigate to the Profiles page on the Hawt-io screen.
• Select the profile to which you want to add the requirements.
• Click the Add-Requirements link to the right of the screen.

• Provide the minimum and Maximum number of hosts to be associated with the profile.

Issues

Once the autoscaler is defined on the root container , the requirements on the profile will be auto-provisioned by the fabric environment . 

• But if for any reason the child containers are brought down , fabric will automatically create a new instance , this might prove to be a problem in case the child containers is being brought down for maintenance.
• If a container is down and is associated to a minimum requirements on a profile , the fabric will spin up a new container but will not attempt to start the shut-down container.