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Contributing

--

First, thank you for contributing to the Blackspace Platform! The goal of this document is to provide everything you need to start contributing to Blackspace properly. The following TOC is sorted progressively, starting with the basics and expanding into more specifics.

Assumptions

  1. You're familiar with Github and the pull request workflow.
  2. You've read Blackspace's docs.
  3. You know about the Blackspace community. Please use this for help.
  4. You are familiar with and have read the style guides for this project present in the /.style_guide/*

Your First Contribution

Run the following scripts/commands in the terminal to download conform and set up a commit message hook locally.

go get github.com/talos-systems/conform
cat <<EOF | tee .git/hooks/commit-msg
#!/bin/sh

conform enforce --commit-msg-file \$1
EOF
chmod +x .git/hooks/commit-msg
  1. Read the style guides in /.style_guide/*
  2. Ensure your change has an issue! Find an existing issue or open a new issue.
    • This is where you can get a feel if the change will be accepted or not. Changes that are questionable will have a needs: approval label.
  3. Once an issue is obtained, fork the Blackspace repository from dev branch in your own local instance.
  4. Create a new Git branch off of the dev branch. 
       git clone https://github.com/BlackspaceInc/BlackspacePlatform.git
   git checkout -b new_branch_name dev
  5. Review the Blackspace workflow and development guidelines.
  6. Make your changes.
  7. Submit the branch as a pull request to the main Blackspace repo dev branch. A Blackspace team member should comment and/or review your pull request within a few days. Although, depending on the circumstances, it may take longer.

Change Control

Onboarding

Start documentation site locally to read onboarding resources.

make doc-site

Git Branches

All changes must be made in a branch and submitted as pull requests. Blackspace does not adopt any type of branch naming style, but please use something descriptive of your changes.

Git Commits

All commits should be concise and adequately describe the change performed. Please ensure you maintain small commits and perform on thing at a time. Each commit should be associated with one distinct change. Commit should follow a distinct framework

Commits should have follow the following framework

git commit -sm "[Tag]:[Description]"

Acceptable Tags :

fix:, feat:, build:, chore:, ci:, docs:, style:, refactor:, perf:, test:

example: git commit -sm "chore: remove unecessary configs"

Style

Please ensure your commits are small and focused; they should tell a story of your change. This helps reviewers to follow your changes, especially for more complex changes.

Signing-off

Your commits must include a DCO signature. This is simpler than it sounds; it just means that all of your commits must contain:

Signed-off-by: Joe Smith <joe.smith@email.com>

Git makes this easy by adding the -s or --signoff flags when you commit:

git commit -sm 'My commit message'

We also included a make signoff target that handles this for you if you forget.

Github Pull Requests

Once your changes are ready you must submit your branch as a pull
request.

Title

The pull request title must follow the format outlined in the conventional
commits spec. Conventional commits is a standardized format for commit messages. Blackspace only requires this format for commits on the master branch. And because Blackspace squashes commits before merging branches, this means that only the pull request title must conform to this format. Blackspace performs a pull request check to verify the pull request title in case you forget.

A list of allowed sub-categories is defined here.

The following are all good examples of pull request titles:

feature(new sink): new `xyz` sink
feature(tcp source): add foo bar baz feature
fix(tcp source): fix foo bar baz bug
chore: improve build process
docs: fix typos

Reviews & Approvals

All pull requests must be reviewed and approved by at least one Blackspace team member. The review process is outlined in the Review guide.

Merge Style

All pull requests are squashed and merged. We generally discourage large pull requests that are over 300-500 lines of diff. If you would like to propose a change that is larger we suggest coming onto the team's gitter or slack channel and discuss it with one of your counterparts. This way we can talk through the solution and discuss if a change that large is even needed! This overall will produce a quicker response to the change and likely produce code that aligns better with our process.

CI

Currently Blackspace uses Github Actions to run tests. The workflows are defined in .github/workflows.

Tests are run for all changes except those that have the label:

ci-condition: skip

Github Actions is responsible for releasing updated versions of Blackspace through various channels.

Some long running tests will only run daily, rather than on every pull request. If needed, an administrator can kick off these tests manually.

Development

Setup

We're super excited to have you interested in working on Blackspace! Before you start you should pick how you want to develop.

For small or first-time contributions, we recommend the Docker method. If you do a lot of contributing, try adopting the Nix method! It'll be way faster and feel more smooth. Prefer to do it yourself? That's fine too!

Using a Docker environment

Targets: You can use this method to produce AARCH64, Arm6/7, as well as x86/64 Linux builds.

Since not everyone has a full working native environment, or can use Nix, we will take our Nix environment and stuff it into orchestrated Docker containers!

This is ideal for users who want it to "Just work" and just want to start contributing. It's also what we use for our CI, so you know if it breaks we can't do anything else until we fix it. 😉

Before you go farther, install Docker through your official package manager, or from the Docker sites.

By default, make environment style tasks will do a docker pull from Github's container repository, you can optionally build your own environment while you make your morning coffee ☕:

# Optional: Only if you want to go make a coffee
# sets up environment in which services will run (development or production)

Now that you have your coffee, you can enter the shell!

# Spins up services locally
# In Debug Mode


# In Production mode

Now you can use the jobs detailed in "Bring your own toolbox" below.

The Basics

Directory Structure

  • /.github - Store CI workflows for Blackspace.
  • /.meta - Project metadata used to generate documentation.
  • /.style_guide - Witholds project styleguides and best practices
  • /benches - Internal benchmarks.
  • /docs - Store documentation.
  • /istio-manifests - Istio service mesh and production manifests.
  • /kubernetes-manifests - Kubernetes production manifests.
  • /linkerd-manifests - Linkerd service mesh and production manifests.
  • /monitoring - Production and development configurations for monitoring purposes.
  • /pb - Protobuf schema definitions common across all backend services.
  • /release - Release artifacts.
  • /scripts - Scripts used to generate docs and maintain the repo.
  • /src - Blackspace source.
  • /distribution - Distribution artifacts for various targets.
  • /test-harness - Utility for E2E tests.

Makefile

Blackspace includes a Makefile in the root of the repo. This serves as a high-level interface for common commands. Running make will produce a list of make targets with descriptions. These targets will be referenced throughout this document.

Code Style

We use gofmt to format our code and CI will verify that your code follows this format style. To run the following command make sure gofmt has been installed on the stable toolchain locally.

# To format the code
make fmt

Feature flags

When a new feature or microservice is added, it has to be put behind a feature flag with the corresponding name. This ensures that it is possible to customize Blackspace builds as well as turn it on or off in production especially if we foresee issues arising.

In addition, during chaos testing it is useful to disable certain services entirely at runtime to better gain visibility over the system's performance in such scenarios.

Dependencies

Dependencies should be carefully selected and avoided if possible. You can see how dependencies are reviewed in the Reviewing guide.

Guidelines

Service Healthchecks

Services must implement a health check as a means for validating their configuration against the environment and external systems. Ideally, this allows the system to inform users of problems such as insufficient credentials, unreachable endpoints, non-existent tables, etc. They're not perfect, however, since it's impossible to exhaustively check for issues that may happen at runtime.

When implementing health checks, we prefer false positives to false negatives. This means we would prefer that a health check pass and the service then fail than to have the health check fail when the service would have been able to run successfully.

A common cause of false negatives in health checks is performing an operation that the service itself does not need. For example, listing all of the available S3 buckets and checking that the configured bucket is on that list. The S3 sink doesn't need the ability to list all buckets, and a user that knows that may not have permitted it to do so. In that case, the health check will fail due to bad credentials even through its credentials are sufficient for normal operation.

This leads to a general strategy of mimicking what the service itself does. Unfortunately, the fact that health checks don't have real events available to them leads to some limitations here. The most obvious example of this is with services where the exact target of a write depends on the value of some field in the event. It also pops up for services where incoming events are expected to conform to a specific schema. In both cases, random test data is reasonably likely to trigger a potentially false-negative result. Even in simpler cases, we need to think about the effects of writing test data and whether the user would find that surprising or invasive. The answer usually depends on the system we're interfacing with.

In some cases, the right thing to do might be nothing at all. If we require dynamic information to figure out what entity that we're even dealing with, odds are very low that we'll be able to come up with a way to meaningfully validate that it's in working order. It's perfectly valid to have a health check that falls back to doing nothing when there is a data dependency like this.

With all that in mind, here is a simple checklist to go over when writing a new health check:

  • Does this check perform different fallible operations from the service itself?
  • Does this check have side effects the user would consider undesirable (e.g. data pollution)?
  • Are there situations where this check would fail but the service would operate normally?

Not all of the answers need to be a hard "no", but we should think about the likelihood that any "yes" would lead to false negatives and balance that against the usefulness of the check as a whole for finding problems. Because we have the option to disable individual health checks, there's an escape hatch for users that fall into a false negative circumstance. Our goal should be to minimize the likelihood of users needing to pull that lever while still making a good effort to detect common problems.

Testing

You can run Blackspace's tests via the make test command. Our tests either use Docker compose to spin up mock services for testing or spins up the necessary service containers in a local minikube cluster.

Sample Logs

We use flog to build a sample set of log files to test sending logs from a file to our local Kibana stack. This can be done with the following commands on mac with homebrew. Installation instruction for flog can be found here.

flog --bytes $((100 * 1024 * 1024)) > sample.log

This will create a 100MiB sample log file in the sample.log file.

Tips and Tricks

If you are developing a particular component and want to quickly iterate on unit tests related only to this component, run the unit tests from the folder in which the component was developed.

Benchmarking

All benchmarks are placed in the /benches folder. You can run benchmarks via the make benchmarks command. In addition, Blackspace maintains a full test hardness for complex end-to-end integration and performance testing.

Profiling

If you're trying to improve Blackspace's performance (or understand why your change made it worse), profiling is a useful tool for seeing where time is being spent.

While there are a bunch of useful profiling tools, a simple place to get started is with Linux's perf. Before getting started, you'll likely need to give yourself access to collect stats:

echo -1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid

You'll also want to edit .env files specific to the services you have updated and make sure that Blackspace is being built with debug symbols in release mode. This ensures that you'll get human-readable info in the eventual output:

debug = true

Then you can start up a release build of Blackspace with whatever config you're interested in profiling.

make release

Once it's started, use the ps tool (or equivalent) to make a note of its PID. We'll use this to tell perf which process we would like it to collect data about.

The next step is somewhat dependent on the config you're testing. For this example, let's assume you're using a simple TCP-mode socket source listening on port 9000. Let's also assume that you have a large file of example input in access.log (you can use a tool like flog to generate this).

With all that prepared, we can send our test input to Blackspace and collect data while it is under load:

perf record -F99 --call-graph dwarf -p $Blackspace_PID socat -dd OPEN:access.log TCP:localhost:9000

This instructs perf to collect data from our already-running Blackspace process for the duration of the socat command. The -F argument is the frequency at which perf should sample the Blackspace call stack. Higher frequencies will collect more data and produce more detailed output, but can produce enormous amounts of data that take a very long time to process. Using -F99 works well when your input data is large enough to take a minute or more to process, but feel free to adjust both input size and sampling frequency for your setup.

It's worth noting that this is not the normal way to profile programs with perf. Usually you would simply run something like perf record my_program and not have to worry about PIDs and such. We differ from this because we're only interested in data about what Blackspace is doing while under load. Running it directly under perf would collect data for the entire lifetime of the process, including startup, shutdown, and idle time. By telling perf to collect data only while the load generation command is running we get a more focused dataset and don't have to worry about timing different commands in quick succession.

You'll now find a perf.data file in your current directory with all of the information that was collected. There are different ways to process this, but one of the most useful is to create a flamegraph. For this we can use the inferno tool (available via cargo install):

perf script | inferno-collapse-perf > stacks.folded
cat stacks.folded | inferno-flamegraph > flamegraph.svg

And that's it! You now have a flamegraph SVG file that can be opened and navigated in your favorite web browser.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes Dev Flow

There is a special flow for when you develop Blackspace especially since it is designed to work with both docker compose and kubernetes.

This flow facilitates building Blackspace and deploying it into a cluster.

Requirements

There are some extra requirements besides what you'd normally need to work on Blackspace:

The dev flow

Once you have the requirements, use the make spin-up-kube command.

That's it, just one command should take care of everything!

It will

  1. build the various Blackspace service binaries in development mode,
  2. build docker images from these binaries,
  3. deploy Blackspace services into the Kubernetes cluster at your current kubectl context using the built docker image and a mix of our production deployment configuration defined in the directory of each service

As the result of invoking the make spin-up-kube command, you should see a kubernetes process running on your local machine, printing the logs from the various deployed Blackspace service instances.

To stop the process, press Ctrl+C, and wait for kubernetes to clean up the cluster state and exit.

Additionally, you can configure skaffold to automatically set up the kubernetes env requirements automatically so we can better focus on development.

Troubleshooting

Kubernetes E2E tests

Kubernetes integration has a lot of parts that can go wrong.

To cope with the complexity and ensure we maintain high quality, we use E2E (end-to-end) tests.

E2E tests normally run at CI, so there's typically no need to run them manually.

Requirements
  • kubernetes cluster (minikube has special support, but any cluster should work)
  • docker
  • kubectl
  • bash

Blackspace release artifacts are prepared for E2E tests, so the ability to do that is required too, see Blackspace docs for more details.

Also:

Note: minikube has troubles running on ZFS systems. If you're using ZFS, we suggest using a cloud cluster or minik8s with local registry.

Running the E2E tests

To run the E2E tests, use the following command:

make run-tests "e2e"

Humans

After making your change, you'll want to prepare it for Blackspace's users (mostly humans). This usually entails updating documentation and announcing your feature.

Documentation

Documentation is very important to the Blackspace project! In order to keep things simple for contributors, all reference documentation is derived from metadata in the /.meta directory. If you add a service, change options, or otherwise change anything user facing, you should update the relevant files in the /.meta directory.

To ensure your change is valid, you can run make check-meta, which validates your changes against the local /.meta/.schema.json file.

The actual website and documentation are generated on the Blackspace-website repo.

Changelog

Developers do not need to maintain the Changelog. This is automatically generated via the make release command. This is made possible by the use of conventional commit titles.

What makes a highlight noteworthy?

It should offer meaningful value to users. This is inherently subjective and it is impossible to define exact rules for this distinction. But we should be cautious not to dillute the meaning of a highlight by producing low values highlights.

How is a highlight different from a blog post?

Highlights are not blog posts. They are short one, maybe two, paragraph announcements. Highlights should allude to, or link to, a blog post if relevant.

Highlights alludes to an upcoming blog post. This allows us to communicate a high-value performance improvement without being blocked by an in-depth blog post.

Security

Please see the SECURITY.md file.

Legal

To protect all users of Blackspace, the following legal requirements are made.

DCO

Blackspace requires all contributors to agree to the DCO. DCO stands for Developer Certificate of Origin and is maintained by the Linux Foundation. It is an attestation attached to every commit made by every developer. It ensures that all committed code adheres to the Blackspace license (Apache 2.0).

Trivial changes

Trivial changes, such as spelling fixes, do not need to be signed. patent licenses as well. These rights are granted to everyone.

FAQ

What if I forgot to sign my commits?

No probs! We made this simple with the signoff Makefile target:

make signoff

If you prefer to do this manually:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13043357/git-sign-off-previous-commits