deployment

Deployment

This directory contains tools to deploy Mir on remote machines. We use Ansible for configuration and deployment (and thus ansible must be installed on the local machine to use these tools). The user only has to provide a list of IP addresses and login credentials to the remote machines, everything else happens automatically.

Local setup

1. Save a list of IP addresses of the machines to deploy Mir on in a file, one per line. The hosts file serves as an example, the contained addresses are meaningless.
2. Configure access to the remote machines by adapting group_vars/all.yaml (see comments in the file). Again, the default contents of the file serve as an example, the values are meaningless.

Remote setup

First, make sure that all remote machines allow passwordless root (sudo) access for the configured user account. Then, to install Mir and its dependencies on the remote machines, run (from this directory)

ansible-playbook -i hosts setup.yaml

The above command assumes that the remote nodes' IP addresses are stored in hosts. Any file can, however, be used for this purpose. Variables specified in group_vars/all.yaml can be overridden by specifying them as --extra-vars arguments. E.g., to check out a different branch of Mir, say, bugfix, run

ansible-playbook -i hosts setup.yaml --extra-vars "git_version=bugfix"

This setup.yaml playbook will also compile the sample chat demo application and the code for preliminary performance evaluation.

Deploying applications

Currently, the chat demo application and the simple benchmarking app are supported out-of-the-box. To start them on the remote machines, run, respectively

ansible-playbook -i hosts start-chat-demo.yaml

or

ansible-playbook -i hosts run-benchmark.yaml

Each of the commands above will start the respective application on all machines specified in hosts. Moreover, the start-benchmark.yaml playbook will create a membership file in the current directory, containing membership configuration in Mir's format, which can be used to start a local bench client.

The application is run on the remote machines within a tmux session. To see the console output of the application, log in to the remote machine and run

tmux a

To attach to the tmux session.

Stopping nodes

To stop the application on the remote machines, run

ansible-playbook -i hosts stop-nodes.yaml

This will kill the tmux server on each remote machine.

Running a custom script

To run a custom script on the remote machines, modify the scripts/custom.sh file and run

ansible-playbook -i hosts custom-script.yaml

This will execute scripts/custom.sh on each remote machine.