Flight Control

Flight Control is a service for declarative, GitOps-driven management of edge device fleets running ostree-based Linux system images.

Note

Flight Control is still in early stage development!

Building

Prerequisites:

• git, make, and go (>= 1.20), and podman-compose

Flightctl agent reports the status of running rootless containers. Ensure the podman socket is enabled:

systemctl --user enable --now podman.socket

Checkout the repo and from within the repo run:

make build

To run unit tests, use make unit-test. This requires installing gotestsum:

go install gotest.tools/gotestsum@latest

To generate API code and mocks, use make generate This requires installing mockgen:

go install github.com/golang/mock/mockgen@v1.6.0

Running

Note: If you are developing with podman on an arm64 system (i.e. M1/M2 Mac) change the postgresql image with:

export PGSQL_IMAGE=registry.redhat.io/rhel8/postgresql-12
podman login registry.redhat.io

The service can be deployed locally in kind with the following command:

make deploy

Note it stores its generated CA cert, server cert, and client-bootstrap cert in $HOME/.flightctl/certs and the client configuration in $HOME/.flightctl/config.yaml.

Use the flightctl CLI to apply, get, or delete resources:

bin/flightctl apply -f examples/fleet.yaml
bin/flightctl get fleets

Use an agent VM to test a device interaction, an image is automatically created from hack/Containerfile.local and a qcow2 image is derived in output/qcow2/disk.qcow2, currently this only works on a Linux host.

# will create the cluster, and the agent config files in bin/agent which will be embedded in the image
make deploy
make agent-vm agent-vm-console # user/password is redhat/redhat

The agent-vm target accepts multiple parameters:

• VMNAME: the name of the VM to create (default: flightctl-device-default)
• VMCPUS: the number of CPUs to allocate to the VM (default: 1)
• VMMEM: the amount of memory to allocate to the VM (default: 512)
• VMWAIT: the amount of minutes to wait on the console during first boot (default: 0)

It is possible to create multiple VMs with different names:

make agent-vm VMNAME=flightctl-device-1
make agent-vm VMNAME=flightctl-device-2
make agent-vm VMNAME=flightctl-device-3

Those should appear on the root virsh list:

$ sudo virsh list
 Id   Name                        State
-------------------------------------------
 13   flightctl-device-1          running
 14   flightctl-device-2          running
 15   flightctl-device-3          running

And you can log in the consoles with agent-vm-console:

make agent-vm-console VMNAME=flightctl-device-1

NOTE: You can exit the console with Ctrl + ] , and stty rows 80 and stty columns 140 (for example) are useful to resize your console otherwise very small.

If you created individual devices you need to clean them one by one:

make agent-vm-clean VMNAME=flightctl-device-1
make agent-vm-clean VMNAME=flightctl-device-2
make agent-vm-clean VMNAME=flightctl-device-3

Use the devicesimulator to simulate load from devices:

bin/devicesimulator --count=100

Running the server locally

For development purposes it can be useful to run the database in a container in kind, and the server locally. To do this, first start the database:

make deploy-db

Then start the server:

rm $HOME/.flightctl/client.yaml
bin/flightctl-server

Metrics

Start the observability stack:

podman-compose -f deploy/podman/observability.yaml up

The Grafana and Prometheus web UIs are then accessible on http://localhost:3000 and http://localhost:9090, respectively.