SkyWalking 9.x showcase

This showcase would follow the latest changes of SkyWalking 9.x, even before the official release.

This showcase repository includes an example music application and other manifests to demonstrate the main features of SkyWalking. The music application is composed of several microservices that are written in different programming languages. Here is the architecture:

%% please read this doc in our official website, otherwise the graph is not correctly rendered.
graph LR;
  loadgen[load generator] --> ui("UI (React)") --> Traffic1("HTTP Request for backend serv") -->  apisix("APISIX as UI container")
 --> app("app server (NodeJS)") --> gateway("gateway (Spring)");
  ui("UI (React)") --> Traffic2("HTTP Request for UI codes") --> apisix("APISIX with  UI container")
  gateway --> songs("songs (Spring)") & rcmd("recommendations (Python)");
  rcmd --> rating("rating (Go)");
  songs --> activeMQ
  activeMQ --> songs
  rcmd --> songs;
  songs --> db("database (H2)");

Usage

Please run the showcase in a brand new test cluster, otherwise the undeploy process may delete some resources that you have installed before running this showcase (for example cert-manager). If you don’t do this in a new test cluster, it’s all on your own risks!

The showcase uses GNU Make and Docker containers to run commands, so please make sure you have make installed and Docker daemon running.

Prerequisites

To deploy the full features of this showcase application, you may need up to 8 CPU cores and 32 GB memory, please increase the Docker daemon resources or Kubernetes cluster resources if you find containers / Pods failed to start up. Alternatively, you can also only deploy part of the features that interest you if you don’t want to increase the resources, via the guide in Customization.

Quick Start

Make sure you have a running Kubernetes cluster and kubectl can access to that cluster.

git clone https://github.com/apache/skywalking-showcase.git
cd skywalking-showcase
make deploy.kubernetes

This will install SkyWalking components, including OAP in cluster mode with 2 nodes, SkyWalking UI, microservices with SkyWalking agent, microservices without SkyWalking agent but managed by Istio, 2 Pods to mimic virtual machines and export metrics to SkyWalking, and enable kubernetes cluster monitoring as well as SkyWalking self observability.

For more advanced deployments, check Customization documentation below.

Notice, when run this showcase locally such as KinD, the images are downloaded inside the KinD, which could take over 10 mins(depend on local network). Rerun make deploy.kubernetes if some timeout errors break the process.

Customization

The variables defined in Makefile.in can be overridden to customize the showcase, by specifying an environment variable with the same name, e.g.:

export ES_VERSION=7.14.0
make <target>

or directly specifying in the make command, e.g.: make <target> ES_VERSION=7.14.0.

Run make help to get more information.

Features

The showcase is composed of a set of scenarios with feature flags, you can deploy some of them that interest you by overriding the FEATURE_FLAGS variable defined in Makefile.in, as documented in Customization, e.g.:

make deploy.kubernetes FEATURE_FLAGS=single-node,agent

Feature flags for different platforms (Kubernetes and Docker Compose) are not necessarily the same so make sure to specify the right feature flags.

Currently, the features supported are:

Kubernetes

To deploy the example application in Kubernetes, please make sure that you have kubectl command available, and it can connect to the Kubernetes cluster successfully.

If you don’t have a running cluster, you can also leverage KinD (Kubernetes in Docker) or minikube to create a cluster.

Run kubectl get nodes to check the connectivity before going to next step. The typical error message that indicates your kubectl cannot connect to a cluster is:

The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

Deploy

# Deploy
make deploy.kubernetes
# Undeploy
make undeploy.kubernetes
# Redeploy
make redeploy.kubernetes # equivalent to make undeploy.kubernetes deploy.kubernetes

Docker Compose

Deploy

# Deploy
make deploy.docker
# Undeploy
make undeploy.docker
# Redeploy
make redeploy.docker # equivalent to make undeploy.docker deploy.docker

Traffic Flow

After deploy the showcase, the business system would send monitoring traffic to the OAP node, and one agent/sidecar connect to one OAP node directly.

Satellite

If the business traffic is unbalanced, it would cause the OAP node receive unbalanced monitoring data. So, you could add the Satellite component. After deploy the showcase with the satellite component, the monitoring traffic would send to the Satellite service, and satellite load balances the traffic to the OAP nodes.

%% please read this doc in our official website, otherwise the graph is not correctly rendered.
graph LR;
  agent["business app(agent)"] --> satellite("satellite") --> oap("oap");
  envoy["sidecar(envoy)"] --> satellite;

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any problems, please add DEBUG=true to the command line to get the output of the resources that will be applied.

make deploy.kubernetes DEBUG=true # this will print the resources that will be applied to Kubernetes

make deploy.docker DEBUG=true # this will print the merged docker-compose.yaml content that will be used to run in Docker Compose