What’s New in Docker 17.03 Volume Plugin Architecture & Specification?

28th March 201713th December 2017 ajeetraina1 Comment

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Docker, Inc announced initial support for volume driver plugins for the first time under Docker 1.8 release. Since then, there has been subtle changes in terms of its volume plugin architecture. With the new Docker 17.03 Volume plugin architecture, writing your own Volume Plugin is quite simplified.

VolPlugin

Old Legacy Docker Volume Plugin Specification < 1.12 release

Evolution

Before 17.03 release, Docker Volume Plugin Specification feature includes the standardization of API interface. In case Docker daemon is already been running in the system and you write certain extension, the only way Docker daemon talks to extension is based on standardized API. As per Docker official page , you need to write 9 endpoints shown below:

New Docker Volume Plugin Specification > 1.12

With Docker 17.03, the new Volume Plugin Spec has been revamped. The new specification extends the standardization and talks about plugin packaging as a Docker Image. What it really mean is now you can now convert your extension/plugin into a Docker image which you can publish on Dockerhub. Interesting, isn’t it? In simple statement, now it is possible to publish Volume plugin in the form of Docker image which anyone can discover, install flawlessly onto their system and easy to configure & manage.New Docker Volume Plugins enable Engine deployments to be integrated with external storage systems such as Amazon EBS, and enable data volumes to persist beyond the lifetime of a single Docker host.

Before we build, store, install and manage the plugin, we need to go deeper in understanding the newer Docker Volume API design.

Understanding Docker Volume API Design:

As per the official Docker Volume Plugin page…

“The new Plugin API is RPC-style JSON over HTTP, much like webhooks.Requests flow from the Docker daemon to the plugin. So the plugin needs to implement an HTTP server and bind this to the UNIX socket mentioned in the “plugin discovery” section. All requests are HTTP POST requests.The API is versioned via an Accept header, which currently is always set to application/vnd.docker.plugins.v1+json.”

How Docker Volume Orchestration Works?

Orches

Playing around with RexRay Volume Plugin:

In my previous blog post, I talked about RexRay as a Volume Plugin. Let us look at various CLIs which can be used to play around with this plugin:

Listing the RexRay Volume Plugin:

Disabling or Enabling the RexRay Volume Plugin:

Verify that “Enabled=true” value gets listed once plugin is enabled back:

If Volume Plugin is in the form of Docker Image, then there should be a way to enter into this container. Right? Yes,it is possible. You can enter into a shell of RexRay Volume Plugin using docker-runc command.

Checking the Plugin logs:

log

It’s time to use this plugin and create volume for your application:

vol1

Inspecting the volume:

vol2

I hope you found this blog useful.In my future blog post, I will talk further on how Volume Plugin Orchestration works in terms of Swarm Mode cluster.

Introducing new RexRay 0.8 with Docker 17.03 Managed Plugin System for Persistent Storage on Cloud Platforms

5th March 201713th December 2017 ajeetraina3 Comments

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

DellEMC Rex-Ray 0.8 Final Release was announced last week. Graduated as top-level project within {code} community, RexRay 0.8 release has been considered as one of the largest releases till date. The new release introduced support for long lists of new storage platforms like S3FS, EBS, EFS, GCEPD & ScaleIO shown below:

rexray010

Public cloud storage is one of the fastest growing sector in storage with leaders like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure. With the release of RexRay 0.8, {code} community took the right approach in targeting the first community-contributed driver starting with Amazon EFS driver and then quickly adding additional community-contributed drivers like Digital Ocean, FittedCloud, Google Cloud Engine (GCEPD) & Microsoft Azure Unmanaged Disk driver.

Introducing New Docker 17.03 Volume Plugin System

With Docker 17.03 release, a new managed plugin system has been introduced. This is quite different from the old Docker plugin system. Plugins are now distributed as Docker images and can be hosted on Docker Hub or on a private registry.A volume plugin enables Docker volumes to persist across multiple Docker hosts.

rex01

In case you are very new to Docker Plugins, they basically extend Docker’s functionality. A plugin is a process running on the same or a different host as the docker daemon, which registers itself by placing a file on the same docker host in one of the plugin directories described either as a.sock files( UNIX domain sockets placed under /run/docker/plugins), .spec files( text files containing a URL, such as unix:///other.sock or tcp://localhost:8080 placed under /etc/docker/plugins or /usr/lib/docker/plugins)or.json files ( text files containing a full json specification for the plugin placed under /etc/docker/plugin). You can refer this in case you want to develop your own Docker Volume Plugin.

Running RexRay inside Docker container

Yes, you read it correct ! With the introduction of Docker 17.03 New Plugin Managed System, you can now run RexRay inside Docker container flawlessly. Rex-Ray Volume Plugin is written in Go and provides advanced storage functionality for many platforms including VirtualBox, EC2, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, and EMC.

You can list out available Docker Volume Plugin for various storage platforms using docker search rexray as shown below:

rexray_plugin2

Let us test-drive RexRay Volume Plugin for Swarm Mode cluster for the first time. I have 4-node Swarm Mode cluster running on Google Cloud Platform as shown below:

rex1

Verify that all the cluster nodes are running the latest 17.03.0-ce (Community Edition).

Installing the RexRay Volume plugin is just one-liner command:

rexray_plugininstallation

You can inspect the Rex-Ray Volume plugin using docker plugin inspect command:

rexray_inspect rexray_inspect22

It’s time to create a volume using docker volume create utility :

$sudo docker volume create –driver rexray/gcepd –name storage1 –opt=size=32

rexray_volume1

You can verify if it is visible under GCE Console window:

RexRay_GCE

Let us try running few application which uses RexRay volume plugin as shown:

{code}==>docker run -dit –name mydb -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wordpress -e MYSQL_USER=wordpress -e MYSQL_PASSWORD:wordpress –volume-driver=rexray/gcepd -v dbdata:/var/lib/mysql mysql:5.7

Verify that MySQL service is up and running using docker logs <container-id> command as shown below:

dbdata1

By now, we should be able to see new volume called “dbdata” created and shown under docker volume ls command:

Under GCE console, it should get displayed too:

Using Rex-Ray Volume Plugin under Docker 17.03 Swarm Mode

This is the most interesting section of this blog post. RexRay volume plugin worked great for us till now, especially for a single Docker host running multiple number of services.But what if I want to enable RexRay Volume to persist across multiple Docker Hosts(Swarm Mode cluster)? Yes, there is one possible way to achieve this – using Swarm Executor. It executes docker command across the swarm cluster. Credits to Madhu Venugopal @ Docker Team for assisting me testing with this tool.

swarmexec_1

Please remember that this is UNOFFICIAL way of achieving Volume Plugin implementation across swarm cluster. I found this tool really cool and hope that it gets integrated within Docker official repository.

First, we need to clone this repository:

$git clone https://github.com/mavenugo/swarm-exec

Run the below command to push the plugin across the swarm cluster:

$cd swarm-exec

$./swarm-exec.sh docker plugin install –grant-all-permissions rexray/gcepd GCEPD_TAG=rexray

swarm_exec01

First, let’s quickly verify the plugin on the master node as shown below:

swarm_exec2

While verifying it on the worker nodes:

swarm_exec3

rexray_gce11

The docker volume inspect <volname> should display this particular volume as rexray volume driver as shown below:

rexray_gce222

Creating a MySQL service which uses Rex-Ray volume under Swarm Mode cluster:

up_service

Verifying that the service is up and running:

rexray_100

To conclude, the new version of RexRay looks promising and brings support for various Cloud storage platform. It continues to be leading open source container orchestration engine and now with inclusion of Docker 17.03 Managed Plugin architecture, it will definitely reduce the pain for implementing persistent storage solution.

Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode & Persistent Storage using NFS

11th October 201613th December 2017 ajeetraina7 Comments

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Containers are stateless by nature and likely to be short-lived. They are quite ephemeral than VMs. What it actually means? Say, you have any data or logs generated inside the container and you don’t really care about loosing it no matter how many times you spin it up and down, like HTTP requests, then the ideal stateless feature should be good enough. BUT in case you are looking out for a solution which should record “stateful” applications like storing databases, storing logs etc. you definitely need persistent storage to be implemented. This is achieved by leveraging Docker’s volume mounts to create either a data volume or a data volume container that can be used and shared by other containers.

In case you’re new to Docker Storage, Docker Volumes are logical building blocks for shared storage when combined with plugins. It helps us to store state from the application to locations outside the docker image layer. Whenever you run a Docker command with -v, and provide it with a name or path, this gets managed within /var/lib/docker or in case you’re using a host mount, it’s something that exists on the host. The problem with this implementation is that the data is pretty inflexible, which means anything you write to that specific location, yes, it’ll stay there after the container’s life cycle, but only on that host. If you lose that host, the data will get erased. This clearly means that the situation is very prone to data loss. Within Docker, it looks very similar to what shown in the above picture, /var/lib/docker directory structure. Let’s talk about how to implement the management of data with an external storage. This could be anything from NFS to distributed file systems to block storage.

In my previous blog, we discussed about Persistent Storage implementation with DellEMC RexRay for Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode. Under this blog, we will look at how NFS works with Swarm Mode.I assume that you have an existing NFS server running in your infrastructure. If not, you can quickly set it up in just few minutes. I have Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode initialized with 1 master node and 4 worker nodes. Just for an example, I am going to leverage a Ubuntu 16.04 node(outside the swarm mode cluster) as NFS server and rest of the nodes( 1 master & 4 workers) as NFS client systems.

Setting up NFS environment:

There are two ways to setup NFS server – either using available Docker image or manually setting up NFS server on the Docker host machine. As I already have NFS server working on one of Docker host running Ubuntu 16.04 system, I will just verify if the configuration looks good.

Let us ensure that NFS server packages are properly installed as shown below:

raina_ajeet@master1:~$ sudo dpkg -l | grep nfs-kernel-server

1:1.2.8-9ubuntu12 amd64 support for NFS kernel server

raina_ajeet@master1:~$

I created the following NFS directory which I want to share across the containers running the swarm cluster.

$sudo mkdir /var/nfs

$sudo chown nobody:nogroup /var/nfs

It’s time to configure NFS shares. For this, let’s edit the export file to look like as show below:

raina_ajeet@master1:~$ cat /etc/exports

# /etc/exports: the access control list for filesystems which may be exported

#               to NFS clients. See exports(5).#

# Example for NFSv2 and NFSv3:

# /srv/homes       hostname1(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) hostname2

(ro,sync,no_subtree_check)#

# Example for NFSv4:

# /srv/nfs4        gss/krb5i(rw,sync,fsid=0,crossmnt,no_subtree_check)

# /srv/nfs4/homes gss/krb5i(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

/var/nfs    *(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

raina_ajeet@master1:~$

As shown above, we will be sharing /var/nfs directory among all the worker nodes in the Swarm cluster.

Let’s not forget to run the below commands to provide the proper permission:

$sudo chown nobody:nogroup /var/nfs

$sudo exportfs -a

$sudo service nfs-kernel-server start

Great ! Let us cross-check if the configuration holds good.

raina_ajeet@master:~$ sudo df -h

Filesystem           Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

udev                 1.9G     0 1.9G   0% /dev

tmpfs                370M   43M 328M 12% /run

/dev/sda1             20G 6.6G   13G 35% /

tmpfs                1.9G     0 1.9G   0% /dev/shm

tmpfs                5.0M     0 5.0M   0% /run/lock

tmpfs                1.9G     0 1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup

tmpfs                100K     0 100K   0% /run/lxcfs/controllers

tmpfs                370M     0 370M   0% /run/user/1001

10.140.0.7:/var/nfs   20G   19G 1.3G 94% /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

As shown above, we have NFS server with IP: 10.140.0.7 and ready to share volume to all the worker nodes.

Running NFS service on Swarm Mode

In case you are new to –mount option introduced under Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode, here is an easy explanation:-

$sudo docker service create –mount type=volume,volume-opt=o=addr=<source-host which is master node>, volume-opt=device=:<NFS directory>,volume-opt=type=nfs,source=<volume name>, target=/<insideContainer> –replicas 3 –name <service-name> dockerimage <command>

Let’s verify if NFS service is up and running across the swarm cluster –

We can verify the NFS volume driver through ‘docker volume’ utility as shown below –

Inspecting the NFS Volume on the nodes:

The docker volume inspect <vol_name> rightly displays the Mountpoint, Labels and Scope of the NFS volume driver.

Verifying if worker nodes are able to see the Volumes

Let’s verify by logging into one of worker node and trying to check if volume is shared across the swarm cluster:

Let us create a file under /var/nfs directory so as to see if storage persistent is actually working and data is shared across the swarm cluster:

Let’s verify if one of worker node can see the created file.

Hence, we implemented persistent storage for Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode using NFS. In the future post, we will talk further on the available storage plugin and its implementations.

[clickandtweet handle=”@ajeetsraina” hashtag=”#Swarm, #docker, #NFS” related=”@docker” layout=”” position=””]Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode & Persistent Storage using NFS[/clickandtweet]

Docker 1.12.1 Swarm Mode & Persistent Storage with DellEMC RexRay on AWS Platform

14th September 201613th December 2017 ajeetraina5 Comments

Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

“Does Docker Engine 1.12 has storage discovery similar to Service Discovery and Orchestration Feature? What is the Volume/Persistent Storage story in 1.12 Swarm Mode? Which will be the best solution for my DB persistence? ” – are few common questions which I faced in almost every online meetup, blogs and Docker webinar. Docker 1.12 release was totally focused on Orchestration feature but there has been subtle changes in regards to volumes, volume drivers and storage. Under this blog post, I will be answering the following queries:

What’s new in Docker 1.12 Persistent Storage?
How does Persistent storage work in case of new service API?
How to deploy a simple Web Application for Docker 1.12 using RexRay?

In case you’re new to Docker storage, persistent storage refers to storage volumes — usually associated with stateful applications, such as database .In laymen language,these are places to store data that lives outside the life cycle of the container. A long lived service like database needs persistent storage which should exist outside the container space and has life span longer than the container which uses it.

Docker offers a basic persistent storage solution for containers in the form of Docker Data Volumes. There has been tremendous amount of focus on OverlayFS which is a modern union filesystem that is similar to AUFS. It has a simpler design, potentially faster and has been in the mainline Linux kernel since version 3.18. It is rapidly gaining popularity in the Docker community and is seen by many as a natural successor to AUFS. If interested, you can refer this to learn more about Overlay2. Let us accept the fact that persistent storage is still an active area of development for Docker. Under Docker 1.12.1, there has been number of improvement over volumes which can be tracked here.

Let us accept the another truth – Docker enthusiast who are looking out to run Docker in the production still count on the ecosystem’s partners like DellEMC (RexRay), ClusterHQ (Flocker), PortWrox, CoreOS and Nutanix to simplify persistent storage in one or different ways. DellEMC RexRay and Flocker are the two most popular persistent storage solution which has been appreciated by the large crowd of Docker users. To my curiosity, I decided to first start looking at RexRay and see how Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode works.

What is RexRay?

RexRay is an open source storage orchestration engine which delivers persistent storage access for container run-time, such as Docker , and provides an easy interface for enabling advanced storage functionality across common storage, virtualization and cloud platforms. It implements the back-end for a Docker volume driver, providing persistent storage to containers backed by a long list of storage providers. It is actually a distributed toolset to manage storage from multiple platforms. REX-Ray locally advertises consistent methods to create, remove, map, and copy volumes abstract of what storage platform is serving the operating system.

RexRay(prior to 0.4.0) is available as a standalone process while starting 0.4.0 version it works as a distributed model of client-server.The client performs a level abstraction of local host processes (request for volume attachment, discovery, format, and mounting of devices) while the server provides the necessary abstraction of the control plane for multiple storage platforms.

Let us try out installing RexRay for Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode and see how it achieves persistent storage for us. I will be using two node Swarm Mode cluster under Amazon AWS.

Want to setup RexRay in 1 minute?

Yes, you surely can. Run RexRay inside the container.

docker run -d \

-e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<access-key> \

-e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<secret-access-key \

-v /run/docker/plugins:/run/docker/plugins \

-v /var/run/rexray:/var/run/rexray \

-v /dev:/dev \

-v /var/run:/var/run \

joskfg/docker-rexray

The official way is simplified too. RexRay is written in Go, so there are typically no dependencies that must be installed alongside its single binary file. The manual methods can be extremely simple through tools like curl. Installing RexRay is just a simple on-liner command:

curl -sSL https://dl.bintray.com/emccode/rexray/install | sh

RexRay 0.5.0 is the latest release and setting it up is a matter of few seconds. We can check the RexRay version information through the below command:

RexRay CLI is feature-rich and there are various options available to play around with the storage volume management capabilities as shown below:

One of the compelling feature of RexRay is that it can be ran as an interactive CLI to perform volume management capabilities plus it can be ran as a service to support Docker and other platforms that can communicate through HTTP/JSON. For Example, one can create a config.yml file as shown below:

root@ip-172-31-31-235:~# cat /etc/rexray/config.yml
rexray:
logLevel: warn
libstorage:
– service: <>
osDrivers:
– linux
volumeDrivers:
– docker
storageDrivers:
– ec2
aws:
accesskey: <aws-access-key>
secretkey: <aws-secret-access-key>

Initializing the RexRay:

To retrieve the information about Storage volume, one can issue the below command:

How does Persistent storage work in case of new service API?

Docker 1.12 comes with 3 new APIs – service, swarm and node. I found users complaining about why -v option has been dropped in the newer Docker 1.12 swarm mode. The reason – We are not just talking about one single host which runs the docker container, here we are talking about orchestration feature which spans across the hundred of cluster nodes.The -v was dropped because services don’t orchestrate volumes. It is important to note that under Docker 1.12.1 we specifically use the term mount because that is what services do. You can have a service that has a template for creating a volume that the service then mounts in for you, but it does not itself handle volumes, so it’s intentionally left out for now. The syntax looks like one shown below for NFS mount:

$sudo docker service create –mount type=volume,volume-opt=o=addr=<source-host which can be master node>, volume-opt=device=:<NFS directory>,volume-opt=type=nfs,source=<volume name>, target=/<insideContainer> –replicas 3 –name <service-name> dockerimage <command>

Want to see how Docker Swarm Mode 1.12 & Persistence storage works with NFS? Check out my recent blog post.

http://collabnix.com/archives/2001

How to deploy a simple Web Application for Docker 1.12 using RexRay?

Now this is an interesting topic and I was just curious to implement this. I already had RexRay 0.3.0 installed on my AWS instances and hence wanted to quickly try it and see how Swarm Mode handles the persistent storage functionality:

I assume you have RexRay up and running in your environment. If not, setting up RexRay 0.3.0 is a matter of few seconds. DellEMC {code} team did a great job in providing “REX-Ray Configuration Generator” through this link to create config.yml file for your RexRay configuration. In case you want to keep it simple, you can export the below variables too:

$ export REXRAY_STORAGEDRIVERS=ec2

$ export AWS_ACCESSKEY=access_key

$ export AWS_SECRETKEY=secret_key

$ rexray service start

Done. Next, lets create a RexRay volume which Docker container is going to use:

I have created a rexray volume called collabray of certain size(for demonstration purpose). Also, you need to mount the volume for Docker to understand as shown above.

Now, run the below docker volume create utility:

You can check that the above command created EBS volume of 7GiB with name “collabray” as shown below:

You can easily verify that the /dev/xvdh gets mounted on /var/lib/rexray/volumes/collabray automatically as shown below:

Let’s verify that docker volume detects the particular volume:

Great ! Now comes the most important part of the whole blog. We will be creating WordPress application as a service where MySQL DB will be mounted to the RexRay volume so as to make DB a persistent storage application. The actual command is shown below:

In the above example, we are using –mount option for the source “collabray” as RexRay volume, targeting /var/lib/mysql as our backup directory using the volume driver called “RexRay”.

We can use docker inspect command for the particular service to verify the RexRay volume being used by container running the service.

Let’s check if it dumps the DB related files under /var/lib/rexray/volumes/collabray/data or not.

Wow ! MySQL database related files are present under the mounted location which will be our persistent storehouse for our cluster and RexRay does that for us very safely.

Next, run the wordpress frontend service which is going to discover the backend wordpressdb1 using the unqualified domain name as shown below:

As shown in the example above, we are not using storage volume for wordpressapp but you might want to backup /var/www/html in different volume created using RexRay.

Finally, I have WordPress application ready to be installed in Swarm Mode using RexRay volume. You can quickly view it using lynx text UI as shown below:

RexRay provides an efficient snapshot capability too. First let us find out the volumeid for “collabray” through the below command:

# rexray snapshot create \

–description=”My DB First Snapshot” \

–snapshotname=”Collabnix WordPress” \

–volumeid=vol-06b67054cd80fe9cb

You can verify the Snapshot looking at AWS Management dashboard too.

In the future post, I will be covering more on libstorage and newer RexRay 0.5.0 implementation with ScaleIO for Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode.

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Category: Docker Storage