+Shannon Coen <scoen(a)pivotal.io> +Nicholas Calugar <ncalugar(a)pivotal.io>

Shannon / Nicholas - between Routing and CAPI, can one of you help Thomas?

On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 1:40 AM Anderer, Thomas <thomas.anderer(a)sap.com>
wrote:

Hello everyone,

we already had an internal discussion on the topic and since we could not
quite come to a solution, I'd like to ask in this list.

We're using a self-made blue-green-deployment-script which pretty much
does what's explained on cloudfoundry.org (
https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/devguide/deploy-apps/blue-green.html), and
additionally checks (HTTP-GET) the application after push, map-route and
unmap-route. This script has been working fine on an instance A of CF
(DEA-based and relatively small), but has issues on instance B
(Diego-based, larger). The aforementioned HTTP-GET sometimes fails with
"404 Not Found: Requested route does not exist" directly after push or
map-route. We never experienced this issue on instance A. This could of
course mean that the instance is small enough that all router operation are
handled faster than our script is able to react. On instance B it sometimes
takes up to a 1 second or even longer until the route mapping is finally
completed.

In our internal discussion with our CF operators, we found a couple of
parts of documentation which at least hint to different, maybe even
inconsistent inner workings of the route mapping:
1) https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/devguide/deploy-apps/blue-green.html:
Step 3: Map-route - The CF Router immediately begins to load balance
traffic for demo-time.example.com between Blue and Green.
- In my opinion this implies or at least strongly hints that the
map-route call was supposed to be synchronous.
2) PUT to "/v2/apps/#{app_guid}/routes/#{route_guid}" returns 201 CREATED
and not 202 ACCEPTED, which also implies that it is a synchronous
operation. It also does not return an event or operation which could be
pinged to wait for completion of route mapping.
3) Operations which show the state of the route, like for example 'cf
routes' already shows the route as being successfully mapped, although 404
is still returned.
4) See
https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/devguide/deploy-apps/routes-domains.html#map-route:
Applications running on the DEA architecture must be restarted after routes
for an app are mapped or unmapped. Applications running on Diego do not
need to be restarted.
- This is contrary to what I experienced, since route mapping on our
instance A always worked synchronously and without restart of the
application. Furthermore, it contradicts what's explained in 1) at least
for DEA.
5)
https://github.com/cloudfoundry/diego-design-notes#routing-translation-components
:
Routing Translation Components: Route-Emitter
a) monitors DesiredLRP state and ActualLRP state via the BBS. When a
change is detected, the Route-Emitter emits route registration and
unregistration messages to the gorouter via the NATS message bus,
b) periodically emits the entire routing table to the router,
c) maintains a lock in consul to ensure only one route-emitter handles
route registration at a time.
- This hints that route mapping is an asynchronous task.

Some of the issues could be fixed by repeatedly pinging the application in
order to wait until the route has been mapped. But what about
blue-green-deployment, where I map the application to a route on which
there is already a running application. Here, I cannot find out in a
general way, if the route mapping is completed and when I can start
unmapping the route from the old application. If route-mapping is indeed an
asynchronous task, in my opinion the description on
https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/devguide/deploy-apps/blue-green.html is
misleading at best. And all blue-green-deployment-scripts which I've seen
so far have this issue.

So, is the route mapping really supposed to be asynchronous? If so, is
there any general way to find out when the route-mapping process has
finished?

Thank you for your help and clarification,

Best regards,
--
Thomas Anderer
Agile Software Engineer
andrena objects ag
currently working at SAP



--

Chip Childers
CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation
1.267.250.0815