Connecting Elixir Nodes with libcluster, locally and on Kubernetes

In the last few articles we saw how to make our Phoenix chat app distributed; at the beginning with Redis, and after with distributed Elixir connecting the nodes together.

We had just one problem; we had to manually connect to the nodes in the IEX console. This is an issue in production. In this video we will see how to automatically cluster the Phoenix chat nodes using the libcluster library locally, and on a Kubernetes cluster with a dynamic number of nodes.

Let’s download that first code of the Phoenix chat example from my github account, poeticoding, and let’s use the pubsub_pg2 branch. Let’s clone the code, and check out to the pubsub_pg2 branch.

$ git clone https://github.com/poeticoding/phoenix_chat_example.git ... $ cd phoenix_chat_example $ git co pubsub_pg2 $ mix deps.get

Let’s download the dependencies, and try to run it locally so we can pass the port as an environment variable, so the first node at the port 4000 . We give a name, first node A . And we start another Phoenix server, node B , and port 4001 .

# Node A $ PORT=4000 iex --sname a -S mix phx.server # Node B $ PORT=4001 iex --sname b -S mix phx.server

Okay, great. Let’s now connect the node A to B . And we see that, this needs to be connected correctly. Let’s try the chat app with the two browsers.

iex(a@mbp)> Node.connect :b@mbp true iex(b@mbp)> Node.list [:a@mbp]

So, let’s connect with one tab to 4000 (node A), and the other tab with 4001 (node B). We see that the messages are propagated correctly.

libcluster

We had to manually connect the nodes using the connect/1 function in the Node module. Let’s see how to use libcluster to automatically connect the nodes.

So at first, we need to add the libcluster library as a dependency.



# mix.exs defp deps do [ ... {:libcluster, "~> 3.0"} ] end # lib/chat.ex defmodule Chat do use Application def start(_type, _args) do import Supervisor.Spec, warn: false topologies = [ chat: [ strategy: Cluster.Strategy.Gossip ] ] children = [ {Cluster.Supervisor, [topologies, [name: Chat.ClusterSupervisor]]}, supervisor(Chat.Endpoint, []) ] opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: Chat.Supervisor] Supervisor.start_link(children, opts) end end

We then need to start a Cluster.Supervisor , which is part of the libcluster library, with some topologies . We use the Gossip strategy, which uses multicast UDP to gossip node names to other nodes in the network.

# Node A $ PORT=4000 iex --sname a -S mix phx.server # Node B $ PORT=4001 iex --sname b -S mix phx.server # Node C $ PORT=4002 iex --sname c -S mix phx.server

Three Phoenix nodes connected

Great, and it should work straight away. So as before we start one node, the A node on port 4000 , and the node B on port 4001 . And you see that the node A is now connected to node B and vice versa. Node list. We see that we didn’t have to connect them manually. The same if I add another node, named C , on port 4002 . They will connect automatically.

Kubernetes

Let’s now see how to deploy this distributed application on Kubernetes, and making the clustering of the nodes, of the Elixir nodes, automatic with libcluster.





We are going to deploy multiple chat nodes on my Kubernetes local setup. But what I’m going to show you could work without any radical change on any cloud provider. We’re going to deploy our chat nodes with Kubernetes deployment and we will connect them automatically together thanks to libcluster, and something called the Kubernetes headless service, which we’ll see in a moment. We will then create a load balancer, which will spread the connections from different browsers to different chat nodes.

So, what is a headless service? I’ve put this file, Nginx kube test. You can find all this code under the libcluster branch. So, let’s try to see with a simple Nginx deployment, what is a headless service.

# nginx_kube_test.yaml kind: Service apiVersion: v1 metadata: name: nginx-nodes namespace: default spec: clusterIP: None selector: app: nginx ports: - name: http port: 80

It’s a service, but we specify clusterIP: None , and the DNS will be nginx- nodes, under the default namespace. And the port, in this case, is going to target port is 80 .

This is just an Nginx deployment with 4 replicas. Let’s create the service and the deployment.

$ kubectl apply -f nginx_kube_test.yaml

We then start an ubuntu container installing dnsutils and curl .

$ kubectl run bash --rm -it --image ubuntu --bash # apt-get update && apt-get install dnsutils curl -y # nslookup nginx-nodes

We see that using this DNS we are able to list all the nginx nodes. If we scale out adding more replicas, we see launching again nslookup nginx-nodes that the new nodes are all present in the list.

Let’s start changing the topology. So we now use the Elixir.Cluster.Kubernetes.DNS strategy , which will use the headless service we’re going to create.

# lib/chat.ex topologies = [ k8s_chat: [ strategy: Elixir.Cluster.Strategy.Kubernetes.DNS, config: [ service: "chat-nodes", application_name: "chat" ] ] ]

# web/controllers/page_controller.ex defmodule Chat.PageController do use Chat.Web, :controller def index(conn, _params) do self_node = inspect(node()) nodes = inspect(Node.list()) render(conn, "index.html", %{node: self_node, nodes: nodes}) end end

# web/templates/page/index.html.eex <div> <p>nodes: <%=@nodes%></p> <p>self: <%=@node%></p> </div> <div id="messages" class="container"> </div> ...

So the application now is ready. We need to build a Docker image. But before building the Docker image, we’re gonna see first the headless service Kubernetes file.

kind: Service apiVersion: v1 metadata: name: chat-nodes namespace: default spec: clusterIP: None selector: app: chat ports: - name: epmd port: 4369

We expose the EPMD and the DNS is chat-nodes . We also create a chat load balancer.

kind: Service apiVersion: v1 metadata: name: chat namespace: default spec: type: LoadBalancer selector: app: chat ports: - name: http port: 8000 targetPort: 4000

Let’s see the deployment.

--- kind: Deployment apiVersion: apps/v1 metadata: name: chat namespace: default spec: replicas: 4 selector: matchLabels: app: chat template: metadata: labels: app: chat spec: containers: - name: phoenix-chat image: chat:libcluster #alvises/phoenix-chat-example:libcluster-kube ports: - containerPort: 4000 env: - name: PORT value: "4000" - name: PHOENIX_CHAT_HOST value: "localhost" - name: ERLANG_COOKIE value: "secret" - name: MY_POD_IP valueFrom: fieldRef: fieldPath: status.podIP command: ["elixir"] args: [ "--name", "chat@$(MY_POD_IP)", "--cookie","$(ERLANG_COOKIE)", "--no-halt", "-S","mix", "phx.server" ]

We’re going at first, to create 4 replicas. We are going to build our image but you can use the image I’ve published on DockerHub: alvises/phoenix-chat-example:libcluster-kube.

The exposed container port is 4000 , we need also to set the same Erlang cookie in each node (in production better to use Kubernetes Secrets).

The important part is the environment variable MY_POD_IP . We define an environment variable, where we set the IP of each node. We then use this variable when we start the server specifying the node name and cookie

elixir --name chat@$(MY_POD_IP) --cookie $(ERLANG_COOKIE) --no-halt -S mix phx.server

To build the Docker image is pretty simple.

$ docker image build -t chat:libcluster .

Let’s create the chat deployment and services in Kubernetes

$ kubectl create -f kube_chat_deploy_and_svc.yaml

We then connect to the load-balancer to our local port 8000 . We see the node list and that the nodes automatically connect. If we add new replicas and we will see almost immediately the new nodes under the node list.

Wrap up

We saw how easy it is with libcluster to connect the nodes together and deploy, also on Kubernetes, distributed Phoenix chat application.

If you have a question or something wasn’t clear, please post a comment in the comment section below, and subscribe to be updated with new articles and screencasts. See you next week!

Resources

GitHub: libcluster

GitHub: poeticoding/phoenix_chat_example

DockerHub: alvises/phoenix-chat-example

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