Long time no blog, I know, I know… Soon, I will do another blog entry to “explain” a little why I am not blogging as much I used too but if you’re still around and reading this then thank you! For the past few months, cn has grown in functionality so let’s explore what’s new and what’s coming.

To get up to speed on the project and some of the main feature, I encourage to read my last presentation

Config file and templates

cn now has a configuration file that can be used to create flavors of your cn clusters. They represent different classes of a cluster where CPU, memory, the image can be tuned. The pull request 100 was dope, thanks to the excellent work of my buddy Erwan Velu.

These flavors can be used via the --flavor argument to the cn cluster start CLI call.

Here is an example of a mimic flavor in $HOME/.cn/cn.toml, which creates a new image new for a specific image you built:

[images]
  [images.complex]
    image_name="this.url.is.complex/cool/for-a-test"

cn comes with some pre-defined flavors you can use as well:

$ cn flavors ls
+---------+-------------+-----------+
| NAME    | MEMORY_SIZE | CPU_COUNT |
+---------+-------------+-----------+
| large   | 1GB         | 1         |
| huge    | 4GB         | 2         |
| default | 512MB       | 1         |
| medium  | 768MB       | 1         |

For images, we also implemented aliases for most-commonly used images:

$ cn image show-aliases
+----------+--------------------------------------------------+
| ALIAS    | IMAGE_NAME                                       |
+----------+--------------------------------------------------+
| redhat   | registry.access.redhat.com/rhceph/rhceph-3-rhel7 |
| mimic    | ceph/daemon:latest-mimic                         |
| luminous | ceph/daemon:latest-luminous                      |
+----------+--------------------------------------------------+

For more examples of possible configuration see the example file.

Container memory auto-tuning

Another goodness from Erwan, this specific work happened in the container image via the ceph-container project, in this pull request. With recent versions of Ceph, Bluestore has implemented its cache in its own memory space. The default values are not meant to run on a small restricted environment such as cn where the memory limit is usually low. So we had to adapt these Bluestore flags on the fly by detecting the memory available and whether or not the memory is capped. Based on several data we are capable of tuning these value, so ceph-osd does not consume too much memory.

This work was crucial for cn reliability since after some time the processes were receiving OOM call from the kernel. So you had to restart the container, but it’ll die eventually again and again.

New core incoming

Initially, the scenario that is used to bootstrap cn is by using a bash script from the ceph-container project. When cn starts, it instantiates a particular scenario called demo which deploys all the ceph daemons, the UI etc.

Bash is good, I love it, but it has its limitations. For instance, performing correct logging, error handling, unit test, all of that becomes increasingly difficult as the project grows. So I decided to switch to Golang with some hope to get below 20 or 15 seconds bootstrap time too.

Typically cn needs around 20 seconds to bootstrap on my laptop, with cn-core we have been able to go below the 15 sec, see by yourself:

$ time cn cluster start -i quay.io/ceph/cn-core:v0.4 core
2019/02/24 14:52:47 Running cluster core | image quay.io/ceph/cn-core:v0.4 | flavor default {512MB Memory, 1 CPU} ...

Endpoint: http://10.36.117.68:8001
Dashboard: http://10.36.117.68:5001
Access key: PCJEU83FCKAZGM3NO609
Secret key: Ie1fRQuJMqoFI9dis2fOYKIf2Yg08H8R1PeZB8QI
Working directory: /usr/share/ceph-nano


real    0m14.730s
user    0m0.032s
sys     0m0.018s

The new core is still in Beta, but it’s a matter of weeks before we switch to cn-core by default. We almost got feature parity with demo.sh, and there are just a few bugs to fix.

You can contribute to this new core as much as you want in the cn-core repository.

Voilà voilà, I hope you still like the project. If there is anything, you would like to see then tell us, something you hate then tell us too!