Running an Akka cluster in an EC2 Autoscaling Group

http://chrisloy.net/2014/05/11/akka-cluster-ec2-autoscaling.html

by chrisloy • 12 years ago

23 13 12 years ago

saryant4• 12 years ago

Excellent post. We made the mistake of trying to use Chef to deal with seed node discovery in our Akka cluster and that was a terrible idea. Really wish we'd gone with the AWS SDK instead.

chrisloy4• 12 years ago

Thanks! The SDK has some "quirks" (and isn't especially Scala-friendly) but I reckon it's ultimately pretty powerful. My main gripe is the lack of real-world examples in the docs - hence my desire to write this up.

saryant4• 12 years ago

One question: how do you deal with crashed JVMs? You can't rejoin a new JVM if it has the same address and port but I can't think of a good way to communicate the new port using the AWS SDK.

gatehouse• 12 years ago

Hi, I didn't see an obvious way to reach you on the blog bit just FYI, it looks weird on iPhone Safari

Edit http://imgur.com/oX0CzuZ http://imgur.com/WsqEVxA

zackangelo• 12 years ago

Were you using Chef inside of OpsWorks? I'm curious about what problems you're having.

I'd think that hooking the configure lifecycle event on your cluster layer in OpsWorks would work just fine.

saryant4• 12 years ago

No, just Chef Solo. We only had four nodes at the time.

noelwelsh• 12 years ago

Nice post. Would love to more about your application of Akka Cluster -- it's far and away the most interesting part of Akka to me, and something we have plans to build some very interesting systems on top of.

chrisloy4• 12 years ago

I work for a large organisation and am not really in a position to go into details about what we'd be using it for at the moment, sorry.

Suffice it to say that we're pretty early on in the project and so far we're using Akka Cluster for sharing transient state between nodes, without the need for any kind of persistence store being used. My post was in response to the pain I had in getting over the initial hurdle of getting a prototype running.

saryant4• 12 years ago

You should turn this post into an Activator template.

chaostheory• 12 years ago

Does Akka cluster do load balancing between nodes yet?

xwowsersx• 12 years ago

Excellent post! How do you ensure that you don't split the cluster - do you have to configure the ASG to add the 2nd node only when the first one is already up? If so, how exactly do you do that?

Running an Akka cluster in an EC2 Autoscaling Group

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