wu-sheng commented on code in PR #546: URL: https://github.com/apache/skywalking-website/pull/546#discussion_r1046628613
########## content/blog/2022-12-13-how-to-run-apache-skywalking-on-aws-eks-rds/index.md: ########## @@ -0,0 +1,188 @@ +--- +title: "How to run Apache SkyWalking on AWS EKS and RDS/Aurora" +date: 2022-12-13 +author: "[Zhenxu Ke](https://github.com/kezhenxu94)" +description: "Introduce how to quickly set up Apache SkyWalking on AWS EKS and RDS/Aurora" +tags: +- SkyWalking +- Observability +- Demo +- AWS +- RDS +- Aurora +--- + +## Introduction + +Apache SkyWalking is an open source APM tool for monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems, +especially designed for microservices, cloud native and container-based (Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos) +architectures. It provides distributed tracing, service mesh observability, metric aggregation and +visualization, and alarm. + +In this article, I will introduce how to quickly set up Apache SkyWalking on AWS EKS and RDS/Aurora, +as well as a couple of sample services, monitoring services to observe SkyWalking itself. + +## Prerequisites + +- AWS account +- [AWS CLI](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/install-cliv2.html) +- [Terraform](https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html) +- [kubectl](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/#kubectl) + +We can use the AWS web console or CLI to create all resources needed in this tutorial, but it can be +too tedious and hard to debug when something goes wrong. So in this artical I will use Terraform to +create all AWS resources, deploy SkyWalking, sample services, and load generator services (Locust). + +## Architecture + +The demo architecture is as follows: + +```mermaid +graph LR + subgraph AWS + subgraph EKS + subgraph istio-system namespace + direction TB + OAP[[SkyWalking OAP]] + UI[[SkyWalking UI]] + Istio[[istiod]] + end + subgraph sample namespace + Service0[[Service0]] + Service1[[Service1]] + ServiceN[[Service ...]] + end + subgraph locust namespace + LocustMaster[[Locust Master]] + LocustWorkers0[[Locust Worker 0]] + LocustWorkers1[[Locust Worker 1]] + LocustWorkersN[[Locust Worker ...]] + end + end + RDS[[RDS/Aurora]] + end + OAP --> RDS + Service0 -. telemetry data -.-> OAP + Service1 -. telemetry data -.-> OAP + ServiceN -. telemetry data -.-> OAP + UI --query--> OAP + LocustWorkers0 -- traffic --> Service0 + LocustWorkers1 -- traffic --> Service0 + LocustWorkersN -- traffic --> Service0 + Service0 --> Service1 --> ServiceN + LocustMaster --> LocustWorkers0 + LocustMaster --> LocustWorkers1 + LocustMaster --> LocustWorkersN + User --> LocustMaster +``` + +As shown in the architecture diagram, we need to create the following AWS resources: + +- EKS cluster +- RDS instance or Aurora cluster + +Sounds simple, but there are a lot of things behind the scenes, such as VPC, subnets, security groups, etc. +You have to configure them correctly to make sure the EKS cluster can connect to RDS instance/Aurora cluster +otherwise the SkyWalking won't work. Luckily, Terraform can help us to create and destroy all these resources +automatically. + +I have created a Terraform module to create all AWS resources needed in this tutorial, you can find it in the +[GitHub repository](https://github.com/kezhenxu94/oap-load-test/tree/main/aws). + +## Create AWS resources + +First, we need to clone the GitHub repository and `cd` into the folder: + +```bash +git clone https://github.com/kezhenxu94/oap-load-test.git +``` + +Then, we need to create a file named `terraform.tfvars` to specify the AWS region and other variables: + +```bash +cat > terraform.tfvars <<EOF +aws_access_key = "" +aws_secret_key = "" +cluster_name = "skywalking-on-aws" +region = "ap-east-1" +db_type = "rds-postgresql" +EOF +``` + +If you have already configured the AWS CLI, you can skip the `aws_access_key` and `aws_secret_key` variables. +To install SkyWalking with RDS postgresql, set the `db_type` to `rds-postgresql`, to install SkyWalking with +Aurora postgresql, set the `db_type` to `aurora-postgresql`. + +There are a lot of other variables you can configure, such as tags, sample services count, replicas, etc., +you can find them in the [variables.tf](https://github.com/kezhenxu94/oap-load-test/blob/main/aws/variables.tf). + +Then, we can run the following commands to initialize the Terraform module and download the required providers, +then create all AWS resources: + +```bash +terraform init +terraform apply -var-file=terraform.tfvars +``` + +Type `yes` to confirm the creation of all AWS resources, or add the `-auto-approve` flag to the `terraform apply` +to skip the confirmation: + +```bash +terraform apply -var-file=terraform.tfvars -auto-approve +``` + +Now what you need to do is to wait for the creation of all AWS resources to complete, it may take a few minutes. +You can check the progress of the creation in the AWS web console, and check the deployment progress of the services +inside the EKS cluster. + +## Generate traffic + +Besides creating necessary AWS resources, the Terraform module also deploys SkyWalking, sample services, and Locust +load generator services to the EKS cluster. + +You can access the Locust web UI to generate traffic to the sample services: + +```bash +open http://$(kubectl get svc -n locust -l app=locust-master -o jsonpath='{.items[0].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}'):8089 +``` + +The command opens the browser to the Locust web UI, you can configure the number of users and hatch rate to generate +traffic. + +In my test, I set the number of users to 50 and hatch rate to 1, causing the Locust load generator to generate +about 6767 requests per second. + + + +## Observe SkyWalking + +You can access the SkyWalking web UI to observe the sample services. + +First you need to forward the SkyWalking UI port to local + +```bash +kubectl -n istio-system port-forward $(kubectl -n istio-system get pod -l app=skywalking -l component=ui -o name) 8080:8080 +``` + +And then open the browser to http://localhost:8080 to access the SkyWalking web UI. + + + +## Observe RDS/Aurora + +You can also access the RDS/Aurora web console to observe the performance of RDS/Aurora instance/Aurora cluste. + +In my tests, with the above traffic load, the RDS postgresql instance (instance type `db.m6g.2xlarge`, 8vCPU, 32GB) +has a CPU utilization of about 5%. + + + +For more test results about RDS vs Aurora, please refer to [the outputs folder](./outputs). 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