How to manage WAS Liberty Servers

1. © 2015 IBM Corporation
WebSphere
Application Server
Liberty Management
Chris Vignola
STSM, WebSphere Architecture
cvignola@us.ibm.com

2. Imagine a multitude of Liberty app servers …
1
… how can you manage it all?

3. Liberty Management Objectives
• Light weight
• Flexible
• Scalable
2

4. Liberty Management Objectives
• Light weight - built on Liberty, agent-less
• Flexible – loosely coupled, cloud-enabled
• Scalable – to 10K servers and counting
3

5. Liberty Management – The Liberty Collective
• Federation of Liberty servers comprising a loosely coupled
multi-server management domain.
• Management function provided by collectiveController-1.0
feature.
• Membership function provided by collectiveMember-1.0 feature.
4

6. Collective Controller
• Function provided by collectiveController-1.0 feature.
• Provides member registry, operations proxy, and monitoring.
• Clusterable for HA and scale.
• Communicates with members via HTTPS.
5

7. Collective Member
• Function provided by collectiveMember-1.0 feature.
• Publishes member state and app information.
• Failover model allows connection to any available collective
controller.
• Communicates with collective controller via HTTPS.
6

8. Liberty Collective
7
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveController-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
…
App server identity:
1) Host
2) User dir
3) Server name

9. Easy Construction thru collective command
• Member management (e.g. add/remove)
• Controller management (e.g. addReplica/removeReplica)
• Host management (e.g. registerHost/unregisterHost)
8

10. Liberty Admin API
• JMX MBeans
• REST API
• Mapping to MBeans
• REST-only – e.g. File Transfer
• Admin Center – Web UI
9

11. Liberty Collective – Admin APIs
10
Liberty App Server
feature:
adminCenter-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
…
JMX or
REST
caller
proxied calls

12. Scripting
• Any Java-enabled language (e.g. Jython, JRuby, Groovy, etc)
• Any REST-capable language (e.g. Python, CURL, Go, etc)
• Liberty does not ship a script language runtime
• Samples on wasdev.net
11

13. Application Deployment
• Best practices
• Server package
• Blue/Green deployment
• 2 Models
• Bottom up
• Push out
12

14. Bottom-up Deployment
• Create server directly on target system
1. create server
1. file transfer server package (recommended)
2. use Liberty ‘server’ command (ok)
2. join to collective
• Manually, scripted, or via dev-ops tool chain
13

15. Example dev-ops tools chain (bottom up)
14
Jenkins
Liberty
store pkg/join

16. Server Package Deployment: Managing Config
15
$WLP_USER_DIR/MyServer/
server.xml
apps/
MyApp.war
deploy (apply overrides)
$WLP_USER_DIR/MyServer/
server.xml
configDropins/
overrides/
prod.xml
apps/
MyApp.war

17. Controller
Members
Liberty Collective
WebSphere Developer Tools
FileTransfer
Service
Liberty Server
Package
Push Out DeploymentDeployTool
Ready
To Run!

18. View Management – Tags
• Assignable to host, server, app, cluster
• Searchable in Admin Center
17

19. Clustering
• clusterMember-1.0 feature
• opt-in model
• cluster operations for
start/stop/membership
• supports application routing,
HA and scale
18

20. Auto-scaling
• Policy-driven, elastic applications
• scalingController-1.0 and scalingMember-1.0 features
19
<scalingDefinitions>
<scalingPolicy id="cluster1Policy“ min=“2“ max=“5">
<metric name="CPU" min="10" max="70"/>
<bind clusters="cluster1"/>
</scalingPolicy>
</scalingDefinitions>

21. Auto-scaling …
20
Liberty App Server
feature:
scalingController-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
scalingMember-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
scalingMember-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
scalingMember-1.0
…
Scaling
policy
application cluster
dynamic start/stop
Workload
thresholds breaches

22. Dynamic Routing
• Dynamic mode in Web Server plugin for WAS
• Dynamically/automatically obtains updates to WAS deployment.
• No more re-generation of WAS plugin config.
• Also available in Data Power
• dynamicRouting-1.0 feature
21

23. Dynamic Routing …
22
Liberty App Server
feature:
dynamicRouting-1.0
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
app:
ITSOWeb.war
…
IHS
or
DataPower
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
app:
ITSOWeb.war
Liberty App Server
feature:
collectiveMember-1.0
app:
ITSOWeb.war
http://.../ITSOWeb
App routing info
App routing info and
changes are dynamically
pushed to routing tier
routing info and
change publishing

24. Thank You
23