downloader

downloader

downloader

The Downloader tool runs on Google Container Engine and will scrape the Maxmind and Routeviews for new data. It will download them from the websites and place them in Google Cloud Storage in the specefied bucket.

It takes one mandatory arguement: --bucket=GCS-BUCKET-NAME

Travis Deployment

Downloader is designed to be deployed exclusively from Travis-CI. If you need to configure Travis to automatically deploy to GKE, then there are a couple things you need to be sure to configure.

Service Account

The deployment scripts expect the service accounts needed for uploading the docker image to GCS and deploying the image to GKE to be stored in the protected environment variable GCLOUD_SERVICE_KEY_XXX, where XXX is the environment you're deploying to (BOX for sandbox, STG for staging, or PRD for production).

The service account key should be the base64 encoded version of the JSON keyfile for a service account with the appropriate permissions to create/read/write objects in GCS and administer clusters in GKE. You can base64 encode the json key by cat key.json | base64 -w 0 and putting the output from that command into the protected environment variable, either through the Travis website or through encrypting it in the .travis.yml file.

The service account also needs the pubsub publisher and pubsub viewer roles.

Deployment Configuration

In addition to the service account, when setting up a new travis deployment, you need to configure the project name you're deploying to, the cluster name within that project, and the bucket name you want the data saved to. Those are all parameters passed into the deploy.sh command, along with the service account JSON key, encoded in base64 form. The deploy.sh command takes the form:

deploy.sh <project name> <cluster name> <bucket name> \
    <base64 service account key text>

Kubernetes Secrets

In order for downloader to be able to connect to GCS, it needs to have a service account with access to GCS. You can use the same service account used for travis deployment, if you wish. But you need to store the key file in a kubernetes secret, named downloader-app-key, so that the deployment config can find and mount it for use by the app. You can set it with:

kubectl create secret generic \
    downloader-app-key --from-file=key.json=/path/to/key.json

Cluster Creation

The default cluster size is enough for the downloader, but you need to be sure to give it read/write permissions for GCS when you create the cluster.

So, we create a dedicated node pool with storage-rw permissions. Ultimately, a limited permission service account would be preferable. Initially, three nodes will be allocated, but the autoscaler will shut down two after the downloader is deployed.

The cluster node-pool is managed using Terraform, defined in terraform-support.

For prometheus monitoring, you must make an extra node pool, also managed by terraform.

Pub/Sub Topic

The downloader also expects a pub/sub topic named "downloader-new-files" to exist. The topic must be created in the project that the downloader is running in, otherwise the downloader will not start.

Prometheus Monitoring

Most of the work for prometheus monitoring is done in the prometheus-support repository. The only things you need to be aware of is that downloader exports some prometheus metrics on /metrics, the containers will have the label so that prometheus scrapes them, and that if you are creating a new cluster for downloader, you must follow the setup instructions in the prometheus-support repo's readme.