device-worker-ng

Flotta device worker

This is an unofficial implementation of the device-worker for Project Flotta.

Motivation

The current implementation of device-worker does not take into consideration the resources available on the device while running workloads. This implementation aims to have a high resilience by ensuring that workloads do not deplete the device of resources. Another motivation is to make the device-worker agnostic about the work to do. The device-worker should only manage and run workloads without any other additional work like monitoring, logging, or data collection. All these additional tasks could be run like any other workloads.

Last but not least, this implementation does not use yggdrasil as broker. It has a simple implementation of yggdrasil API but it is a standalone in this regard.

Differences between the official agent and device-worker-ng

1. Workload Kind

Currently, the official device-worker supports only two types of workloads: pods and ansible.

The device-worker-ng supports pod and, in addition to device-worker, supports the k8s workloads.

2. Run workloads as rootfull or rootless

Workload CR has a new field Rootless which set the type of executor which will be used to run the workload. In case of podman, the pods will be either rootless or rootless based on this field. To be able to run rootfull pods, the agent must be run as root and to run rootless pods the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR must be provided in the config.yaml file.

3. OS monitoring and logging

device-worker-ng does not intend to have any build-in OS monitoring and logging.

4. Cron

You can define a workload to run as cron by adding a field in the CR of the workload:

apiVersion: management.project-flotta.io/v1alpha1
kind: EdgeWorkload
metadata:
  name: workload2
spec:
  deviceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      device: toto
  type: pod
  cron: *\1 * * * *
  pod:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: work
          image: quay.io/ctupangiu/cron-workload:latest

For k8s workloads, the cron will be ignored.

This manifest adds a cron definition to the workload making the workload to be executed every minute.

5. Retry

Because device-worker-ng does not rely on systemd to restart a failling job, it has its own retry mechanism. It supports constant or exponential retry intervals. Currently, there is no way to configure the interval though the CR of the workload. The retry is set to 20s constant interval.

6. EdgeDevice's profiles

Profiles are a new feature of device-worker-ns. The idea behind it is to allow workloads to run only when certains profiles are active. Each profile has a set of conditions which, basically, are boolean expression like: cpu > 23% or cpu < 5% || cpu > 40%. The value for variables can be sent to the device though a POST request like:

curl -X -H "Content-Type: application/json" -v -d '{"value":20,"name":"cpu"}' http://localhost:8080/metrics

The endpoint is hard coded to http://localhost:8080/metrics. After each POST, the scheduler will evaluate each condition for each profile and determinate which if the job will run or not. An EdgeDevice CR with profiles can look like this:

apiVersion: management.project-flotta.io/v1alpha1
kind: EdgeDevice
metadata:
  labels:
    app: camera
    name: toto
    namespace: default
spec:
  heartbeat:
    periodSeconds: 2
    profiles:
      - name: test
        conditions:
          - name: "off"
            expression: "x<3% || x == nil"
          - name: "another_one"
            expression: "y>3"

This CR defines one profile named test whith two conditions off and another_one. To enable profiles for a workload, we need to set this profile in the CR of the workload:

apiVersion: management.project-flotta.io/v1alpha1
kind: EdgeWorkload
metadata:
  name: nginx-rootfull
spec:
  deviceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: camera
    profiles:
    	- name: "test"
        conditions:
          - "off"
  type: k8s
  pod:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: nginx1
          image: quay.io/project-flotta/nginx:1.21.6

For this workload, we add only one condition off so, if that condition is true, the executor will run the workload.

Prerequisites

You must have flotta operator and API server running and client certificates already generated. For more information, please read the documentation.

Remark:

To have a support for profiles, retry and cron feature, you may need to use this repo github.com/tupyy/k4e-operator of flotta-edge-api and flotta-controller because, curently, the official repo does not support those feature:

Build

You need go1.18 installed to be able to build the project.

Build:

make vendor
make build

Usage

Create a configuration yaml like:

LOG_LEVEL: debug
CA_ROOT: /home/cosmin/projects/device-worker-ng/resources/certificates/ca.pem
CERT: /home/cosmin/projects/device-worker-ng/resources/certificates/cert.pem
KEY: /home/cosmin/projects/device-worker-ng/resources/certificates/key.pem
SERVER: https://127.0.0.1:8043
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR: /run/user/1000
KUBECONFIG: /path/to/kubeconfig/if/any
DEVICE_ID: toto

Run the device-worker:

device-worker-ng --config config.yaml 

If you want to execute workloads on rootfull podman, you will need to run the device-worker-ng as root.

Remark: Don't forget to set env var TMPDIR to a path where you have write access. podman-executor needs rw access to temporary folder to write the pod spec to files needed by podman play kube command.

If you prefer, you can use environment variable with the prefix EDGE_DEVICE:

EDGE_DEVICE_CA_ROOT=path_to_ca EDGE_DEVICE_CERT=path_to_cert EDGE_DEVICE_KEY=path_to_key EDGE_DEVICE_SERVER=https://127.0.0.1:8043 device-worker-ng