Wednesday 4 December 2013

Demo of Fuse 6.1 with Apache Camel and hawtio on OpenShift

Here's a screencast showing how to get started using JBoss Fuse 6.1 Early Access release on OpenShift for creating integration solutions based on Apache Camel in the hybrid cloud (via OpenShift Online for the public cloud or OpenShift Enterprise for on premise, or a combination of both).


JBoss Fuse 6.1 Early Access from JBoss Developer on Vimeo.

Watch it on vimeo for the HD version.

The screencast shows how to create and deploy EIP flows; change them, make rolling upgrades and visualise whats happening all from your web browser via the Fuse Console; which is implemented completely using the open source project hawtio.

If you want to try it out for yourself (everyone gets 3 free gears on OpenShift online!), try this quickstart or see the more detailed instructions.

I hope to create many more videos soon; showing many other aspects of Fuse on OpenShift (like creating A-MQ topologies, getting insight into whats really happening via ElasticSearch and the API registry support among others). Until then, enjoy! Feedback always appreciated.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

happy 1st birthday hawtio! Welcome to hawtio 1.2.0!

Its exactly a year ago today I hacked the first commit of hawtio, the lightweight and modular HTML5 console for Java thats hawt.  As Claus just said, Happy Birthday hawtio!

Its been an amazing ride, its hard to believe its been just a year! A huge thanks to the hawtio team and everyone who's helped turn hawtio into a truly amazing console.

hawtio's really growing up fast and getting more awesome by the day. It constantly surprises me the awesomeness the hawtio team keep on adding.

Highlights of the year

The highlights of the year for me are:

  • lots and lots of plugins are now available for working with JVMs, JMX, logging and many frameworks like Apache Camel, Apache ActiveMQ, Infinispan, ElasticSearch and OSGi
  • Apache ActiveMQ 5.9.x or later now ships with hawtio inside
  • Apache Camel folks have effectively deprecated the old camel console in favour of hawtio
  • JBoss A-MQ and JBoss Fuse 6.1 is coming with hawtio as the default Fuse Management Console
  • hawtio works great stand alone or in most containers now like Apache Karaf, Apache Tomcat, Jetty and Widfly
Pretty much all aspects of the console is pretty awesome already; here's a few edited highlights:
  • in Camel we can visualise real time visualisations of running Camel routes inside a JVM, see the metrics update in real time, visually design camel routes, and trace or debug running routes
  • in ActiveMQ we can see all the queues, topics and metrics; create queues/topics, browse queues, on 5.9.x we can resend DLQ messages, move messages from a queue to another queue, delete messages, send messages and see destination consumer/producer diagrams. When using Fuse 6.1 we can visually design clustered broker topologies (e.g. for geographic store and forward networks).
  • in OSGi there is support for all main aspects; from viewing bundles, features, Config Admin, declarative services, viewing services, packages, dependency graphs, diagnosing class loading issues, navigating from bundle to maven metadata to source/javadoc, to using the Karaf shell from a browser.
  • when using JBoss Fuse 6.1 then hawtio becomes a full featured UI for working with many containers in a fabric; creating containers, editing profiles, looking inside runtimes, browsing logs etc.
One of my personal favourite features: when using the insight-log library from Fuse (or when using Fuse), the log plugin links all log statements and methods in each stack trace to the exact line of source code that generated the log statement or exception! Thats hawt

Or being able to search maven repositories and view versions, source or javadoc from inside the browser. Also the interactive developer help is pretty cute; so you can play around with all of hawtio's angularjs directives in the browser ;)

Getting Started

I don't think you truly understand how awesome hawtio is until you start using it really. So get started today!

We love contributions so please dive in and help; even if its just ideas for how to make things even more awesome. 

hawtio is built on AngularJS; I've used many different UI and web frameworks over the years (most of them TBH) and I really can't recommend AngularJS highly enough. So if you fancy learning AngularJS, why not try hacking a new plugin or adding some functionality to an existing plugin you like? There's lots of ideas already if you're not sure what to do.

Check out the developer guide for more details on getting started and building the code.

hawtio 1.2.0 released!

To celebrate hawtio's first birthday we've just released 1.2.0 today! It should be sync'd to maven central in the next hour or two. 

There are 407 issues fixed in this release (most of them new features or improvements I might add!)

So what are you waiting for? Go get it while its hawt!

Don't cha wish your console was hawt like hawtio?

Thursday 10 October 2013

a sneak peek at whats coming in JBoss Fuse 6.1

I'm really excited about the forthcoming Fuse 6.1 release as there's a ton of awesome new features which I've really wanted for some time and some really hawt tooling :).

So here's a quick sneak peek, focussing mostly on the new version of the Fuse Management Console (which is now implemented by hawtio open source project).

A-MQ

First let me show you the A-MQ topology view which lets you view and create topologies of Apache ActiveMQ brokers in your fabric.



The green background is used to show the master broker (see the top row, the green master is on the left, the grey background container on the right is the slave). If in doubt, hover over the containers and the tooltip tells you whats going on or click on things to dive into the detail views.

For containers which are inactive, the green play icon becomes an orange stopped icon (or you see the provisioning icons as containers startup, download, provision etc). This view is real time so you can watch containers startup (which can take a little while if you're using small gears on OpenShift ;).

If you click on the connect icon inside each container box, it takes you straight inside that broker; so you can view the destinations & see all the detailed metrics etc.

Incidentally the numbers in green badges next to the profile names show the number of containers running versus the required target number (like the new profile screen shows - see example below - the Target (requirements) versus Count (actual) columns). Again the tooltip gives a detailed explanation if you're unsure




e.g. if you create a new broker config for a replicated broker; it by default creates a requirement for 3 containers to run for that profile (broker configuration); then you'd get a red icon until enough containers are running - and clicking the red badge takes you to the create containers page.

On OpenShift we've an auto-scaler, so as you add a new broker configuration, the containers would spin up immediately once the configuration is saved and you can watch them visually spin up (cool eh!).

To setup your own broker topology click the + Broker button to add new broker configurations (Stand Alone, Master / Slave, N + 1 or Replicated) and define the groups of brokers.

When using Fabric you can put brokers into groups (or 'regions'). A group is just a name (or a path "us/east" if folks prefer); its just a String which is used to look in the right bit of ZooKeeper to find the brokers to connect to. So it can be a tree; though usually folks requirements are simple enough to just have either 1 global region; or have, say, 3 for different geo locations.

We can have a bunch of brokers in different groups, say, us-east, us-west, emea and messaging clients can then just use the right group name to connect to the right group of brokers. We use groups too for defining store/forward networks between groups. e.g. the us-east brokers may need to also store/forward with us-west brokers; they typically don't care which broker they connect to - but just need to connect to a broker within the right group. 

We can then create Fabric profiles for clients which are location specific. e.g. if you've a 'cheese' application (some web service or web app or whatnot) that needs to connect to A-MQ; we can have a cheese-us-east profile; which the only thing that profile does is it inherits from 'cheese' and just specifies the A-MQ group name of "us-east' to connect to.

Longer term we hope to align the broker groups with OpenShift's DNS/applications; so folks not using Fabric at all can just have the regions mapped to DNS names; e.g. "broker-us-east-foo.rhcloud.com" would be the host name to connect to an A-MQ broker and under the covers it does the DNS / haproxy crack to connect you to the right broker - without requiring any magic on the client side (other than knowing the right DNS/host name for the right group).

Dashboards

Also new in 6.1 is profile specific dashboards; so you can create custom dashboards for any profile which is based on the services running in that exact profile (i.e. a specific group of containers); then any container you connect to via the Fuse Management Console you get a nice easy view of the right things you want to see for that kind of profile. 

e.g. here's the default real time dashboard:


you can resize, move and add/edit/delete views in the usual way. Pretty much any UI in Fuse Management Console (which includes all the hawtio plugins) can be used as a rectangle on the dashboard; so you could add camel route metrics, log file searches or whatever).

Dashboards are then versioned and stored with all the other configuration. Which brings me to the configuration side...

Configuration gets git hawtness

Fuse Fabric is designed to make it really easy to manage large clusters of containers in a simple way; so you can group containers into profiles. Then you can configure the profile & choose the exact deployment artefacts once and all the containers are updated immediately. You can use profile inheritance so you can configure groups of containers differently; e.g. use regional changes to some configuration values; increase the RAM/cache/disk usage settings on bigger boxes etc.

Finally you can version your profiles; so that rather than changes to a profile becoming immediate on all containers; you can create a new version; edit the profiles - then perform a rolling upgrade; choose which containers to upgrade, try them for a while, if things look good, roll more containers to the new version - or rollback if things go bad.

In Fuse 6.1 we have support for working with the configuration using the git source control system and its associated tools. This means that all changes to configuration, deployment units, dashboards, the wiki, camel routes and broker topologies all has a nice audit log of who changed what when; its easy to use all the available git tools to do diffs and revert changes, merge between branches/repos etc. 

This means the configuration can work nicely with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment systems (e.g. using gerrit and jenkins). e.g. define all your profiles and configuration in development; then through Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment builds and code review systems like gerrit, merge changes from development -> integration test -> soak test -> production etc.

Using git with Fuse 6.1

If you view any container's page like below and click on the URLs tab:


it shows the git url; so just do a git clone of that; then checkout the branch for the version you want to work with. (In 6.1 of Fuse, a version maps to the name of a branch in git).
git clone http://localhost:8181/git/fabric
cd fabric
git checkout -t origin/1.0
ls -al fabric/profiles
you can then hack on the profile data using any editor you like (they are just folders of config files) then commit and git push to make the changes active! Or make your own branches and so forth.

Whats really cool is that the wiki (where you can document all your applications and profiles) is versioned in the same git repository as your dashboards and configuration. So if you add a new version of a service in a new version of a profile; the dashboard can be updated to show new metrics; then whatever version is running you see the right wiki, documentation and dashboard for the exact version!

Camel editor and debugger included

Last but not least; 6.1 includes web based editing, viewing (with real time metrics and debugging of camel routes. The camel routes can be versioned in profiles; so you can do rolling upgrades of your camel routes with all changes audited and browsable in a git repository.


Summary

No blogging for months and then I write a huge post, sorry! :) 

If the above was too long just think, Fuse 6.1 has an awesome improved web console (based on the hawtio open source project) and lets you work with all the configuration in git so all changes are audited and you can easily combine Fuse 6.1 with any git, Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment tooling for all your provisioning & configuration data.

There's lots more 6.1; I'll have to try blog more often ;)

Thursday 13 June 2013

introducing the Apache Camel based open source iPaaS

I've had a blast at CamelOne and Red Hat Summit in Boston; thanks for all the great speakers and feedback!

I demo'd our new Apache Camel based iPaaS (i.e. our Camel Cloud or Fuse integration appliance). Here's a quick demo video of what I presented at my CamelOne keynote along with the slides.

If you don't mind working on the bleeding edge here are the instructions for building and running it, though we'll have the public stable early access release soon.



Camel in the cloud demo from CamelOne 2013 from JBoss Developer on Vimeo.