Thursday, January 28, 2016

Disnix 0.5 release announcement and some reflection

In this blog post, I'd like to announce the next Disnix release. At the same time, I noticed that it has been eight years ago that I started developing it, so this would also be a nice opportunity to do some reflection.

Some background information


The idea was born while I was working on my master's thesis. A few months prior, I got familiar with Nix and NixOS -- I read Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis, managed to package some software, and wrote a couple of services for NixOS.

Most of my packing work was done to automate the deployment of WebDSL applications, a case study in domain-specific language engineering, that is still an ongoing research project in my former research group. WebDSL's purpose is to be a domain-specific language for developing dynamic web applications with a rich data model.

Many aspects in Nix/NixOS were quite "primitive" compared to today's implementations -- there was no NixOS module system, making it less flexible to create additions. Many packages that I needed were missing and I had to write Nix expressions for them myself, such as Apache Tomcat, MySQL, and Midnight Commander. Also the desktop experience, such as KDE, was quite primitive, as only the base package was supported.

As part of my master's thesis project, I did an internship at the Healthcare Systems Architecture group at Philips Research. They had been developing a platform called SDS2, which purpose was to provide asset tracking and utilization analysis services for medical equipment.

SDS2 qualifies itself as a service-oriented system (a term that people used to talk frequently about in the past, but not anymore :) ). As such, it can be decomposed into a set of distributable components (a.k.a. services) that interact with each other through "standardized protocols" (e.g. SOAP), sometimes through network links.

There are a variety of reasons why SDS2 has a distributed architecture. For example, data that has been gathered from medical devices may have to be physically stored inside a hospital for privacy reasons. The analysis components may require a lot of computing power and would perform better if they run in a data center with a huge amount of system resources.

Being able to distribute services is good for many reasons (e.g. in meeting certain non-functional requirements such as privacy), but it also has a big drawback -- services are software components, and one of their characteristics is that they are units of deployment. Deploying a single service without any (or proper) automation to one machine is already complicated and time consuming, but deploying a network of machines is many times as complex.

The goal of my thesis assignment was to automate SDS2's deployment in distributed environments using the Nix package manager as a basis. Nix provides a number of unique properties compared to many conventional deployment solutions, such as fully automated deployment from declarative specifications, and reliable and reproducible deployment. However, it was also lacking a number of features to provide the same or similar kinds of quality properties to deployment processes of service-oriented systems in networks of machines.

The result of my master's thesis project was the first prototype of Disnix that I never officially released. After my internship, I started my PhD research and resumed working on Disnix (as well as several other aspects). This resulted in a second prototype and two official releases eventually turning Disnix into what it is today.

Prototype 1


This was the prototype resulting from my master's thesis and was primarily designed for deploying SDS2.

The first component that I developed was a web service (using similar kinds of technologies as SDS2, such as Apache Tomcat and Apache Axis2) exposing a set of deployment operations to remote machines (most of them consulting the Nix package manager).

To cope with permissions and security, I decided to make the web service just an interface around a "core service" that was responsible for actually executing the deployment activities. The web service used the D-Bus protocol to communicate with the core.

On top of the web service layer, I implemented a collection of tools each executing a specific deployment activity in a network of machines, such as building, distributing and activating services. There were also a number of tools combining deployment activities, such as the "famous" disnix-env command responsible for executing all the activities required to deploy a system.

The first prototype of disnix-env, in contrast to today's implementation, provided two deployment procedure variants: building on targets and building on the coordinator.

The first variant was basically inspired by the manual workflow I used to carry out to get SDS2 deployed -- I manually installed a couple of NixOS machines, then used SSH to remotely connect to them, there I would do a checkout of Nixpkgs and all the other Nix expressions that I need, then I would deploy all packages from source and finally I modified the system configuration (e.g. Apache Tomcat) to run the web services.

Unfortunately, transferring Nix expressions is not an easy process, as they are rarely self contained and typically rely on other Nix expression files scattered over the file system. While thinking about a solution, I "discovered" that the Nix expression evaluator creates so-called store derivation files (low-level build specifications) for each package build. Store derivations are also stored in the Nix store next to ordinary packages, including their dependencies. I could instead instantiate a Nix expression on the coordinator, transfer the closure of store derivation files to a remote machine, and build them there.

After some discussion with my company supervisor Merijn de Jonge, I learned that compiling on target machines was undesired, in particular in production environments. Then I learned more about Nix's purely functional nature, and "discovered" that builds are referentially transparent -- for example, it should not matter where a build has been performed. As long as the dependencies remain the same, the outcome would be the same as well. With this "new knowledge" in mind, I implemented a second deployment procedure variant that would do the package builds on the coordinator machine, and transfer their closures (dependencies) to the target machines.

As with the current implementation, deployment in Disnix was driven by three kinds of specifications: the services model, infrastructure model and distribution model. However, their notational conventions were a bit different -- the services model already knew about inter-dependencies, but propagating the properties of inter-dependencies to build functions was an ad-hoc process. The distribution model was a list of attribute sets also allowing someone to specify the same mappings multiple times (which resulted in undefined outcomes).

Another primitive aspect was the activation step, such as deploying web applications inside Apache Tomcat. It was basically done by a hardcoded script that only knew about Java web applications and Java command-line tools. Database activation was completely unsupported, and had to be done by hand.

I also did a couple of other interesting things. I studied the "two-phase commit protocol" for upgrading distributed systems atomically and mapped its concepts to Nix operations, to support (almost) atomic upgrades. This idea resulted in a research paper that I have presented at HotSWUp 2008.

Finally, I sketched a simple dynamic deployment extension (and wrote a partial implementation for it) that would calculate a distribution model, but time did not permit me to finish it.

Prototype 2


The first Disnix prototype made me quite happy in the early stages of my PhD research -- I gave many cool demos to various kinds of people, including our industry partner: Philips Healthcare and NWO/Jacquard: the organization that was funding me. However, I soon realized that the first prototype became too limited.

The first annoyance was my reliance on Java. Most of the tools in the Disnix distribution were implemented in Java and depended on the Java Runtime Environment, which is quite a big dependency for a set of command-line utilities. I reengineered most of the Disnix codebase and rewrote it in C. I only kept the core service (which was implemented in C already) and the web service interface, that I separated into an external package called DisnixWebService.

I also got rid of the reliance on a web service to execute remote deployment operations, because it was quite tedious to deploy it. I made the communication aspect pluggable and implemented an SSH plugin that became the default communication protocol (the web service protocol could still be used as an external plugin).

For the activation and deactivation of services, I developed a plugin system (Disnix activation scripts) and a set of modules supporting various kinds of services replacing the hardcoded script. This plugin system allowed me to activate and deactivate many kinds of components, including databases.

Finally, I unified the two deployment procedure variants of disnix-env into one procedure. Building on the targets became simply an optional step that was carried out before building on the coordinator.

Disnix 0.1


After my major reengineering effort, I was looking into publishing something about it. While working on a paper (which first version got badly rejected), I realized that services in a SOA-context are "platform independent" because of their interfaces, but they still have implementations underneath that could depend on many kinds of technologies. Heterogeneity makes deployment extra complicated.

There was still one piece missing to bring service-oriented systems to their full potential -- there was no multiple operating systems support in Disnix. The Nix package manager could also be used on several other operating systems besides Linux, but Disnix was bound to one operating system only (Linux).

I did another major reengineering effort to make the system architecture of the target systems configurable requiring me to change many things internally. I also developed new notational conventions for the Disnix models. Each service expression became a nested function in which the outer function corresponds to the intra-dependencies and the inner function to the inter-dependencies, and look quite similar to expressions for ordinary Nix packages. Moreover, I removed the ambiguity problem in the distribution model by making it an attribute set.

The resulting Disnix version was first described in my SEAA 2010 paper. Shortly after the paper got accepted, I decided to officially release this version as Disnix 0.1. Many external aspects of this version are still visible in the current version.

Disnix 0.2


After releasing the first of Disnix, I realized that there were still a few pieces missing while automating deployment processes of service-oriented systems. One of the limitations of Disnix is that it expects machines to be present already that may have to run a number of preinstalled system services, such as MySQL, Apache Tomcat, and the Disnix service exposing remote deployment operations. These machines had to be deployed by other means first.

Together with Eelco Dolstra I had been working on declarative deployment and testing of networked NixOS configurations, resulting in a tool called nixos-deploy-network that deploys networks of NixOS machines and a NixOS test driver capable of spawning networks of NixOS virtual machines in which system integration tests can be run non-interactively. These contributions were documented in a tech report and the ISSRE 2010 paper.

I made Disnix more modular so that extensions could be built on top of it. The most prominent extension was DisnixOS that integrates NixOS deployment and the NixOS test driver's features with Disnix service deployment so that a service oriented system's deployment process could be fully automated.

Another extension was Dynamic Disnix, a continuation of the dynamic deployment extension that I never finished during my internship. Dynamic Disnix extends the basic toolset with an infrastructure discovery tool and a distribution generator using deployment planning algorithms from the academic literature to map services to machines. The extended architecture is described in the SEAMS 2011 paper.

The revised Disnix architecture has been documented in both the WASDeTT 2010 and SCP 2014 papers and was released as Disnix 0.2.

Disnix 0.3


After the 0.2 release I got really busy, which was partly caused by the fact that I had to write my PhD thesis and yet another research paper for an unfinished chapter.

The last Disnix-related research contribution was a tool called Dysnomia, which I had based on the Disnix activation scripts package. I augmented the plugins with experimental state deployment operations and changed the package into a new tool, that in (theory) could be combined with other tools as well, or used independently.

Unfortunately, I had to quickly rush out a paper for HotSWUp 2012 and the code was in a barely usable state. Moreover, the state management facilities had some huge drawbacks, so I was not that eager to get them integrated into the mainstream version.

Then I had to fully dedicate myself to completing my PhD thesis and for more than six months, I hardly wrote any code.

After finishing my first draft of my PhD thesis and waiting for feedback from my committee, I left academia and switched jobs. Because I had no use practical use cases for Disnix, and other duties in my new job, its development was done mostly in my spare time at a very low pace -- some things that I accomplished in that period is creating a 'slim' version of Dysnomia that supported all the activities in the HotSWUp paper without any snapshotting facilities.

Meanwhile, nixops-deploy-network got replaced by a new tool named Charon, that later became NixOps. In addition to deployment, NixOps could also instantiate virtual machines in IaaS environments, such as Amazon EC2. I modified DisnixOS to also integrate with NixOps to use its capabilities.

Three and a half years after the previous release (late 2014), my new employer wanted to deploy their new microservices-based system to a production environment, which made me quite motivated to work on Disnix again. I did some huge refactorings and optimized a few aspects to make it work for larger systems. Some interesting optimizations were concurrent data transfers and concurrent service activations.

I also implemented multi-connection protocol support. For example, you could use SSH to connect to one machine and SOAP to another.

After implementing the optimizations, I realized that I had reached a stable point and decided that it was a good time to announce the next release, after a few years of only little development activity.

Disnix 0.4


Despite being happy with the recent Disnix 0.3 release and using it to deploy many services to production environments, I quickly ran into another problem -- the services that I had to manage store data in their own dedicated databases. Sometimes I had to move services from one machine to another. Disnix (like the other Nix tools) does not manage state, requiring me to manually migrate data, which was quite painful.

I decided to dig up the state deployment facilities from the HotSWUp 2012 paper to cope with this problem. Despite having a number of limitations, the databases that I had to manage were relatively small (tens of megabytes), so the solution was still a good fit.

I integrated the state management facilities described in the paper from the prototype into the "production" version of Dysnomia, and modified Disnix to use them. I left out the incremental snapshot facilities described in the paper, because there was no practical use for them. When the work was done, I announced the next release.

Disnix 0.5


With Disnix 0.4, all my configuration management work was automated. However, I spotted a couple of inefficiencies, such as many unnecessary redeployments while upgrading. I solved this issue by making the target-specific services concept a first class citizen in Disnix. Moreover, I regularly had to deal with RAM issues and added on-demand activation support (by using the operating system's service manager, such as systemd).

There were also some user-unfriendly aspects that I improved -- better and more concise logging, more helpful error messages, --rollback, --switch-generation options for disnix-env, and some commands that work on the deployment manifest were extended to take the last deployed manifest into account when no parameters have been provided (e.g. disnix-visualize).

Conclusion


This long blog post describes how the current Disnix version (0.5) came about after nearly eight years of development. I'd like to announce its immediate availability! Consult the Disnix homepage for more information.

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