8 ms·

Weave and Docker for Mac: The bridge between local and remote services

60 points by hiphipjorge 11y ago

zephod 11y ago
Offtopic, but does anybody know how the diagrams in this article were generated? I'd love a simple piece of software to generate beautiful, straightforward pictures like this to explain architectural problems.
- ncke 11y ago
  I don't think that it generated these diagrams, but you should check out planttext (http://www.planttext.com/ http://www.planttext.com/) - makes UML diagrams easy.
- darrhiggs 11y ago
  I don't know about the article, but DOT[0] + graphviz[1] could be used for this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag... [1] http://www.graphviz.org/ http://www.graphviz.org/
- pavlov 11y ago
  On Mac, I've always liked OmniGraffle for architecture diagrams.
zeveb 11y ago
Why not just run Linux locally? Mac OS X is BSD, not Linux, which means its build tools & environment are subtly incompatible. You're always going to be chafing if you develop anywhere other than in your deployment environment. Linux is superlative for desktop & development use. It supports things like tiling window managers far better than does a Mac. It's free. The hardware is far more affordable. Although this is definitely a matter of taste, I find Linux far more usable than a Mac. I will grant that Mac laptops are lightweight & thin. It just seems weird to me to go through all these contortions to develop software for Linux on a Mac or Windows box when it's far easier IMHO to just … run Linux.
- geggam 11y ago
  That simply isn't cool enough.
- toyg 11y ago
  Developers don't exist in a vacuum. A lot of people have to use stuff like Office and Skype; if you do that on Windows, "you're always going to be chafing", the pain just moves from one area to the next.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    I wouldn't trust skype even in a VM.
- lucaspiller 11y ago
  I've been using a Mac for 10 years and am thinking of switching back to Linux. I also want to get new hardware as 4GB RAM is really limiting. What would people recommend? I do like the Mac hardware, but considering you can get better for a lot less I don't think I'll stick with it.
  - xgbi 11y ago
    I just took a new job in a company that uses Dell and Linux for the main OS, coming back from 4 years in another company where macs were the thing. Let me tell you: it sucks. - Lockscreen disapears when my session is locked, I have to type my password blind.. - Scrolling sucks, plainly. The trackpad registers clicks when I don't want him to, leading to me moving text around when I just want to move the pointer.. it's so unbearable that I brought my old mouse at my job. - The fan is audible and always on. It also sends the heat back on my left hand (I'm left handed and the vents are on the left of the laptop), which sucks. - Debian 8 packages don't include Intel acceleration, so you have to use experimental packages. But using them, it results in Skype being impossible to install.. - Did I talk about the miserable battery life? The laptop is brand new (Latitude E5550). Seriously, you're going to regret it.
    - 11y ago
fabiofumarola 11y ago
Why do you need to connect to remote services using weave? Should the stage environment be separated from you development one? Anyway nice article. Thanks
- kernel_panic 11y ago
  We have around 18 different microservices each with their own configuration and repos. Setting them all up, keeping them up to date and managing them locally is a pain (and also turns my laptop into an inferno). Our staging environment is on Runnable which spins up all 18 of these in an isolated stack so I do no have to worry about configs or management.
cjbprime 11y ago
> sudo curl -L git.io/weave -o /usr/local/bin/weave Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.
- api 11y ago
  But it redirects to https. That's secure, right?
  - cjbprime 11y ago
    It redirects to HTTPS when you aren't being MITM'd with malware..
NetStrikeForce 11y ago
Hey, We provide an alternate solution ([1]Wormhole) that covers this scenario (and others). The main differences with e.g. Weave are: - Non Docker-specific - Easier to deploy, in my opinion ofc :-) - Based on Open Source (You can just deploy SoftEhter's vanilla client as the agent) - We don't use vxlan, just SSL encapsulation. - Actually, every client will only generate outbound SSL connections, so chances are you won't need to reconfigure any firewalls or network gear for Wormhole to work. - By default, chances are you won't overlap with the provided IP addressing (non-public, non-RFC1918 IP space) - Multiplatform Windows / Linux / Os X - API available to create and deploy networks and clients - Our architecture requires traffic to go up to a central server and down to destination, so there's added latency. In my tests I've found this to not penalise performance for most applications as other solutions based on extra layers (I.e. Vxlan) like Weave. Don't get me wrong, I think Weave is brilliant. We're just an alternative that aims for simplicity. There's some overlapping, but we probably have different markets. [1]: https://wormhole.network https://wormhole.network
antman 11y ago
HN discussion about Weave being slow [0]. I dont know if the issue has been addressed since it was first posted. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9498139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9498139
- fons 11y ago
  It has, now Weave is kinda fast :) See http://weave.works/weave-docker-networking-performance-fast-data-path/ http://weave.works/weave-docker-networking-performance-fast-... http://rp.delaat.net/2015-2016/p50/report.pdf http://rp.delaat.net/2015-2016/p50/report.pdf Full disclosure: I work at Weaveworks
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - DanielDent 11y ago
    It's terribly slow unless you don't care about encryption: https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/1925 https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/1925 The per-packet processing overhead is a real and unresolved problem. I'm using Rancher's networking now instead. It uses ipsec between hosts, so everything gets handled by code paths which have been optimized in the kernel, and performance is good (especially if you have a not-ancient CPU and have the AES-NI instruction - then wirespeed gigabit works with acceptable overhead). I like Weave's decentralized architecture and wish it were realistic to use it. If they are going to stick with a user-space solution they probably need to use DPDK or one of the other high-performance software defined networking toolkits, which tend to process packets using a SIMD approach.
    - fidget 11y ago
      IPSec is still pretty slow. While it might be fine for X DC stuff, without a real private network you're not going to find the low latency that makes microservices attractive.
dmritard96 11y ago
Must admit I thought this was the weave framework google/nest are pushing.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
I dream of a company that installs Linux on some of the most popular desktops PROPERLY, and charges users 100$ to install it, and helps you maintain your Linux desktop over the years. Many have tried, no one has succeeded. Canonical had an opportunity to do this... Instead, they had to do "Enterprise" stuff. Bah.
- thelimey 11y ago
  Several laptop manufacturers have offered Canonical distros pre-installed as an alternative to Windows, so you don't even need to spend $100. And then dropped the option due to lack of volume...

60 points by hiphipjorge 11y ago

Offtopic, but does anybody know how the diagrams in this article were generated? I'd love a simple piece of software to generate beautiful, straightforward pictures like this to explain architectural problems.

ncke 11y ago
I don't think that it generated these diagrams, but you should check out planttext (http://www.planttext.com/ http://www.planttext.com/) - makes UML diagrams easy.
darrhiggs 11y ago
I don't know about the article, but DOT[0] + graphviz[1] could be used for this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag... [1] http://www.graphviz.org/ http://www.graphviz.org/
pavlov 11y ago
On Mac, I've always liked OmniGraffle for architecture diagrams.

zeveb 11y ago

Why not just run Linux locally? Mac OS X is BSD, not Linux, which means its build tools & environment are subtly incompatible. You're always going to be chafing if you develop anywhere other than in your deployment environment. Linux is superlative for desktop & development use. It supports things like tiling window managers far better than does a Mac. It's free. The hardware is far more affordable. Although this is definitely a matter of taste, I find Linux far more usable than a Mac. I will grant that Mac laptops are lightweight & thin. It just seems weird to me to go through all these contortions to develop software for Linux on a Mac or Windows box when it's far easier IMHO to just … run Linux.

geggam 11y ago
That simply isn't cool enough.
toyg 11y ago
Developers don't exist in a vacuum. A lot of people have to use stuff like Office and Skype; if you do that on Windows, "you're always going to be chafing", the pain just moves from one area to the next.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  I wouldn't trust skype even in a VM.
lucaspiller 11y ago
I've been using a Mac for 10 years and am thinking of switching back to Linux. I also want to get new hardware as 4GB RAM is really limiting. What would people recommend? I do like the Mac hardware, but considering you can get better for a lot less I don't think I'll stick with it.
- xgbi 11y ago
  I just took a new job in a company that uses Dell and Linux for the main OS, coming back from 4 years in another company where macs were the thing. Let me tell you: it sucks. - Lockscreen disapears when my session is locked, I have to type my password blind.. - Scrolling sucks, plainly. The trackpad registers clicks when I don't want him to, leading to me moving text around when I just want to move the pointer.. it's so unbearable that I brought my old mouse at my job. - The fan is audible and always on. It also sends the heat back on my left hand (I'm left handed and the vents are on the left of the laptop), which sucks. - Debian 8 packages don't include Intel acceleration, so you have to use experimental packages. But using them, it results in Skype being impossible to install.. - Did I talk about the miserable battery life? The laptop is brand new (Latitude E5550). Seriously, you're going to regret it.
  - 11y ago

fabiofumarola 11y ago

Why do you need to connect to remote services using weave? Should the stage environment be separated from you development one? Anyway nice article. Thanks

kernel_panic 11y ago
We have around 18 different microservices each with their own configuration and repos. Setting them all up, keeping them up to date and managing them locally is a pain (and also turns my laptop into an inferno). Our staging environment is on Runnable which spins up all 18 of these in an isolated stack so I do no have to worry about configs or management.

cjbprime 11y ago

> sudo curl -L git.io/weave -o /usr/local/bin/weave Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

api 11y ago
But it redirects to https. That's secure, right?
- cjbprime 11y ago
  It redirects to HTTPS when you aren't being MITM'd with malware..

NetStrikeForce 11y ago

Hey, We provide an alternate solution ([1]Wormhole) that covers this scenario (and others). The main differences with e.g. Weave are: - Non Docker-specific - Easier to deploy, in my opinion ofc :-) - Based on Open Source (You can just deploy SoftEhter's vanilla client as the agent) - We don't use vxlan, just SSL encapsulation. - Actually, every client will only generate outbound SSL connections, so chances are you won't need to reconfigure any firewalls or network gear for Wormhole to work. - By default, chances are you won't overlap with the provided IP addressing (non-public, non-RFC1918 IP space) - Multiplatform Windows / Linux / Os X - API available to create and deploy networks and clients - Our architecture requires traffic to go up to a central server and down to destination, so there's added latency. In my tests I've found this to not penalise performance for most applications as other solutions based on extra layers (I.e. Vxlan) like Weave. Don't get me wrong, I think Weave is brilliant. We're just an alternative that aims for simplicity. There's some overlapping, but we probably have different markets. [1]: https://wormhole.network https://wormhole.network

antman 11y ago

HN discussion about Weave being slow [0]. I dont know if the issue has been addressed since it was first posted. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9498139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9498139

fons 11y ago
It has, now Weave is kinda fast :) See http://weave.works/weave-docker-networking-performance-fast-data-path/ http://weave.works/weave-docker-networking-performance-fast-... http://rp.delaat.net/2015-2016/p50/report.pdf http://rp.delaat.net/2015-2016/p50/report.pdf Full disclosure: I work at Weaveworks
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- DanielDent 11y ago
  It's terribly slow unless you don't care about encryption: https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/1925 https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/1925 The per-packet processing overhead is a real and unresolved problem. I'm using Rancher's networking now instead. It uses ipsec between hosts, so everything gets handled by code paths which have been optimized in the kernel, and performance is good (especially if you have a not-ancient CPU and have the AES-NI instruction - then wirespeed gigabit works with acceptable overhead). I like Weave's decentralized architecture and wish it were realistic to use it. If they are going to stick with a user-space solution they probably need to use DPDK or one of the other high-performance software defined networking toolkits, which tend to process packets using a SIMD approach.
  - fidget 11y ago
    IPSec is still pretty slow. While it might be fine for X DC stuff, without a real private network you're not going to find the low latency that makes microservices attractive.

dmritard96 11y ago

Must admit I thought this was the weave framework google/nest are pushing.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

I dream of a company that installs Linux on some of the most popular desktops PROPERLY, and charges users 100$ to install it, and helps you maintain your Linux desktop over the years. Many have tried, no one has succeeded. Canonical had an opportunity to do this... Instead, they had to do "Enterprise" stuff. Bah.

thelimey 11y ago
Several laptop manufacturers have offered Canonical distros pre-installed as an alternative to Windows, so you don't even need to spend $100. And then dropped the option due to lack of volume...