Introduction¶
Management summary¶
Goal of this page is to provide a manual and scripts to
- get an reliable open source infrastructure for your business / environment
- reproducibly running in less than 1 hour
- at a cost of less 20 € month (lets see how this changes)
About the Flex4Apps¶
The convergence of cloud, communication and IoT infrastructure plus the trend towards virtual applications (e.g. migrating software to the cloud) create new challenges for application developers and infrastructure providers. The resulting systems are complex with dynamic resources hiding possible problems. This creates a requirement for flexible monitoring and optimisation methods. The Flex4Apps project addresses the challenges of monitoring and optimising large, distributed, cyber-physical systems. The goal of the project is to provide a solution to manage the high data volumes and complexity of system monitoring whilst disturbing the target system as little as possible.
The demonstrator is setup using the f4a.me domain.
High level architecture¶
Goal of the project is not to worry about “hardware” while operating an infrastructure. Currently servers have to be rented / purchased. They need to be maintained and in case something breaks down, the operation of the overlaying service / system is impacted.
Docker swarm is one solution to achieve this abstraction layer. For this approach three or more (virtual) servers are required. RAM and CPU power is key, SSDs help to improve the performance.
Even though docker runs on many platforms we decided to operate based on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Windows is also possible, but has some drawbacks.
Docker only achieves the independence with regards to the stateless execution of services like webservers, mailservers and other services. To provide persistent storage a file server / cluster and a database server is needed.