Introducing await

I’m leading a migration to Kubernetes at my fulltime job at Saltside. Our goal is to deploy our SoA application as a helm chart. This posed a few initial problems. The biggest problem is that services depend on other services (this is SoA after all). Service A may depend on service B to start. Databases are the second problem. Services cannot start if they cannot connect to their datastores. These problems occour because pods are started in any order. We can easily solve this problem with Kubernetes init containers specifically awaiting for dependencies to start.

We’ve open sourced our await CLI to address these problems. The await command is primarily designed for Kubernetes init containers, but there are probably other uses cases where it could be useful. We created await because we wanted something that:

Retried connections repeatedly until a timeout was reached Supported all our datastores / service types Provided a uniform UX

There didn’t seem to be any existing FOSS so we created our own. The result is a simple shell script with a mix of python built on Alpine linux. The resulting is a small Docker image. It shouldn’t slow down pod creation and is small enough to use a base image.

await supports the following checks:

HTTP Servers : runs curl Redis : runs redis-cli ping MongoDB : runs showDBs() Memcached : runs INFO Local DynamodB : ListTables against a local Local DynamoDB mysql : runs show tables; Arbitrary commands

await uses URIS to determine the check method. Each protocol in the URI maps to a check function. Here are some examples:

# wait for an HTTP server await http://example.com # wait for an HTTP server for 2 minutes (default: 60 seconds) await -r 120 http://example.com # wait for an HTTP server with extra curl options await http://example.com -- -H 'Special-Header: Foo' # wait for a redis server await redis://redis.mycompany.com # wait for EC2 access await cmd -- aws ec2 describe-instances

You can pull from saltside/await on docker hub .

All await commands accept a -r for retries. The default is 60 attempts. Commands also accept the -- [EXTRA_OPTS] syntax to pass arguments to the underlying call. This should provide users with enough flexibity to set connection parameters for all their resources.

We’re happy to take PRs to the source on GitHub. Big thanks to Terje Larsen & Sitesh Jalan for most of the work.

Good luck our there and happy shipping!