Background

Current documentation describes how to install a high availability Apollo cluster with one-click through Rainbond, a cloud native application management platform. This approach is suitable for users who are less familiar with Kubernetes, containerization and other complex technologies, and lowers the barrier to deploy Apollo in Kubernetes.

Combination of Rainbond and Apollo

Rainbond is an easy to use open source cloud native application management platform.

With the help of it, users can complete the deployment, operation and maintenance of microservices in a graphical interface.

With the help of Kubernetes and containerization technology, automatic operation and maintenance capabilities such as fault self-healing and elastic expansion can be endowed to users’ applications.

Rainbond has a built-in native Service Mesh microservice framework, and also has a good integration experience with other microservice frameworks such as Spring Cloud and Dubbo.

Therefore, a large number of Rainbond users may also be users of the Apollo configuration center.

Instead of worrying about how to deploy a Apollo cluster, the Rainbond team made Apollo a one-click application template for free download and installation by open source users.

This installation method greatly reduces the deployment burden of users using Apollo clusters. Currently, versions 1.9.2 is supported.

The current installation mode integrates a set of PRO environments by default. Instructions to add additional environments is described in the advanced features section later.

About application template

Application template is a package manager for Rainbond cloud native application management platform. Users can install applications into Rainbond with one-click. No matter how complex the application is, the application template abstracts it into an package, which is installed with docker images of all the components, configuration information, and relationships between all the components.

Prerequisite

• Deployed Rainbond cloud native application management platform. For example: The Quick Start can be used to run in a PC within a container.

• Internet connection.

Quick Start

Access the built-in open source app store

Select the App Store on the left, switch to the Open Source App Store, and search apollo to find the Apollo application.

One-click install

Click Install on the right of Apollo to enter the installation page. After filling in simple information, click OK to start the installation, and the page automatically jumps to the topology view.

Parameters：

After a few minutes, the Apollo is installed and up and running.

Testing

Access the default domain provided by component Apollo-portal-1.9.2 to log into the Apollo console and verify in system information that the PRO environment is ready.

Configuration

In Rainbond, Apollo clusters can be configured based on a graphical interface. It mainly includes three parts: environment variables, configuration file mounting and plugin configuration.

• Environment variables: You can customize environment variables through environment configuration in different component pages. For example, Apollo-portal-1.9.2 adds APOLLO_PORTAL_ENVS=pro by default to define the environment managed by the current portal.

• Configuration files: You can set configuration files for components in environment configuration on different component pages.

  • Apollo-portal-1.9.2 mount /apollo-portal/config/apollo-env.properties is used to define meta addresses for different environments.

  • Apollo-config-1.9.2 mount /apollo-configservice/config/application-github.properties used to declare the current config and admin service address.

• Plugin configuration: The downstream call address is defined in Rainbond by installing the Egress Network Governance Plugin for Apollo-portal-1.9.2 Apollo-config-1.9.2, which is an implementation of Service Mesh microservice governance. By defining the domain name of the downstream service, you can access the specified port of the downstream service. For example, in the Apollo-portal-1.9.2 plugin, the domain name to access port Apollo-config-1.9.2 ‘s 8080 is Apollo-config-pro, which is why the configuration only defines the domain name and does not need to define the port.

Advanced

Instance number scaling

The Apollo-portal-1.9.2 Apollo-config-1.9.2 Apollo-admin-1.9.2 components included in the Apollo configuration center are deployed using a Deployment controller, Service discovery and communication are realized through Rainbond’s built-in Service Mesh microservice framework. Therefore, all three components can scale multiple instances with one click for clustered deployment.

Take Apollo-portal-1.9.2 as an example, click scale, modify the number of instances, and click Set.

Add envs

The Apollo configuration center supports multiple environments and manages them using a unified Portal page. Apollo clusters based on Rainbond’s one-click installation ship with the ‘PRO’ environment by default. In the Rainbond scenario, I’ll show you how to append a set of ‘DEV’ environments. Access the Apollo-config-dev and Apollo-admin-dev components, respectively.

1. Deploy another Set of Apollo clusters and remove Apollo-portal-1.9.2 ApolloPortalDB components from the new cluster. Change the name of Apollo-config-1.9.2 Apollo-admin-1.9.2 component for ease of administration. Add a dependency from Apollo-portal-1.9.2 to Apollo-config-dev Apollo-admin-dev. The topology is shown as follows：

Note that this step will trigger a connection information environment variable conflict, remember to redefine your preferred name for the Apollo-config-dev Apollo-admin-dev component’s internal port.

1. In environment configuration page, modify Apollo-config-Dev configuration file /apollo-configservice/config/application-github.properties, Change the service addresses of config and admin to the expected values.

1. Go to the Apollo-config-dev Apollo-portal-1.9.2 plugin page, modify the configuration for its Egress Network Governance Plugin , Rainbond built-in microservice framework, define the downstream service address by setting Domains. In the case of Apollo-portal-1.9.2, an access domain name to apollo-config-dev apollo-admin-dev needs to be configured.

After the configuration is complete, click update configuration, Apollo-config-Dev can be accessed through the domain name apollo-config-dev.

Similarly, Apollo-config-dev needs to be configured with an access domain name to apollo-admin-dev. Update the configuration after the configuration is complete.

1. Modify the configuration of Apollo-portal-1.9.2 to join the new DEV environment.

Modify the value of environment variable APOLLO_PORTAL_ENVS to add to the dev environment.

Modify the configuration file /apollo-portal/config/apollo-env.properties and write the meta address of the dev environment.

Update the Apollo-portal-1.9.2 component to make all configurations take effect. View system information to verify that the environment is added.