Oracle WebLogic on Kubernetes

Project goal

The aim of this project is to improve the deployment of Oracle WebLogic infrastructure in large-scale deployments, profiting from new technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker Containers. These technologies will help to make the infrastructure deployment process portable, repeatable, and faster, enabling CERN service managers to be more efficient in their daily work.

R&D topic
Data-centre technologies and infrastructures
Project coordinator(s)
Antonio Nappi
Team members
Lukas Gedvilas
Collaborator liaison(s)
Monica Riccelli, Will Lyons, Maciej Gruzka, Cris Pedregal, David Ebert, Dmitrij Dolgušin

Collaborators

Project background

The Oracle WebLogic service has been active at CERN for many years, offering a very stable way to run applications core to the laboratory. However, we would like to reduce the amount of time we spend on maintenance tasks or creating new environments for our users. Therefore, we started to explore solutions that could help us to improve how we deploy Oracle WebLogic. Kubernetes has now made our deployment much faster, reducing the time spent on operational tasks and enabling us to focus more on developers’ needs.

Recent progress

In 2020, we focused on the structure of monitoring and logging systems; these dramatically improved the way we work.

Using Prometheus for the monitoring part, we were able to get much more information on both the infrastructure itself and the application layer. We can now easily see resource use level in Kubernetes, as well as how containers are behaving. Thanks to this, it will be much easier to build an efficient alert system.

We decided to introduce Fluentd as our logging component. This helped us to reduce the number of hosts writing to elastic search and to standardise the logs produced by our system. Meanwhile, we also managed to migrate more applications to Kubernetes: 70-80% of our current production is now running on K8s.

 

Next steps

We aim to complete the migration of production applications by mid 2021. We will also focus on the integration of Prometheus into our new alert system. In addition, we would also like to start investigating ArgoCD and Flux2 as solutions for making application and infrastructure deployments more oriented towards GitOps.

Publications

    A. Nappi. HAProxy High Availability Setup. Databases at CERN blog. 2017. cern.ch/go/9vPf
    A. Nappi. HAProxy Canary Deployment. Databases at CERN blog. 2017. cern.ch/go/89ff

Presentations

    A. Nappi, WebLogic on Kubernetes at CERN (16 May). Presented at WebLogic Server Summit, Rome, 2019.
    A. Nappi, One Tool to Rule Them All: How CERN Runs Application Servers on Kubernetes (16 September). Presented at Oracle Code One 2019, San Francisco, 2019. cern.ch/go/DbG9
    D. Ebert (Oracle), M. Martin, A. Nappi, Advancing research with Oracle Cloud (18 September). Presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2019, San Francisco, 2019. cern.ch/go/LH6Z
    E. Screven, A. Nappi, Cloud Platform and Middleware Strategy and Roadmap (17 September). Presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2019, San Francisco, 2019. cern.ch/go/d8PC
    M. Riccelli, A. Nappi, Kubernetes: The Glue Between Oracle Cloud and CERN Private Cloud (17 September). Presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2019, San Francisco, 2019. cern.ch/go/Bp8w
    A. Nappi, L. Rodriguez Fernández, WebLogic on Kubernetes (17 January). Presented at CERN openlab meeting with Oracle in Geneva, Geneva, 2017. cern.ch/go/6Z8R
    S. A. Monsalve, Development of WebLogic 12c Management Tools (15 August). Presented at CERN openlab summer students’ lightning talks, Geneva 2017. cern.ch/go/V8pM
    A. Nappi, L. Rodriguez Fernández, WebLogic on Kubernetes (16 August). Presented at Oracle Workshop Bristol, Bristol, 2017. cern.ch/go/6Z8R
    A. Nappi, WebLogic on Kubernetes (21 September). Presented at CERN openlab Open Day, Geneva, 2017. cern.ch/go/6Z8R
    A. Nappi, L. Rodriguez Fernández, Oracle Weblogic on Containers: Beyond the frontiers of your Data Centre Openday (21 September). Presented at CERN openlab Open Day, Geneva, 2017. cern.ch/go/nrh8
    A. Nappi, L. Gedvilas L. Rodríguez Fernández, A. Wiecek, B. Aparicio Cotarelo (9-13 July). Presented at 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP), Sofia, Bulgaria, 2018. cern.ch/go/dW8J
    A. Nappi, L. Gedvilas L. Rodríguez Fernández, A. Wiecek, B. Aparicio Cotarelo (9-13 July). Presented at 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP), Sofia, Bulgaria, 2018. cern.ch/go/dW8J
    L. Rodriguez Fernandez, A. Nappi, Weblogic on Kubernetes (11 January). Presented at CERN Openlab Technical Workshop, Geneva, 2018. cern.ch/go/6Z8R
    B. Cotarelo, Oracle Weblogic on Kubernetes (July). Presented at 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP), Sofia, 2018. cern.ch/go/6MVQ
    M. Riccelli, D. Cabelus, A. Nappi, Running a Modern Java EE Server in Containers Inside Kubernetes (23 October). Presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2018, San Francisco, 2018. cern.ch/go/b6nl
    W. Coekaerts, A. Nappi, Cloud Platform and Middleware Strategy and Roadmap (15 January). Presented at Oracle OpenWorld Middle West, Dubai, 2020. cern.ch/go/9kqK
    M. Gruszka, W. Lyons, A. Nappi, Deploying Oracle WebLogic Server on Kubernetes and Oracle Cloud (15 January). Presented at Oracle OpenWorld Middle West, Dubai, 2020. cern.ch/go/6FVF
    W. Coekaerts, M. McMaster, R. Hussain, A. Nappi, Cloud Platform and Middleware Strategy and Roadmap (13 February). Presented at Oracle Openworld, London, 2020. cern.ch/go/f8FZ
    M. Gruszka, W. Lyons, A. Nappi, Deploying Oracle WebLogic Server on Kubernetes and Oracle Cloud (13 February). Presented at Oracle Openworld, London, 2020. cern.ch/go/6SLl