xcflushd

Xcflushd

Description

This is the daemon that flushes the data that the gateway side of XC like the apicast-xc module running on top of APIcast, stores for reporting and authorizing to 3scale.

When you deploy 3scale to a gateway you usually have a request performed to 3scale for every request that needs authorization, which introduces latency and load in 3scale. The goal of XC is to reduce latency and increase throughput by significantly reducing the number of requests made to 3scale's backend. In order to achieve that, XC caches authorization statuses and reports.

Xcflushd is a daemon that is required to run while using XC. Its responsibility consists of flushing the cached reports and renewing the cached authorization statuses. All this is done in background, not in request time.

Xcflushd can run together with a different gateway as long as it uses the same format for the cached authorizations and reports. This format will be documented soon.

Development environment and testing

You will need Docker and GNU make.

First, clone the project:

$ git clone [e-mail]:3scale/xcflushd.git

Next, cd into the directory, cd xcflushd

Run the tests with:

$ make test

That will run the unit test suite. It's using Rspec.

Develop with:

$ make bash

That will create a Docker container and run bash inside it. The project's source code will be available in ~/app and synced with your local xcflushd directory. You can edit files in your preferred environment and still be able to run whatever you need inside the Docker container.

Deployment

You will need a Redis server running.

Docker

Build:

$ make build

Run:

$ docker run --rm -it xcflushd script/launch help

You can send the options as params for script/launch:

$ docker run --rm -it xcflushd script/launch run --auth-ttl 900 --provider-key my_provider_key --redis 127.0.0.1:6379 --frequency 300 --backend https://su1.3scale.net:443

Please note that the help command will also show you abbreviated flags you can use at your convenience. Also, script/launch sets all the JRuby flags recommended for a production environment. If you'd like to set different ones, you can run:

$ docker run --rm -it xcflushd JRUBY_OPTS="..." jruby -S bundle exec xcflushd help

Locally

This instructions are for JRuby, the Ruby implementation that we recommend for running xcflushd.

Install the dependencies:

$ jruby -S bundle install

Run the program with the recommended flags for production:

$ script/launch help

Openshift

If what you need is deploying Xcflushd together with APIcast and XC, you can follow the instructions provided in the apicast-xc repo.

How it works

Every X minutes (configurable) the flusher does two things:

1. Reports to 3scale all the reports cached in Redis.
2. Renews the authorization status (authorized/denied) for all the applications affected by the cached reports that have been reported to 3scale.

For more details, check the design doc.

Contributing

1. Fork the project
2. Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
3. Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
4. Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
5. Create a new Pull Request

License

Apache-2.0