MuleSoft Runtime Fabric Deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) - Part 2: Mgmt & Operations
This is the second part of a series of articles focused on MuleSoft Runtime Fabric. In our previous article, we’ve described how to deploy a full MuleSoft Runtime Fabric on top of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Now is the time to learn some mechanisms to manage that cluster.
We are going to describe some tips about how to:
The process of deploying an application into the Runtime Fabric
The process to review the logs produced by the deployment process
Basic but useful commands to understand what is happening within the Runtime Fabric (namespaces, pods, secrets, etc)
Consolidate the log files into an external system (we are going to use Papertrail for our article)
Destroy pods
Test our applications
The usage of the rtfctl CLI
Plus, a set of tips that are going to be useful for you while managing and maintaining your Runtime Fabric.
Let’s start from the beginning.
How to know if my cluster is up and running
There are different ways to validate the health of your runtime fabric. Let’s elaborate on a couple of them:
Via Anypoint Platform console (https://anypoint.mulesoft.com)
Via the rtfctl CLI. We will get into some details with this one
For the first option, you can get a very quick view by going into Runtime Manager -> Runtime Fabrics:
In the first block (circle number 1) you will have the option/link for Runtime Fabrics. In the second block (the purple one or number two in the image), you will get a summary of your Runtime Fabric, and finally, in the third block (the brown one or number 3) you will get a little bit of information like Application Status, Deployments, and Nodes.
Let’s get a deeper look into block #2 (the purple one in the image):
With this piece of information, you can validate:
That your cluster is Active. The other option is that it can be Degraded (we will elaborate more on that in the next paragraphs) or disconnected. The desired status is Active.
Then you can see the version of your Runtime Fabric, and it suggests that you upgrade to the latest one. In my case, I could upgrade to 1.10.0. But that will be part of another article in the upcoming future.
The number of vCPUs that you have for your Runtime Fabric and the Memory.
And a hyperlink to download the rtfctl CLI.
If you are an operator and want to see how healthy your Runtime Fabric is, with this small section you can get it. Direct and simple.
Now, sometimes things go in directions that we do not control that can make our cluster change its status. In that case in section #3 (the brown in the previous images) you can get some useful detail:
If something is wrong with the Application Status, your Deployments, or an event with your Nodes, you can get that detail from here. For example, the following image is from a Degraded cluster:
As you can see, some of the errors that are causing the cluster to be in Degraded status are described in the different sections, in this case: in the Nodes section. For this error, something is wrong with our nodes, to the point that there is no status from them; they are probably down.
Now let’s do something similar with RTFCTL CLI.
RTFCTL CLI
Since the very beginning of the computing era, the command-line interface (CLI) has been the common place to manage systems. But in this modern era, CLIs have become even more popular; and it is true to say that sometimes it is much more natural to use those CLIs rather than expecting a web-based console. For MuleSoft Runtime Fabric, there is an alternative for that, and that is called rtfctl.
The official documentation is here: https://docs.mulesoft.com/runtime-