This blog was originally published at project-flotta.io as part of my Google Summer of Code contribution in 2022.

Introduction

Edge Example App is an app for Flotta Edge devices, with a workload that will be deployed on the device that has two main features:

• Sensing the Internet (which helps to construct devices network topology). <= this article

• Read CPU temperature (which indicates how much load the device is handling).

As Project Flotta's goal is to manage workloads deployed on small-footprint devices and deal with network connectivity issues, this app provides a way of collecting network information that will be exported to the edge cluster. This App Along with the Web UI Interface, provides a good view of the network topology and the devices that are connected to the Internet.

How this app works

Taking the simple way of getting network information, this app collects its information about the network by sending a packet on the IP network to the Edge Cluster, calculating the time taken for each hop the packet makes during its route to the destination, this much like traceroute in the network but done on the device.

As a workload app, this app benefits from Flotta Edge devices architecture, collecting its information and saving it to a file on the device and letting the device worker send it to the edge cluster, this way

How to use this app

Use the following manifests to deploy the app to your device:

First, apply your secrets and configmaps:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: s3secret
  namespace: default
type: Opaque
data:
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: <your-aws-access-key-id>
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: <your-aws-secret-key>

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: dc1-syslog
  namespace: default
data:
  Address: dc1.syslog.project-flotta.io:601
  Protocol: tcp
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: secure-syslog
  namespace: default
data:
  Address: secure.dc1.syslog.project-flotta.io:601
  Protocol: tcp
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: s3config
  namespace: default
data:
  BUCKET_HOST: s3://flotta-data-bucket
  BUCKET_NAME: flotta-data-bucket
  BUCKET_PORT: "443"
  BUCKET_REGION: us-east-1

Second, apply the device by this manifest (or update it if it already exists):

apiVersion: management.project-flotta.io/v1alpha1
kind: EdgeDevice
metadata:
  name: <your-device-name>
  namespace: default
  labels:
    app: <some-label-here>
spec:
  requestTime: "2022-07-14T04:55:44Z"
  logCollection:
    dc1-syslog:
      bufferSize: 10 # 10 megabytes of size
      kind: syslog
      syslogConfig:
        name: dc1-syslog
    secure-syslog:
      bufferSize: 100 # 100 megabytes of size
      kind: syslog
      syslogConfig:
        name: secure-syslog
  storage:
    s3:
      configMapName: "s3config"
      secretName: "s3secret"

Note: these files explained in the Docs

Finally, apply the app to the device:

apiVersion: management.project-flotta.io/v1alpha1
kind: EdgeWorkload
metadata:
  name: <workload-name>
spec:
  logCollection: dc1-syslog
  deviceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: <device-label> # same as the device label
  data:
    egress:
      - source: export
        target: example-edge-device
  type: pod
  pod:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: edge-example-workload
          image: docker.io/ahmadateya/flotta-edge-example-workload:latest
          securityContext:
            capabilities:
              add: ["ALL"]

in part 2, we will see how the Web App presents the network topology and the devices that are connected to the Internet.

GitHub Repository

• https://github.com/project-flotta/flotta-edge-example