There are no reviews yet. Be the first to send feedback to the community and the maintainers!
Teleport tool: Backwards-compatible resilience to network outages ================================================================= Written by Petar Maymounkov. Part of the Go Circuit Project. Read the HTML version of this document at http://blog.gocircuit.org/teleport-tool The Teleport Tool is a communication utility for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows, distributed under the Apache License (http://www.apache.org/licenses/), written entirely in Go (http://golang.org), that allows you to: * Shrink your devops workload by protecting your client/server deployments against network interruptions, * Retrofit legacy software (or sloppily written new software) to benefit from automatic connection caching and pooling, * Keep your interactive sessions (ssh and such) alive after you close your notebook's lid, * Reduce the configuration complexity of your cloud applications. Motivation ---------- When clients and servers talk it is not uncommon for the network connectivity to disappear only to re-appear later. In data centers, compelex network misconfigurations or DDoS attacks inflict temporary network outages. Mobile devices going into tunnels lose connection to Internet servers until they are back out. Notebooks going to sleep shutdown all network operations for live processes to discover at power resumption. When such outages occur most software treats them in a heavy-handed manner, closing out user sessions, possibly losing data, disrupting system operations and imposing complexity on software design. In many domains — like data streaming or interactive terminal sessions — applications could continue working healthily after an outage if only they did not receive the premature network error condition, forcing them to declare failure and resort to possibly complicated recovery-and-retry steps. For example, * A dropped ssh session would lose accumulated state (running processes, environment, shell history, etc.) requiring a manual replay of interactive steps, whereas * A dropped Apache Kafka (http://kafka.apache.org) event stream connection would require a heavy-handed course-grain replay of events from its on-disk log whenever the network reappears. Much headache could be saved if application endpoints did not experience network failures as terminal error conditions in favor of experiencing them as prolonged read and write operations. We set out to accomplish this state of matter in a backwards-compatible manner, whereby pre-existing software can take advantage without change. Furthermore, as a by-product of our design, we are also able to equip legacy software with intelligent connection caching and pooling. Solution -------- Qualitatively, intermittent network outages are no different than temporarily slow networks. Quantitatively, they differ in that they impose usually longer time intervals between successful transmissions. Since TCP can handle slow networks, our approach is to harness its power and "amplify" it to handle network interruptions. The high-level idea is simple. We use a plain TCP connection to transmit data under normal network conditions. When this connection breaks, in response to a network outage, we do not prompt the application layer with an error, instead we wait to establish a new TCP connection and represent a slow/unresponsive network to the application layer. When connectivity is resumed, the application layer experiences a perceived dramatic increase in network bandwidth. We trade errors for time. This simple mechanism is trickier to accomplish than is apparent on the surface. When TCP connections (or any other reliable connections, for that matter) are dropped, there is no guarantee that the last few writes have been trasmitted through reliably before the connection error was reported. To remedy this, we incorporated a light-weight protocol that, transparently to the application, guarantees exactly-once delivery (basically proper semantics) of every single byte written to the connections at the application level. How it works ------------ The Teleport Tool ships as a single command-line utility tele which executes in either client or server mode. Its operating diagram is illustrated below. client input address | +---------------+ | +-------------+ | USER's CLIENT +---- localhost -->• | TELE CLIENT +-----+ +---------------+ +-------------+ | ≈ | CLIENT-SIDE | ····················································· UNRELIABLE NETWORK ····· SERVER-SIDE | | ≈ +---------------+ +-------------+ | | USER's SERVER | •<-- localhost ----+ TELE SERVER | •<--+ +---------------+ | +-------------+ | | | server input address server+client output address On the server side, the user deploys the TCP server software as usual, depicted as the "USER's SERVER" box. For instance, this could be an sshd server, listening on port 22. The TCP address (with port) of the user's TCP server is dubbed the server input address. Alongside with the user's TCP server (i.e. on the same host) one deploys the Teleport Tool in server mode, or teleport server for short. The job of the teleport server is to accept outside incoming connections — that are resilient to network outages — from a peering "teleport client" and proxy them to the user's TCP server. The teleport server listens for outside connections on what we call the server output address. To launch the teleport server, one invokes: % tele -server -in=SERVER_INPUT_ADDR -out=SERVER_OUTPUT_ADDR On the connecting host, one launches the Teleport Tool in client mode, or teleport client. The teleport client accepts TCP connections from user's clients, running on the same host, and forwards them — in a network outage resilient manner — across the unreliable outside network to the teleport server, which in turn forwards them to the user's TCP server. Incoming user TCP connections are received on the client input address and the remote teleport server is expected to be found at the client output address. So, in fact, the client and server output addresses should equal. The teleport client is invoked by: % tele -client -in=CLIENT_INPUT_ADDR -out=CLIENT_OUTPUT_ADDR The user's TCP server and clients can be recycled without restarting the teleport server and client. The teleport server and client can be restarted while the user's TCP server and clients are live. This will result in interruption of current client-server connections, as the Teleport Tool does not prevent against endpoint failures (only network failures), but new connections will proceed normally. Examples and use cases ---------------------- Surviving ssh sessions during power suspension, in user mode °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° It is not uncommon that if you are an engineer you regularly log into a remote datacenter host via ssh from your notebook computer. Every time you suspend your notebook or your notebook switches from one WiFi network to another, your live ssh sessions are terminated and all state is lost. You can now entirely avoid this by tunneling your ssh traffic through the Teleport Tool. What's more, you don't have to have root privileges on the remote datacenter machine. Simply start the teleport server with user credentials and pick a sufficiently high port to bind it to: % tele -server -in=:22 -out=:40300 On your notebook, start your teleport client only once (usually on startup): % tele -client -in=:22999 -out=host9.datacenter.net:40300 And try it: % ssh -p 22999 localhost Reducing cloud applications configuration complexity °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° In large datacenters, one often encounters complicated tools for updating the configurations of deployed cloud services. These tools are often used to update endpoint addresses, hardcoded in configuration files of different services. One source of complexity there is the need to deal with a myriad different types of configuration files, belonging to unrelated software packages. When deploying network services in conjunction with the Teleport Tool, one is able to avoid reconfiguration complexity by configuring all services against the unchanging localhost addresses of teleport clients. Download, build and install --------------------------- Proceed as follows: (1) Install the latest release of the >Go Language compiler (http://golang.org), (2) Fetch, build and install the Teleport Tool by typing in: % go get github.com/petar/GoTeleport/tele % go install github.com/petar/GoTeleport/tele/cmd/tele (3) Run tele to get the help screen and verify the installation was successful. Contributing and fineprint -------------------------- The Teleport Tool and the communication technology behind it — Teleport Transport, to be described in another article — are part of the Go Circuit Project (http://gocircuit.org). To facilitate adoption and contribution to the Teleport Tool, I am maintaining a mirror of its source tree (which originates within the source of the Go Circuit, https://code.google.com/p/gocircuit) on GitHub, at GitHub, https://github.com/petar/GoTeleport, where pull requests will be accepted. Contributions of significant new features or interfaces should first be discussed on the gocircuit-dev discussion group, found at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gocircuit-dev For news and updates, tune into to Twitter @gocircuit or subscribe to the RSS feed of The Go Circuit Blog, at http://blog.gocircuit.org/feed.atom
GoLLRB
A Left-Leaning Red-Black (LLRB) implementation of balanced binary search trees for Google GoGoDCCP
GoDCCP is an implementation of the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol in GoGoNeedle
GoNeedle is a system for punching reliable transport over UDP through NATs and FirewallsGoReverseProxy
An NGINX-alike HTTP reverse proxy in GoGoHTTP
HTTP package and server: A step ahead of Go's standard library.GoMNIST
GoMNIST is a Go driver for reading Yann LeCun's MNIST dataset of handwritten digitstonika
Archival copy of the first shot at Tonikavitamix
A source-to-source compiler for the Go Language that virtualizes timersc
fork of Russ Cox's code.google.com/p/rscgozk
Fork of launchpad.net/gozkGoRedis
Go Language implementation of the Redis network protocolgocircuit.exp
Go Circuit experimental coderscfuse
A fork of Russ Cox's FUSE client for Goveranda
Daily tools to make things sunniermaymounkov.org
Essays, talks, slides, etc.ShelfLife
Prototype social infrastructure for the Harvard Library System and the Digital Public Library of Americagov4git
Decentralized governance for GitGoTripleSec
Go bindings and server for TripleSecblog
App Engine blog application in GoGoGauge
Some handy instrumentation for debuggingLove Open Source and this site? Check out how you can help us