My aim is to support the new grpc generic write path in Frankenstein. On the surface this seems easy - however I've hit a number of problems that make me think it might be better to not use grpc just yet.
The explanation of the problems requires a little background. At weave, traffic to frankenstein need to go through a couple of services first, for SSL and to be authenticated. So traffic goes:
internet -> frontend -> authfe -> frankenstein
- The frontend is Nginx, and adds/removes SSL. Its done this way for legacy reasons, so the certs can be managed in one place, although eventually we imagine we'll merge it with authfe. All traffic from frontend is sent to authfe.
- Authfe checks the auth tokens / cookie etc and then picks the service to forward the RPC to.
- Frankenstein accepts the reads and does the right thing with them.
First problem I hit was Nginx won't proxy http2 requests - it can accept them, but all calls downstream are http1 (see https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/923). This wasn't such a big deal, so it now looks like:
internet --(grpc/http2)--> frontend --(grpc/http1)--> authfe --(grpc/http1)--> frankenstein
Next problem was golang grpc server won't accept http1 requests (see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/grpc-io/JnjCYGPMUms). It is possible to link a grpc server in with a normal go http mux, as long as the mux server is serving over SSL, as the golang http client & server won't do http2 over anything other than an SSL connection. This would require making all our service to service comms SSL. So I had a go a writing a grpc http1 server, and got pretty far. But is was a bit of a mess.
So finally I thought I'd make a separate grpc frontend for this, running in parallel with the frontend/authfe combo on a different port - and first up I'd need a grpc reverse proxy. Ideally we'd have some nice, generic reverse proxy that only knew about a map from service names -> downstream service, and didn't need to decode & re-encode every request as it went through. It seems like this can't be done with golang's grpc library - see https://github.com/mwitkow/grpc-proxy/issues/1.
And then I was surprised to find you can't do grpc from browsers! See http://www.grpc.io/faq/ - not important to us, but I'm starting to question why we decided to use grpc in the first place?
It would seem we could have most of the benefits of grpc with protos over HTTP, and this wouldn't preclude moving to grpc when its a bit more mature? In fact, the grcp FAQ even admits as much:
> Why is gRPC better than any binary blob over HTTP/2?
> This is largely what gRPC is on the wire.
This will avoid duplicate MetricFamilies, thereby shrinking the size
of the federation payload and also creating legal text format.
Also, add unit tests for federation. They were also needed for the
previous state of the code, but were missing.
This adds a flag -storage.local.engine which allows turning off local
storage in Prometheus. Instead of adding if-conditions and nil checks to
all parts of Prometheus that deal with Prometheus's local storage
(including the web interface), disabling local storage simply means
replacing the normal local storage with a noop version that throws
samples away and returns empty query results. We also don't add the noop
storage to the fanout appender to decrease internal overhead.
Instead of returning empty results, an alternate behavior could be to
return errors on any query that point out that the local storage is
disabled. Not sure which one is more preferable, so I went with the
empty result option for now.
Switched to testing by way of the static_configs rather than
dns_sd_config parameter. Verified that the revised test both passes
without network access, and also still catches the bug it's supposed to
cover.
The current separation between lexer and parser is a bit fuzzy when it
comes to operators, aggregators and other keywords. The lexer already
tries to determine the type of a token, even though that type might
change depending on the context.
This led to the problematic behavior that no tokens known to the lexer
could be used as label names, including operators (and, by, ...),
aggregators (count, quantile, ...) or other keywords (for, offset, ...).
This change additionally checks whether an identifier is one of these
types. We might want to check whether the specific item identification
should be moved from the lexer to the parser.
