How can I deploy a crate cluster on Giant Swarm?

Question

I have been trying to set up a working crate cluster on Giant Swarm for quite a while now but haven't been really successfull so far.

Here are my attempts so far:

• Using multicast and deploying crate as a single component. This works if all instances of this component end up on the same host, unfortunately this isn't reliable.

• Using unicast with two components, which each expose port 4300 via url. This results in messages being received by each component in the discovery interval ( every 30 secounds by default ). Unfortunately Giant Swarm only supports HTTP on its urls, so all messages that are error messages from something other than HTTP being sent by the component.

• Using unicast with two components and trying to discover them via their IPs. I set up Giant Swarm dependencies from one component to the other (circular dependencies are not supported). I can't get this to work because Giant Swarm doesn't allow me to run scripts before the docker container is created ( which is used in this blog post to run crate on the google cloud platform ) and docker does not support bidirectional linking.

I am out of ideas at this point, is there something I am missing about either crate or Giant Swarm? The only example I saw so far of something similar working was the blog post I linked above and it uses a mechanic I cannot use on Giant Swarm.

I would appreciate any kind of input on how to make this work or ideas leading in the right direction.

Answer 1

The current (May 2015) answer is: On a private Giant Swarm cluster, which we provide to customers on request, we support Multicasting. So the road is paved there for Crate.IO clustering.

We use Weave for the networking part.

Edit September 2015: We just published a blog post explaining how to set up a Crate cluster on Giant Swarm.

Answer 2

I'm sorry to say that it is not possible to deploy a Crate cluster (>1 node) on Giant Swarm at the moment (due to reasons you've mentioned). We (Crate.IO) are already in contact with Giant Swarm regarding that.