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System tooling overview

For new members of our team, this is an overview of system tooling elements used in cloud.gov operations and how they’re implemented in our BOSH/Cloud Foundry architecture.

Architecture components

Log aggregation

Logs to AWS CloudWatch

cloud.gov operations uses Amazon’s CloudWatch log agent to collect system and Cloud Foundry logs and push them to CloudWatch.

As seen in the cg-aws-boshrelease repository, the awslogs job has a configuration file referencing the system logs to be ingested for each host.

The job also runs a pre-start script on each host, which creates an additional config file referencing every log file under /var/vcap/sys/log. This config file uses the instance ID and the absolute path to the log file to create a unique log stream name, which you can then view in the AWS console.

For more information, consult the CloudWatch agent reference.

Monitoring

NTP

To keep system clock time accurate, the cloud.gov operations BOSH deployment installs a cron job on each host for the root user, which runs ntpdate every 15 minutes.

From the cg-deploy-bosh repository, the global NTP configuration is defined in the agent section of the BOSH deployment manifests and ends up on each host in /var/vcap/bosh/etc/ntpserver. This configuration is used in turn by the sync-time script from the bosh_ntp stage of the BOSH stemcell builder.

This configuration is kept geographically diverse by using NIST Internet Time Servers and leveraging the global address which resolves across all the server addresses in a round-robin sequence to equalize the load across all of the servers.

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