[skywalking-website] 01/01: Add blog to run skywalking on AWS

[ke...@apache.org]

This is an automated email from the ASF dual-hosted git repository.

kezhenxu94 pushed a commit to branch aws/sw
in repository https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/skywalking-website.git

commit d64f8084de6aca4796c538802a2a6917c1073d72
Author: kezhenxu94 <ke...@apache.org>
AuthorDate: Tue Dec 13 03:01:49 2022 +0000

    Add blog to run skywalking on AWS
---
 .../index.md                                       | 174 +++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 174 insertions(+)

diff --git a/content/blog/2022-12-13-how-to-run-apache-skywalking-on-aws-eks-rds/index.md b/content/blog/2022-12-13-how-to-run-apache-skywalking-on-aws-eks-rds/index.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..2e6923292e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/blog/2022-12-13-how-to-run-apache-skywalking-on-aws-eks-rds/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,174 @@
+---
+title: "How to run Apache SkyWalking on AWS EKS and RDS/Aurora"
+date: 2022-12-13
+author: [Zhenxu Ke](https://github.com/kezhenxu94)
+description: Introduce how to quickly set up Apache SkyWalking on AWS EKS and RDS/Aurora
+tags:
+- SkyWalking
+- Observability
+- Demo
+- AWS
+- RDS
+- Aurora
+---
+
+## Introduction
+
+Apache SkyWalking is an open source APM tool for monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems,
+especially designed for microservices, cloud native and container-based (Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos)
+architectures. It provides distributed tracing, service mesh observability, metric aggregation and
+visualization, and alarm.
+
+In this article, I will introduce how to quickly set up Apache SkyWalking on AWS EKS and RDS/Aurora,
+as well as a couple of sample services, monitoring services to observe SkyWalking itself.
+
+## Prerequisites
+
+- AWS account
+- [AWS CLI](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/install-cliv2.html)
+- [Terraform](https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html)
+- [kubectl](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/#kubectl)
+
+We can use the AWS web console or CLI to create all resources needed in this tutorial, but it can be
+too tedious and hard to debug when something goes wrong. So in this artical I will use Terraform to
+create all AWS resources, deploy SkyWalking, sample services, and load generator services (Locust).
+
+## Architecture
+
+The demo architecture is as follows:
+
+```mermaid
+graph LR
+    subgraph AWS
+        subgraph EKS
+          subgraph istio-system namespace
+              direction TB
+              OAP[[SkyWalking OAP]]
+              UI[[SkyWalking UI]]
+            Istio[[istiod]]
+          end
+          subgraph sample namespace
+              Service0[[Service0]]
+              Service1[[Service1]]
+              ServiceN[[Service ...]]
+          end
+          subgraph locust namespace
+              LocustMaster[[Locust Master]]
+              LocustWorkers0[[Locust Worker 0]]
+              LocustWorkers1[[Locust Worker 1]]
+              LocustWorkersN[[Locust Worker ...]]
+          end
+        end
+        RDS[[RDS/Aurora]]
+    end
+    OAP --> RDS
+    Service0 -. telemetry data -.-> OAP
+    Service1 -. telemetry data -.-> OAP
+    ServiceN -. telemetry data -.-> OAP
+    UI --query--> OAP
+    LocustWorkers0 -- traffic --> Service0
+    LocustWorkers1 -- traffic --> Service0
+    LocustWorkersN -- traffic --> Service0
+    Service0 --> Service1 --> ServiceN
+    LocustMaster --> LocustWorkers0
+    LocustMaster --> LocustWorkers1
+    LocustMaster --> LocustWorkersN
+    User --> LocustMaster
+```
+
+As shown in the architecture diagram, we need to create the following AWS resources:
+
+- EKS cluster
+- RDS instance or Aurora cluster
+
+Sounds simple, but there are a lot of things behind the scenes, such as VPC, subnets, security groups, etc.
+You have to configure them correctly to make sure the EKS cluster can connect to RDS instance/Aurora cluster
+otherwise the SkyWalking won't work. Luckily, Terraform can help us to create and destroy all these resources
+automatically.
+
+I have created a Terraform module to create all AWS resources needed in this tutorial, you can find it in the
+[GitHub repository](https://github.com/kezhenxu94/oap-load-test/tree/main/aws).
+
+## Create AWS resources
+
+First, we need to clone the GitHub repository and `cd` into the folder:
+
+```bash
+git clone https://github.com/kezhenxu94/oap-load-test.git
+```
+
+Then, we need to create a file named `terraform.tfvars` to specify the AWS region and other variables:
+
+```bash
+cat > terraform.tfvars <<EOF
+aws_access_key = ""
+aws_secret_key = ""
+cluster_name   = "skywalking-on-aws"
+region         = "ap-east-1"
+db_type        = "rds-postgresql"
+EOF
+```
+
+If you have already configured the AWS CLI, you can skip the `aws_access_key` and `aws_secret_key` variables.
+To install SkyWalking with RDS postgresql, set the `db_type` to `rds-postgresql`, to install SkyWalking with
+Aurora postgresql, set the `db_type` to `aurora-postgresql`.
+
+There are a lot of other variables you can configure, such as tags, sample services count, replicas, etc.,
+you can find them in the [variables.tf](https://github.com/kezhenxu94/oap-load-test/blob/main/aws/variables.tf).
+
+Then, we can run the following commands to initialize the Terraform module and download the required providers,
+then create all AWS resources:
+
+```bash
+terraform init
+terraform apply -var-file=terraform.tfvars
+```
+
+Type `yes` to confirm the creation of all AWS resources, or add the `-auto-approve` flag to the `terraform apply`
+to skip the confirmation:
+
+```bash
+terraform apply -var-file=terraform.tfvars -auto-approve
+```
+
+Now what you need to do is to wait for the creation of all AWS resources to complete, it may take a few minutes.
+You can check the progress of the creation in the AWS web console, and check the deployment progress of the services
+inside the EKS cluster.
+
+## Generate traffic
+
+Besides creating necessary AWS resources, the Terraform module also deploys SkyWalking, sample services, and Locust
+load generator services to the EKS cluster.
+
+You can access the Locust web UI to generate traffic to the sample services:
+
+```bash
+open http://$(kubectl get svc -n locust -l app=locust-master -o jsonpath='{.items[0].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}'):8089
+```
+
+The command opens the browser to the Locust web UI, you can configure the number of users and hatch rate to generate
+traffic.
+
+## Observe SkyWalking
+
+You can access the SkyWalking web UI to observe the sample services.
+
+First you need to forward the SkyWalking UI port to local
+
+```bash
+kubectl -n istio-system port-forward $(kubectl -n istio-system get pod -l app=skywalking -l component=ui -o name) 8080:8080
+```
+
+And then open the browser to http://localhost:8080 to access the SkyWalking web UI.
+
+## Observe RDS/Aurora
+
+You can also access the RDS/Aurora web console to observe the performance of RDS/Aurora instance/Aurora cluste.
+
+## Clean up
+
+When you are done with the demo, you can run the following command to destroy all AWS resources:
+
+```bash
+terraform destroy -var-file=terraform.tfvars -auto-approve
+```