DDevelopment & Design

HAProxy load balancing with sticky sessions based on request body

Integrating systems you have no influence on needs a lot of workarounds. Recently we could not scale Python service consuming SOAP messages with a new hardware. It just didn’t benefit from more processing cores. On the other hand (and this happens often with older software) setting up several instances gave almost linear scalability. Only thing left – configure a loadbalancer and we are done.

Easier said than done. We had to make sure messages are loadbalanced but also that all messages related to given customer USSD conversation always hit the same backend service. So, we had to use application layer information to configure sticky sessions. This is not straightforward in HAProxy when you have to look into http payload and parse some specific information. We used HAProxy 1.6 and simple LUA script to do just that:

core.Alert("LUA script parsing SOAP element loaded");

function parseElement(txn, salt)

    local payload = txn.req:dup()

    -- parses integer value from element named "element"
    local value = string.match(string.match(payload, "element>%d+<"), "%d+")
    core.Info("value: " .. value)
    return value
end

-- register HAProxy "fetch"
core.register_fetches("parseElement", parseElement)

Put this script into a file and it can be loaded in HAProxy configuration using lua-load directive.

Script registers new HAProxy fetch which can be used to configure session stickiness.

balance roundrobin
stick-table type string size 30k expire 30m
stick on "lua.parseElement" table nodes

You have to also make sure all payload is loaded before you start parsing it. This can be achieved with option http-buffer-request configuration directive.

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DDevelopment & Design

Simple trick to DRY your Grails controller

Grails controllers are not very DRY. It's easy to find duplicated code fragments in default generated controller. Take a look at code sample below. It is duplicated four times in show, edit, update and delete actions:

class BookController {
def show() {
def bookInstance = Book.get(params.id)
if (!bookInstance) {
flash.message = message(code: 'default.not.found.message', args: [message(code: 'book.label', default: 'Book'), params.id])
redirect(action: "list")
return
        }
        [bookInstance: bookInstance]
    }
}

Why is it duplicated?

There is a reason for that duplication, though. If you move this snippet to a method, it can redirect to "list" action, but it can't prevent controller from further execution. After you call redirect, response status changes to 302, but after method exits, controller still runs subsequent code.

Solution

At TouK we've implemented a simple trick to resolve that situation:

  1. wrap everything with a simple withStoppingOnRender method,
  2. whenever you want to render or redirect AND stop controller execution - throw EndRenderingException.

We call it Big Return - return from a method and return from a controller at once. Here is how it works:

class BookController {
def show(Long id) {
withStoppingOnRender {
Book bookInstance = Book.get(id)
validateInstanceExists(bookInstance)
            [bookInstance: bookInstance]
        }
    }

protected Object withStoppingOnRender(Closure closure) {
try {
return closure.call()
        } catch (EndRenderingException e) {}
    }

private void validateInstanceExists(Book instance) {
if (!instance) {
flash.message = message(code: 'default.not.found.message', args: [message(code: 'book.label', default: 'Book'), params.id])
redirect(action: "list")
throw new EndRenderingException()
        }
    }
}

class EndRenderingException extends RuntimeException {}

Example usage

For simple CRUD controllers, you can use this solution and create some BaseController class for your controllers. We use withStoppingOnRender in every controller so code doesn't look like a spaghetti, we follow DRY principle and code is self-documented. Win-win-win! Here is a more complex example:

class DealerController {
@Transactional
def update() {
withStoppingOnRender {
Dealer dealerInstance = Dealer.get(params.id)
validateInstanceExists(dealerInstance)
validateAccountInExternalService(dealerInstance)
checkIfInstanceWasConcurrentlyModified(dealerInstance, params.version)
            dealerInstance.properties = params
saveUpdatedInstance(dealerInstance)
redirectToAfterUpdate(dealerInstance)
        }
    }
}