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Deploy Blinkenlights

Caleb Clauset
  • Updated

Blinkenlights is a job queuing and load balancing component for Adobe InDesign Server. You can use it as a standalone product, or as an optional component for Typefi Server 8.6 or later.

A job queue is a buffer that stores job requests pending processing. Job queues map to one or more instances of InDesign Server. Blinkenlights supports multiple job queues, which allows clients to submit their jobs to the queue that best suits that type of work.

In addition to job queuing and load balancing, Blinkenlights enables:

  • Multiple queues
  • Prioritised job queuing
  • Status visibility
  • Job filtering
  • Performance metrics
  • Logging

Blinkenlights is built using a high availability cluster to ensure it can handle high traffic, and that no data is lost in the result of a server failure. It also supports a RESTful API to submit jobs, and control jobs, servers, and queues. You do not need Blinkenlights to run InDesign Server successfully, but we highly recommend it when you have multiple InDesign Server instances.

For more information about using Blinkenlights, see Getting started with Blinkenlight and Doing more with job queues.

Container Registry

You can docker pull the following packages from our container registry:

  • containers.typefi.com/blinkenlights:latest
  • containers.typefi.com/grafana:latest
  • containers.typefi.com/prometheus:latest
  • containers.typefi.com/nginx:latest

Troubleshooting

To restart the Blinkenlights node without reloading the task or service, visit /api/v1/restart.

Running Blinkenlights on Docker Desktop

  1. Edit the base docker-compose.yml with your MongoDB instance information.
    • You can use a local server or MongoDB Atlas. The database is less than 512 MB in production.
  2. Set the BL_LICENSE to the license key issued by Typefi.
  3. Run docker-compose up to start the instance.

Deploying Blinkenlights on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fargate

We will walkthrough an example of deploying Blinkenlights in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Fargate. This example assumes Blinkenlights has a public IP address (for internet access) and guides you through a complete setup. Your environment may be a simpler, or a more complex, version of this deployment.

You will need the Amazon ECS command-line interface (CLI) to deploy Blinkenlights. To install the Amazon ECS CLI, see ECS CLI installation.

Update parameters

  1. Rename ecs-params-sample-fargate.yml to ecs-params.yml and update the ecs-params.yml file for your desired environment.
  2. Rename docker-compose-sample-fargate.yml to docker-compose.yml and update the docker-compose.yml file and substitute the parameters as needed.
    • Point to your remote MongoDB database NODE_CONFIG. Don't have MongoDB? Try MongoDB Atlas. The free tier will suffice.
    • Update the Blinkenlights license BL_LICENSE.
    • Set the logging to point to the correct region (awslog-region). The default is us-east-1. This will create a cluster and service running on ECS that has Service Discovery. Service Discovery means Blinkenlights is discoverable by services on the same VPC.

Start Blinkenlights on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

  1. Permit access only from trusted private IP ranges (this step is optional and not necessary in all cases).
  2. Create and attach the task execution role: 
    aws iam --region us-east-1 create-role --role-name ecsTaskExecutionRole --assume-role-policy-document file://task-execution-assume-role.json
    aws iam --region us-east-1 attach-role-policy --role-name ecsTaskExecutionRole --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonECSTaskExecutionRolePolicy
  3. Create a cluster config: 
    ecs-cli configure --cluster blinkenlights --default-launch-type FARGATE --config-name blinkenlights --region AWS_REGION
  4. Create a CLI profile: 
    ecs-cli configure profile --access-key AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --secret-key AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY --profile-name blinkenlights-profile
  5. Create the security group: 
    aws ec2 create-security-group --group-name blinkenlights-sg --description "blinkenlights security group"
    This command outputs theAWS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID.
  6. Set security group inbound rules:
    • HTTP/HTTPS: 
      aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-id AWS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID --protocol tcp --port 80 --cidr RANGE
      aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-id AWS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID --protocol tcp --port 443 --cidr RANGE
    • Websocket: 
      aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-id AWS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID --protocol tcp --port 8081 --cidr RANGE
  7. Create a cluster: 
    ecs-cli up --cluster-config blinkenlights --ecs-profile blinkenlights-profile --vpc AWS_VPC_ID --subnets AWS_SUBNET_ID_1, AWS_SUBNET_ID_2 --security-group AWS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID
  8. Update ECS configuration.
    • Update the ecs-params.yml file with the subnet IDs and security group ID.
  9. Deploy service to cluster: 
    ecs-cli compose --project-name blinkenlights service up --private-dns-namespace blinkenlights --vpc AWS_VPC_ID --create-log-groups --cluster-config blinkenlights --ecs-profile blinkenlights-profile --enable-service-discovery
    or, 
    ecs-cli compose --ecs-params ecs-params.yml --project-name blinkenlights service up --vpc AWS_VPC_ID --cluster-config blinkenlights --ecs-profile blinkenlights-profile --enable-service-discovery --public-dns-namespace-id NAMESPACE-ID

Stop Blinkenlights on AWS

  1. Remove service: 
    ecs-cli compose --project-name blinkenlights service down --cluster-config blinkenlights --ecs-profile blinkenlights-profile
  2. Remove cluster: 
    ecs-cli down --cluster-config blinkenlights --ecs-profile blinkenlights-profile

Update and restart Blinkenlights on AWS

  • If you already have a Blinkenlights service: 
    aws ecs update-service --cluster CLUSTER_NAME --service SERVICE_NAME --force-new-deployment
    For Blinkenlights, the command would look like this: 
    aws ecs update-service --cluster blinkenlights --service blinkenlights --force-new-deployment
  • If you do not have a Blinkenlights service: 
    aws ecs update-service --cluster CLUSTER_NAME --service SERVICE_NAME
    For Blinkenlights, the command would look like this: 
    aws ecs update-service --cluster blinkenlights --service blinkenlights

See also

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