grafana/pkg/aggregator

aggregator

This is a package that is intended to power the aggregation of microservices within Grafana. The concept as well as implementation is largely borrowed from kube-aggregator.

Why aggregate services?

Grafana's future architecture will entail the same API Server design as that of Kubernetes API Servers. API Servers provide a standard way of stitching together API Groups through discovery and shared routing patterns that allows them to aggregate to a parent API Server in a seamless manner. Since we desire to break Grafana monolith up into more functionally divided microservices, aggregation does the job of still being able to provide these services under a single address. Other benefits of aggregation include free health checks and being able to independently roll out features for each service without downtime.

To read more about the concept, see here.

Note that, this aggregation will be a totally internal detail to Grafana. External fully functional APIServers that may themselves act as parent API Servers to Grafana will never be made aware of them. Any of the APIService related to Grafana Groups registered in a real K8s environment will take the address of Grafana's parent server (which will bundle grafana-aggregator).

kube-aggregator versus grafana-aggregator

The grafana-aggregator component will work similarly to how kube-aggregator works for kube-apiserver, the major difference being that it doesn't require core V1 APIs such as Service. Early on, we decided to not have core V1 APIs in the root Grafana API Server. In order to still be able to implement aggregation, we do the following in this Go package:

1. We do not start the core shared informer factories as well as any default controllers that utilize them. This is achieved using DisabledPostStartHooks facility under the GenericAPIServer's RecommendedConfig.
2. We provide an externalname Kind API implementation under service.grafana.app group which works functionally equivalent to the idea with the same name under core/v1/Service.
3. Lastly, we swap the default available condition controller with the custom one written by us. This one is based on our externalname (service.grafana.app) implementation. We register separate PostStartHooks using AddPostStartHookOrDie on the GenericAPIServer to start the corresponding custom controller as well as requisite informer factories for our own externalname Kind.

Gotchas (Pay Attention)

1. grafana-aggregator uses file storage under /tmp. System restarts won't preserve any configuration.
   1. Ensure any externalname and APIService configuration is in place post system restarts when developing locally.
2. Since grafana-aggregator outputs configuration (TLS and kubeconfig) that is used in the invocation of aggregated servers, ensure you start the aggregated service after launching the aggregator during local development.