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title

Firehose

Firehose

The unified message bus for Infra services.

At a Glance

Hosts
  • firehose*.openstack.org
Puppet
Projects

Overview

The firehose is an infra run MQTT broker that is a place for any infra run service to publish events to. The concept behind it is that if anything needs to consume an event from an infra run service we should have a single place to go for consuming them.

firehose.openstack.org hosts an instance of Mosquitto to be the MQTT broker and also locally runs an instance of germqtt to publish the gerrit event stream over MQTT and lpmqtt to publish a launchpad event stream over MQTT.

Connection Info

firehose.openstack.org has 2 open ports for MQTT traffic:

  • 1883 - The default MQTT port
  • 80 - Uses websockets for the MQTT communication
  • 8883 - The default SSL/TLS MQTT port
  • 8080 - Uses websockets for SSL/TLS encrypted MQTT communication

Note

The websockets ports are currently disabled due to Mosquitto bug #278. Once this is resolved the websockets ports will be reopened.

Topics

Topics at a top level are set based on the name of the service publishing the messages. The higher levels are specified by the publisher. For example:

gerrit/openstack-infra/germqtt/comment-added

is a typical message topic on firehose. The top level 'gerrit' specifies the service the message is from, and the rest of the message comes from germqtt (the daemon used for publishing the gerrit events)

MQTT topics are hierarchical and you can filter your subscription on part of the hierarchy. [1]

Services Publishing to firehose

As of right now the following services publish messages to the firehose:

Service Base Topic Source of Messages
ansible ansible ansible_mqtt_plugin
gerrit gerrit germqtt
launchpad launchpad lpmqtt
subunit worker gearman-subunit subunit-gearman-worker

For a full schema description see firehose_schema

Client Usage

There is no outside access to publishing messages to the firehose available, however anyone is able to subscribe to any topic services publish to. To interact with the firehose you need to use the MQTT protocol. The specific contents of the payload are dictated by the service publishing the messages. So this section only covers how to subscribe and receive the messages not how to consume the content received.

Available Clients

The MQTT community wiki maintains a page that lists available client bindings for many languages here: https://github.com/mqtt/mqtt.github.io/wiki/libraries For python using the paho-mqtt library is recommended

CLI Example

The mosquitto project also provides both a CLI publisher and subscriber client that can be used to easily subscribe to any topic and receive the messages. On debian based distributions these are included in the mosquitto-clients package. For example, to subscribe to every topic on the firehose you would run:

mosquitto_sub -h firehose.openstack.org --topic '#'

You can adjust the value of the topic parameter to make what you're subscribing to more specific.

MQTT Protocol Example

Interacting with firehose on the unecrpyted MQTT port is normally pretty easy in most language bindings. Here are some examples that will have the same behavior as the CLI example above and will subscribe to all topics on the firehose and print it to STDOUT.

Python

import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt


def on_connect(client, userdata, flags, rc):
    print("Connected with result code " + str(rc))
    client.subscribe('#')

def on_message(client, userdata, msg):
    print(msg.topic+" "+str(msg.payload))

# Create a websockets client
client = mqtt.Client()
client.on_connect = on_connect
client.on_message = on_message

# Connect to the firehose
client.connect('firehose.openstack.org')
# Listen forever
client.loop_forever()

Haskell

This requires the mqtt-hs library to be installed.

{-# Language DataKinds, OverloadedStrings #-}

module Subscribe where

import Control.Concurrent
import Control.Concurrent.STM
import Control.Monad (unless, forever)
import System.Exit (exitFailure)
import System.IO (hPutStrLn, stderr)

import qualified Network.MQTT as MQTT

topic :: MQTT.Topic
topic = "#"

handleMsg :: MQTT.Message MQTT.PUBLISH -> IO ()
handleMsg msg = do
    let t = MQTT.topic $ MQTT.body msg
        p = MQTT.payload $ MQTT.body msg
    print t
    print p

main :: IO ()
main = do
  cmds <- MQTT.mkCommands
  pubChan <- newTChanIO
  let conf = (MQTT.defaultConfig cmds pubChan)
              { MQTT.cHost = "firehose.openstack.org" }
  _ <- forkIO $ do
    qosGranted <- MQTT.subscribe conf [(topic, MQTT.Handshake)]
    forever $ atomically (readTChan pubChan) >>= handleMsg
  terminated <- MQTT.run conf
  print terminated

Go

package main
import (
  "fmt"
  MQTT "github.com/eclipse/paho.mqtt.golang"
  "os"
  "strconv"
  "time"
)
func onMessageReceived(client MQTT.Client, msg MQTT.Message) {
    fmt.Printf("TOPIC: %s\n", msg.Topic())
    fmt.Printf("MSG: %s\n", msg.Payload())
}
func main() {
    hostname, _ := os.Hostname()
    opts := &MQTT.ClientOptions{
        ClientID: hostname+strconv.Itoa(time.Now().Second()),
    }
    opts.AddBroker("tcp://firehose.openstack.org:1883")
    opts.OnConnect = func(c MQTT.Client) {
        if token := c.Subscribe("#", 0, onMessageReceived); token.Wait() && token.Error() != nil {
            fmt.Println(token.Error())
            os.Exit(1)
        }
    }
    client := MQTT.NewClient(opts)
    if token := client.Connect(); token.Wait() && token.Error() != nil {
        panic(token.Error())
    }
    for {
        time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
    }
}

Websocket Example

In addition to using the raw MQTT protocol firehose.o.o provides a websocket interface on port 80 that MQTT traffic can go through. This is especially useful for web applications that intend to consume any events from MQTT. To see an example of this in action you can try: http://mitsuruog.github.io/what-mqtt/ (the source is available here: https://github.com/mitsuruog/what-mqtt) and use that to subscribe to any topics on firehose.openstack.org.

Another advantage of using websockets over port 80 is that it's much more firewall friendly, especially in environments that are more locked down. If you would like to consume events from the firehose and are concerned about a firewall blocking your access, the websocket interface is a good choice.

You can also use the paho-mqtt python library to subscribe to mqtt over websockets fairly easily. For example this script will subscribe to all topics on the firehose and print it to STDOUT

import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt


def on_connect(client, userdata, flags, rc):
    print("Connected with result code " + str(rc))
    client.subscribe('#')

def on_message(client, userdata, msg):
    print(msg.topic+" "+str(msg.payload))

# Create a websockets client
client = mqtt.Client(transport="websockets")
client.on_connect = on_connect
client.on_message = on_message

# Connect to the firehose
client.connect('firehose.openstack.org', port=80)
# Listen forever
client.loop_forever()

Using SSL/TLS

If you would like to connect to the firehose using ssl to encrypt the events you recieve from MQTT you just need to connect with ssl enabled via either of the encypted ports. If you'd like to verify the server ssl certificate when connecting you'll need to provide a CA bundle to use as most MQTT clients do not know how to use the system trusted CA bundle like most http clients.

To connect to the firehose and subscribe to all topics you can use the mosquitto CLI client:

mosquitto_sub --topic '#' -h firehose.openstack.org --cafile /etc/ca-certificates/extracted/tls-ca-bundle.pem -p 8883

You can use python:

import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt


def on_connect(client, userdata, flags, rc):
    print("Connected with result code " + str(rc))
    client.subscribe('#')


def on_message(client, userdata, msg):
    print(msg.topic+" "+str(msg.payload))


# Create an SSL encrypted websockets client
client = mqtt.Client()
client.tls_set(ca_certs='/etc/ca-certificates/extracted/tls-ca-bundle.pem')
client.on_connect = on_connect
client.on_message = on_message

# Connect to the firehose
client.connect('firehose.openstack.org', port=8883)
client.loop_forever()

Or with ruby:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mqtt'

client = MQTT::Client.new
client.host = 'firehose.openstack.org'
client.ssl = true
client.cert_file = '/etc/ca-certificates/extracted/tls-ca-bundle.pem'
client.port = 8883
client.connect()
client.subscribe('#')

client.get do |topic,message|
    puts message
    end

Example Use Cases

Event Notifications

A common use case for the event bus is to get a notification when an event occurs. There is an open source tool, mqttwarn that makes setting this up off the firehose (or any other mqtt broker) very straightforward.

You can use mqttwarn to setup custom notifications to a large number of tools and services. (both local and remote). You can read the full docs on how to configure and use mqttwarn at https://github.com/jpmens/mqttwarn/wiki and https://github.com/jpmens/mqttwarn/blob/master/README.md

IMAP and MX

We're using Cyrus as an IMAP server in order to consume launchpad bug events via email. The configuration of the admin password account and creation of the lpmqtt user for Cyrus were completed using the following:

$ sudo saslpasswd2 cyrus
$ cyradm --user=cyrus --server=localhost
Password:
localhost> create user.lpmqtt

An MX record has also been set up to point to the firehose server.