java-spring-api VS Fluentd

We start with an example app that will generate logs. We will use a Java API from a previous post on deploying with Helm. For the complete code for this section take a look at this branch here. We see that we have a logback.xml where we specify to write logs to a file. (See here te relevant part)

We will add OAS3 documentation to a Java Spring API from a previous post on Kubernetes Helm. The completed code for this post is found on github here.

We will start off with a Spring Boot API from this previous post on deployments with helm. We will extend this application with a database connection and use testcontainers in the integration tests. The complete code for this post can be on github here.

In this post we will take the Kubernetes deployment we build in several previous posts on Kubernetes and turn it into a Helm package. The final project code can be found on github here.

We are going to reuse an application that we made in an earlier post (found here). It’s just a basic setup with a greetings endpoint. The code that is used is found on github here.

Now we have the architecture in place. We only need to add a Prometheus Rule for our application that triggers an alert. We build from the Spring Boot application that we deployed in the cluster in an earlier post. The configuration of this rule is done as another CRD and is found on this branch on github.

The full code can be found on this branch. Here are the steps I took.

We start off with the example application from an earlier post. The complete autoscaling code can be found on github.

If you just can’t wait to dive into the code. The complete configuration can be found on github.

With our library in place we can remove the pipeline config out of our Jenkins file and refer to it as follows: (or checkout the code here)

Get Started with Fluentd

Currently, there is no cluster-wide logging. Fluentd can be used to have a unified logging layer for the cluster.

Fluentd hasn't been touched for 8 years? Looking at the repo it looks like it's alive and well. https://github.com/fluent/fluentd

Fluentd is an open-source log management and data collection tool. Just like Logstash, Fluentd uses a pipeline-based architecture. This allows it to collect data from various sources and network traffic and forward it to various destinations.

Fluentd is a powerful log management tool that offers organizations the flexibility and scalability required to handle large volumes of log data from a variety of sources and transport it to various destinations. Utilizing a flexible and modular architecture, Fluentd allows users to easily add new input and output plugins to integrate with a wide range of systems and applications. It supports a wide range of data sources and destinations, including databases, message queues, and data stores.

Substation is an affordable alternative to products like Cribl (~10x cost savings) and is easier to manage than similar open-source projects such as Logstash and fluentd. It's been used in production by the security team at Brex for 2+ years and is ready for any scale, even beyond 100,000 events per second!

There are probably too many to chose from. Logstash, Promtail, Vector, Filebeat, FluentD, Logagent and probably many more

To alleviate some of the pain, it’s a good idea to use industry standards and tooling like OpenTelemetry (https://opentelemetry.io). For data collection specific to logs, open-source tools like LogStash and Fluentd are also popular.

Created and maintained by the creators of fluentd, fluentbit is a lightweight, fast, and scalable logging and metrics processor and forwarder. Built specifically for the cloud and containerized environments, it allows users to collect data from any source, enrich it with filters and forward it to the tool of their choice.