OpenShift Service Mesh on IBM System Z/LinuxONE Part II: Build Bookinfo from Source

This is Part II of a series of articles on how to install and test OpenShift Service Mesh on IBM System Z/LinuxONE. Part I: Installation covered how to install OSSM. NB: This article is also published on the IBM community blog site.

The official documentaton says that it’s not possible to install and run bookinfo on OSSM on Z or P systems. Here in Part II we make it possible by showing you how to build the bookinfo images from source, and altering the bookinfo deployment yaml files to reference those images.

The Bookinfo Example Microservices Suite

First of all, it must be noted that the Bookinfo example is not a supported Red Hat or IBM product. It is simply an open-source example of how a suite of microservices can be deployed in Service Mesh and illustrates how to use many of its useful features.

The bookinfo example images are available pre-built for the amd64 (x86) architecture, but not for s390x (IBM System Z/LinuxONE), so we will illustrate here how to build your own, and push them to the registry and namespace of your choice.

The bookinfo examples are used extensively in the ‘Learn OpenShift’ tutorials. Having your own set of bookinfo images to follow those tutorials on Z can be very instructive and give you a great sense of confidence that all OSSM features work as advertised on Z, and that you know how to use and secure them in your own enterprise production OpenShift Service Mesh environment.

Prerequisites

To build a set of bookinfo test images to validate your installation, and see how Red Hat OSSM works in practice, you will need the packages git and podman-docker installed on an IBM System Z to build the bookinfo test images. podman-docker provides the Red Hat user-space program podman which is aliased as the docker program you might be more familiar with.

You’ll want to have podman version ≥ 3.0 installed, which implement the --build-args feature, which is used in the container build scripts to generate docker images with different images which invoke different features of several of the microservices. On RHEL, you can determine which versions you have installed with:

$ sudo yum list installed | grep podman
podman.s390x                                     3.0.1-6.module+el8.4.0+10607+f4da7515       @rhel-8-for-s390x-appstream-rpms
$ podman --version
podman version 3.0.2-dev

Also, make sure to have at least 9 GB disk space free allocated for your home directory, as podman stores the container images in your ~/.local directory; by contrast with docker, podman runs in user space and does not require a daemon service running as root to build container images.

Building the Bookinfo Test images for s390x architecture

The first thing we need to do is build the mysql base image that the bookinfo services will use:

$ git clone https://github.com/linux-on-ibm-z/dockerfile-examples.git
$ cd dockerfile-examples/MySQL/8.x
$ podman build . -t mysql-s390x:8.0
$ podman images | grep mysql
localhost/mysql-s390x                                          8.0               eea3731eb142  3 hours ago     555 MB

Now we can git the maistra-test-tool sources, checkout the maistra-2.0-z branch, navigate to the bookinfo source tree and build the bookinfo example test images to validate our OSSM operators:

$ git clone git@github.com:maistra/maistra-test-tool.git
$ cd maistra-test-tool
$ git checkout maistra-2.0-z
$ cd tests/samples/bookinfo/src
$ ./build-services.sh <your-version> <your-registry/your-namespace>

If the version of OSSM you installed in Part I was 2.0.3, for example, you would use 2.0.3 for the <your-version>. If you plan on pushing this to your own repository on quay.io, for example, the <your-registry/namespace> you would use is quay.io/<your-username-on-quay>.

Since I’m pushing these up to quay.io/zaccelerator the prefix tags each example image:

$ podman images examples-bookinfo | \
  grep zaccelerator | grep 2.0.3  | \
  awk '{printf "%s:%s\n", $1,$2}'
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-reviews-v1:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-reviews-v2:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-reviews-v3:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-mongodb:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-mysqldb:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-ratings-v-unhealthy:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-ratings-v-delayed:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-ratings-v-faulty:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-ratings-v2:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-ratings-v1:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-ratings-v-unavailable:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-details-v2:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-details-v1:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-productpage-v-flooding:2.0.3
quay.io/zaccelerator/examples-bookinfo-productpage-v1:2.0.3

and I can use that same image list to push them up to the repository:

for i in `podman images examples-bookinfo |\
          grep zaccelerator | grep 2.0.3  |\
          awk '{printf "%s:%s\n", $1,$2}'`
do
podman push $i
done

Now let’s take a look at these images in the repository, just to convince ourselves they are really there:

This is what it looks like in quay.io. It will look a little different if you are using a different registry.

And tagged correctly:

This is what it looks like in quay.io. It will look a little different if you are using a different registry.

It’s a good idea to check the repositories you pushed your images to for having the exact tags you intended, because we’re going to be referencing those by this specific version tag in the declarative bookinfo example yaml files in the next section.

Modifying Bookinfo deployment scripts to reference your images

First we need to update the references in the bookinfo sample yamls to refer to your own built-for-Z bookinfo test images.

$ cd maistra-test-tool/tests/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube
$ for i in *.yaml
> do
> sed -i 's,quay.io/maistra,<your-registry>/<your-namespace>,' $i
> sed -i 's/2.0.0-ibm-z/<your-version>/' $i
> done

Where <your-registry>is the name of the registry you pushed your images up to, <your-namespace> is, for example, your username on that registry or perhaps the name of an organization you created there, just for keeping all these example-bookinfo images together there. <your-version> is the version tag you built and pushed them with.

For example, I used quay.io for my registry, and pushed my example-bookinfo images up to the zaccelerator namespace in it, and tagged the images with version 2.0.3. So I ran:

for i in *.yaml
> do
> sed -i 's,quay.io/maistra,quay.io/zaccelerator,' $i
> sed -i 's/2.0.0-ibm-z/2.0.3/' $i
> done

Two ways to check that your image tags referenced in the .yaml files match the tags on your images are grep 'image:' *.yaml

and git diff:

git diff gives you some context as well as assuring you that you did not inadvertently change something else

These will be useful commands to return to if your OpenShift deployments have trouble pulling the images for some reason; but you will have already checked in advance at least that your deployment yamls are set up to pull the bookinfo images that you built and pushed up to the registry of your choice.

Portable property, Pip!

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Stay tuned for Part III: Much Ado about Bookinfo to see how to deploy these images in your brand-new Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh installation!

Many thanks to Tony Gargya and Mark Herman for editing advice!