When it comes to logging in cloud environments like OpenShift you often read about concepts only. Twelve-factor-applications, stateless containers, console or stdout logging. Everything nice. A point where the online sources get really spare is how to apply these concepts practically.
First things first, let’s do a short wrap up of the basic concepts and then about how to apply them practically in a cloud environment like OpenShift.
The twelve factor application (https://12factor.net) is a manifest that describes how to deliver software-as-a-service. The main concepts are
- Setup automation, to minimize time and costs
- Clean contracts with the underlying operating system to offer a maximum portability between execution environments
- Suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms
- Minimize divergence between development and production, enabling continuous deployment
- Can scale up without significant changes to tooling
OpenShift in combination with Docker and stateless micro-services is a very good choice to achieve the goals proposed for the twelve factor app. With docker and kubernetes, we can automate the setup and also enable continuous deployment. When we run our software in docker containers, we get a maximum on portability because it is just a container we can shift from one system to another without worrying about the underlying operating system. The OpenShift scaling mechanism in combination with stateless microservices enables automatic scaling based on a load balancer.