ASP and Marathon ASP Controller Usage¶

The F5 Marathon ASP Controller instance has been deployed. Now we need to test our setup. To do so, we will setup a backend application that will be reached by the frontend application.

Warning

Make sure that mesos-dns is running. To check you may go to the Marathon UI and check the status of the application “mesos-dns”. If it’s not running, click on restart to re-initialize it

To deploy the backend application, connect to the Marathon UI and click on “Create Application”

{
  "container": {
    "docker": {
      "portMappings": [
        {
          "servicePort": 31899,
          "protocol": "tcp",
          "containerPort": 80,
          "hostPort": 0
        }
      ],
      "privileged": false,
      "image": "10.2.10.10:5000/f5-demo-app",
      "network": "BRIDGE",
      "forcePullImage": true
    },
    "type": "DOCKER",
    "volumes": []
  },
  "mem": 128,
  "labels": {
    "asp": "enable",
    "ASP_COUNT_PER_APP": "2"
  },
  "env": {
      "F5DEMO_APP": "backend"
  },
  "cpus": 0.25,
  "instances": 1,
  "upgradeStrategy": {
    "maximumOverCapacity": 1,
    "minimumHealthCapacity": 1
  },
  "id": "my-backend"
}

You should see the following applications be created:

1. Your “my-backend” application
2. Another application created with 2 instances called : asp-my-backend. This is your ASP instances deployed in front of your application. You can see that 2 instances were deployed (done via the ASP_COUNT_PER_APP label)

To test your ASP instances, go to the Marathon UI > Application > asp-my-backend. Here you will see that 2 instances are deployed, click on the link specified for each of them:

If you are connected to the backend instances, it works as expected:

Now that our backend is deployed and fronted successfully by ASP, we should try to access it from the frontend application.

Go back to your frontend application on http://10.2.10.80. On this page you have a link to the backend, click on it.

You should see something like this:

On this page you may see the following information:

1. host header: the host is asp-my-backend. This is the DNS name for our cluster of ASP instances.
2. user-agent: We can see that the request came from the frontend application
3. x-forwarded-for: the request was coming from the BIG-IP (it does SNAT)