In the coming weeks I’m performing some testing of a new application on a Cassandra cluster. To add a little randomness into some of the tests I thought it would be interesting to give the Cassandra service a little kick. I created a simple Ansible playbook this afternoon that does this. A simple Chaos Monkey if you like. Here’s the basic flow of the playbook…

  1. Select random host from play_hosts.
  2. Stop service.
  3. Wait for interval.
  4. Start service.
  5. Wait for Service back up, Port?
  6. Wait for second defined interval.

These tasks are repeated n number of times as specified by the user. This playbook is interesting because it uses a couple of nifty tricks…

The first is a method to dynamically generate a list to iterate over. This is how we control the number of times we restart the service.

- name: Generate a list we will iterate over
    set_fact:
      restart_iterations: "{{ restart_iterations | default([]) + [item | int] }}"
    with_sequence: start=1 end="{{ max_iterations }}"
    run_once: yes

The second uses the loop construct. The current_iteration variable is made available in the tasks.yml file

- name: Run main tasks file
    include_tasks: tasks.yml
    loop: "{{ restart_iterations }}"
    loop_control:
      loop_var: current_iteration

The playbook can optionally produce a log to make it a little easier to see what nodes it’s executing on…

tail -f /tmp/service_restarter.log
2019-01-27 18:38:51 CET - Current iteration is 1 and is executing on cnode2
2019-01-27 18:41:18 CET - Current iteration is 2 and is executing on cnode4
2019-01-27 18:43:47 CET - Current iteration is 3 and is executing on cnode3
2019-01-27 18:46:15 CET - Current iteration is 4 and is executing on cnode3
2019-01-27 18:48:42 CET - Current iteration is 5 and is executing on cnode5
2019-01-27 18:51:07 CET - Current iteration is 6 and is executing on cnode2
2019-01-27 18:53:34 CET - Current iteration is 7 and is executing on cnode1
2019-01-27 18:56:03 CET - Current iteration is 8 and is executing on cnode4
2019-01-27 18:58:29 CET - Current iteration is 9 and is executing on cnode4
2019-01-27 19:00:55 CET - Current iteration is 10 and is executing on cnode2

Here’s how you might execute the playbook…

ansible-playbook -l cassandra -i inventory service_restarter.yml

The playbook is available over on my github/ServiceRestarter.

While this playbook was designed with Cassandra in mind it should work for any service that listens on a TCP port. See the README file for an explanation of the variables.