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Ballot

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Consul-based leader election tool with tagging support and hooks for automated tasks on leadership changes.

What is it?

Ballot fills a gap in Consul's functionality by providing a built-in feature for leader election among registered services. It designates a leader among multiple services, marks the chosen leader with a specified tag, and allows for the execution of a script whenever a leader election occurs.

How does it work?

Ballot leverages Consul's session and key-value (KV) store APIs to perform leader election:

  1. Session Creation: Each service instance creates a Consul session.
  2. Lock Acquisition: Instances attempt to acquire a lock on a predefined Consul KV key using their session.
  3. Leader Election: The instance that successfully acquires the lock is elected as the leader.
  4. Tagging the Leader: The leader is tagged with a specified tag (e.g., primary) in the Consul catalog.
  5. Health Checks: The leader's health is continuously monitored. If the leader becomes unhealthy, the lock is released, and a new election occurs.
  6. Hooks Execution: Custom scripts or commands can be executed when a service is promoted to leader or demoted.
sequenceDiagram
    participant B1 as Ballot Instance 1
    participant B2 as Ballot Instance 2
    participant C as Consul

    B1->>C: Create Session
    B2->>C: Create Session
    B1->>C: Acquire Lock (KV)
    Note right of C: B1 wins lock
    B2->>C: Acquire Lock (KV)
    Note right of C: B2 fails, waits
    B1->>C: Tag service as "primary"
    B1->>B1: Execute execOnPromote
    loop Health Check
        C->>B1: Monitor health
    end
    Note over B1: B1 becomes unhealthy
    C-->>B1: Session invalidated
    B1->>B1: Execute execOnDemote
    B2->>C: Acquire Lock (KV)
    Note right of C: B2 wins lock
    B2->>C: Tag service as "primary"
    B2->>B2: Execute execOnPromote
Loading

More information about Consul sessions and leader elections can be found in https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/tutorials/developer-configuration/application-leader-elections.

Requirements

  • Go 1.21 or higher
  • Consul 1.10 or higher

Installation

Using Go:

go install github.com/ncode/ballot@latest

From source:

git clone https://github.com/ncode/ballot
cd ballot
go build -o ballot .

Usage

# Run with a config file
ballot run --config /path/to/config.yaml

# Default config location: $HOME/.ballot.yaml
ballot run

Ballot also supports environment variables via Viper. Any config option can be set using the BALLOT_ prefix (e.g., BALLOT_CONSUL_TOKEN).

How to try it?

  1. Install Ballot
$ git clone https://github.com/ncode/ballot
$ cd configs/development
  1. Run the development setup
$ make &
  1. Open consul ui http://127.0.0.1:8500/ui/dc1/services/my-service/instances
  2. Play with the health checks and see the election happening and moving
$ find consul/state
consul/state
consul/state/ready1
consul/state/ready3
consul/state/ready2
$ rm consul/state/ready1
$ sleep 10
$ touch consul/state/ready1
$ rm consul/state/ready2
$ sleep 10
$ touch consul/state/ready2
$ rm consul/state/ready3
$ sleep 10
$ touch consul/state/ready3

Environment variables

During the call of execOnPromote and execOnDemote a few environment variables are injected in case you need to use the address and port of the service for automation.

$ADDRESS   # IP Address of the current service elected
$PORT      # Port of the service
$SESSIONID # Current SessionID of the elected master

Configuration

The configuration file is a yaml file with the following structure:

consul:
  token:                                    # Consul token
election:
  enabled:
    - my-service-name                       # Name of the service enabled for election
  services:
    my-service-name:                        # Name of the service
      id: my-service-name                   # ID of the service
      key: my-service-name                  # Key to be used for the lock in Consul, this should be the same across all nodes
      token:                                # Token to be used for the session in Consul
      serviceChecks:                        # List of checks to be used to determine the health of the service
        - ping                              # Name of the check
      primaryTag: primary                   # Tag to be used to mark the leader
      execOnPromote: '/bin/echo primary'    # Command to be executed when the service is elected as leader
      execOnDemote: '/bin/echo secondary'   # Command to be executed when the service is demoted as leader
      ttl: 10s                              # TTL for the session
      lockDelay: 5s                         # Lock delay for the session

Development and examples

Examples of configuration files and service definitions can be found inside configs/development.

Production deployment

Ballot handles SIGINT and SIGTERM for graceful shutdown. Logs are output in JSON format to stdout.

Systemd example:

[Unit]
Description=Ballot Leader Election
After=network.target consul.service
Wants=consul.service

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ballot run --config /etc/ballot/config.yaml
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Multiple elections: Ballot can manage elections for multiple services simultaneously. Add multiple entries to election.enabled and configure each under election.services.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

  • Open an issue to discuss significant changes before submitting a PR
  • Include tests for bug fixes and new features
  • Run go test ./... and go vet ./... before submitting

TODO

  • Allow to pre-define the preferred leader

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See the LICENSE file for details.