podman-movie-demo

A simple demo of using podman to run containers that serve a list of recommended movie ids, given a user id. The instruction covers 1. running a single container and 2. running two containers with a load balancer. A simple load testing is conducted to compare their performances.

Installation

Reference: https://www.atlantic.net/dedicated-server-hosting/how-to-install-and-use-podman-on-ubuntu-20-04/

Install podman on Ubuntu 20.04:

sudo apt-get update -y

sudo apt-get install curl wget gnupg2 -y

sudo source /etc/os-release
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list"

wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/Release.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update -qq -y
sudo apt-get -qq --yes install podman

Install dev dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.dev.txt

Training a collaborative filtering model

Reference https://www.jiristodulka.com/post/recsys_cf/

Run train_model.ipynb to train the model and obtain a prediction of top 10 movie ids for all 610 users, saved in top_n_movie_ids.pkl.

Containerizing

Single container

Build an image and run a container named deployment in the background:

podman build -t deployment .
podman run -d --name deployment -p 5000:5000 deployment

Test out the API:

curl localhost:5000/recommend/10
# should return 1204,898,1237,1262,1272,1196,50,112552,318,904

Perform simple load testing with Apache Bench (200 concurrent requests, 10000 requests in total)

# if not installed, run `sudo apt install apache2-utils`
ab -n 10000 -c 200 http://localhost:5000/recommend/10

Percentage results from Apache Bench:

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    309
  66%    317
  75%    323
  80%    327
  90%    350
  95%    381
  98%   1325
  99%   1349
 100%   3360 (longest request)

Stop the container

podman stop deployment

Two containers with a load balancer

Reference: https://notes.elmiko.dev/2020/12/27/messing-around-with-nginx-podman.html

Create a podman network named deployment_net

podman network create deployment_net

Build an image and run two containers named deployment1 and deployment2 in the background. Specify --network deployment_net so the containers reside in the same network space:

podman build -t deployment .
podman run -d --name deployment1 --network deployment_net deployment
podman run -d --name deployment2 --network deployment_net deployment

Build and run the NGINX container to serve as the load balancer in the foreground:

podman run -v `pwd`/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:Z -p 5000:5000 \
--name nginx --network deployment_net docker.io/library/nginx

# If success, you should see "/docker-entrypoint.sh: Configuration complete; ready for start up"

Test out the API in another shell session:

curl localhost:5000/recommend/10
# should return 1204,898,1237,1262,1272,1196,50,112552,318,904

Perform a simple load testing with Apache Bench (200 concurrent requests, 10000 requests in total)

# if not installed, run `sudo apt install apache2-utils`
ab -n 10000 -c 200 http://localhost:5000/recommend/10

Percentage results from Apache Bench:

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    218
  66%    232
  75%    240
  80%    245
  90%    257
  95%    269
  98%    287
  99%    305
 100%    360 (longest request)

Stop the containers

Press ctrl + c in the NGINX container's shell session
Stop the two other containers

podman stop deployment1
podman stop deployment2

Troubleshooting

Problem: Error: error creating container storage: the container name "<name>" is already in use by "<id>". You have to remove that container to be able to reuse that name.: that name is already in use. Solution: do podman rm --storage <id>

OscarWang114 / podman-movie-demo