The goal of this project is to create a fully functional Flink cluster by virtualization the nodes. When the cluster is active, Flink jobs can be deployed in the same way as in a real cluster..

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• Ansible
• Flink

• It's necessary to have VirtualBox installed.
• The project uses Vagrant for creating virtual nodes, so It's necessary to have Vagrant installed.
• For the creation of the virtual node, Vagrant uses the Ubuntu 20.04 box, therefore the box is necessary to have it installed. Command: vagrant box add bento/ubuntu-20.04
• The last step is to provision the nodes. Ansible is used to automate this task, so you need to have it installed as well.
• While the Flink cluster is being created, use the ssh ports to communicate the nodes. By default, the ssh port is 22, but the host contains more than one virtual node, for this reason it is necessary to map the ssh ports on the host machine to others ports. The mapped ports are defined in Vagrantfile by default and are mapped to 2220,2221,2221. For this reason, it is very important that these ports are free. Note: We can also use these ports to communicate with virtual nodes through ssh.
• Other ports that flink need free are: 6123,8080,8081

If you meet all the prerequisites, just run ./cluster-up.shin your favorite terminal emulator.

The Vagrant folder contains the Vagrant configuration file. This file defines the number of virtual nodes and their configuration. In this case, the file defines three nodes with Ubuntu 20.04 (one as Flink's Jobmanager and two as Flink's Taskmanager)

For each node, Vagrant calls the Ansible pipeline to provision the node.

When Ansible is called by Vagrant the entrypoint is site.yml. This yml define pipeline per roles /hosts. The hosts(nodegroup or single node), with their hostname , are defined in inventory. Hostnames are the same of Vagrantfile. Inventory file also contain ssh properties, for example: jobmanager ansible_ssh_host=127.0.0.1 ansible_ssh_port=2220 ansible_ssh_user=vagrant ansible_ssh_pass=vagrant

The project folder structure follows the best practices proposed by Ansible (directory-layout).

The common role runs for all nodes:

• The first part downloads the JDK and adds the environmental variable to the path.
• The second downloads the Flink and adds the environmental variable to the route.
• Finally, the Flink configuration files (flink-conf.yaml,master, slave) are added.

The cluster startup role is only executed by the Jobmanager node although some tasks are delegated to the taskmanager nodes. The task managers and jobmanager are registered in the cluster.

If you don't want to download the JDK and Flink, you can add the .zip files to the files folder. Ansible will detect zip files and skip downloads

Finally, if everything is correct, the browser accesses the GUI. localhost:8081