Operations

This guide describes how to perform day-to-day operations of the ACD Router and its associated services, collectively known as the Director.

Component Overview

To effectively operate the Director software, it is important to understand the composition of the various software components and how they are deployed.

Each Director instance functions as an independent system, comprising multiple containerized services. These containers are managed by a standard container runtime and are seamlessly integrated with the host’s operating system to enhance the overall operator experience.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 based operating systems, the Podman container runtime is used for container management. In the case of older Red Hat releases, Docker serves as the container runtime. Although both

runtimes

utilize the same OCI compliant container images and offer equivalent levels of abstraction, performance, and security, the key distinction lies in Podman’s ability to operate without an additional daemon service running on the host. Unlike Docker, Podman manages each container as a separate process, eliminating the reliance on a shared daemon and mitigating the risk of a single-point-of-failure scenario.

Although several distinct services make up the Director, the primary component is the router. The router is responsible for listening for incoming requests, processing the request, and redirecting the client to the appropriate host, or CDN to deliver the requested content.

Two additional containers are responsible for configuration management. Those are confd and confd-transformer. The former manages a local database of configuration metadata and provides a REST API for managing the configuration. The confd-transformer simply listens for configuration changes from confd and adapts that configuration to a format suitable for the router to ingest. For additional information about setting up and using confd see here..

The next two components, the edns-proxy and the convoy-bridge allow the router to communicate with an EDNS server for EDNS-based routing, and with synchronization with Convoy respectively. Additional information about the EDNS-Proxy is available here.. For the Convoy Bridge service see here..

The remaining containers are useful for metrics, monitoring, and alerting. These include prometheus and grafana for monitoring and analytics, fluentbit and alertmanager for monitoring and alarms, and grafana-loki for log aggregation.