Emissary is a P2P based data-driven workflow engine that runs in a heterogeneous possibly widely dispersed, multi-tiered P2P network of compute resources. Workflow itineraries are not pre-planned as in conventional workflow engines, but are discovered as more information is discovered about the data. There is typically no user interaction in an Emissary workflow, rather the data is processed in a goal oriented fashion until it reaches a completion state.
Emissary is highly configurable, but in this base implementation does almost nothing. Users of this framework are expected to provide classes that extend emissary.place.ServiceProviderPlace to perform work on emissary.core.IBaseDataObject payloads.
A variety of things can be done and the workflow is managed in stages, e.g. STUDY, ID, COORDINATE, TRANSFORM, ANALYZE, IO, REVIEW.
The classes responsible for directing the workflow are the emissary.core.MobileAgent and classes derived from it, which manage the path of a set of related payload objects through the workflow and the emissary.directory.DirectoryPlace which manages the available services, their cost and quality and keep the P2P network connected.
Maven Site and Javadoc hosted on GitHub Pages: https://code.nsa.gov/emissary/
- Linux or MacOSX operating system
- JDK 11
- Apache Maven 3.5+
Read through the DEVELOPING.md guide for information on installing required components, pulling the source code, building and running Emissary.
Run mvn clean package to compile, test, and package Emissary
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[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
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[INFO] Total time: 9.132 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2022-01-10T22:31:05Z
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There is one bash script in Emissary that runs everything. It is in the top level Emissary directory. The script runs the emissary.Emissary class which has several Picocli commands available to handle different functions.
If the emissary script is run without any arguments, you will get a listing of all the configuration subcommands and a brief description.
./emissary
Running ./emissary help will give you the same output as running with no arguments. If you want to see more
detailed information on a command, add the command name after help. For example, see all the
arguments with descriptions for the server command, run:
./emissary help server
The rest of commands all have (-b or --projectBase) arguments that can be set, but it must match PROJECT_BASE.
The config directory is defaulted to /config but can also be passed in with (-c or --config). When running from the git checkout, you should use target as the projectBase. Feel free to modify config files in target/config before you start.
Logging is handled by logback. You can point to a custom file with the --logbackConfig argument.
See the help -c for each command to get more info.
This command will start up an Emissary server and initialize all the places, a pickup place, and drop off filters that are configured. It will start in standalone mode if -m or --mode is not specified. By default, the number of MobileAgents is calculated based on the specs of the machine. On modern computers, this can be high. You can control the number of agents with -a or --agents. Here is an example run.
./emissary server -a 2
Without further configuration, it will start on http://localhost:8001. If you browse to that url, you will need to enter the username and password defined in target/config/jetty-users.properties, which is emissary and emissary123.
The default PickUpPlace is configured to read files from target/data/InputData. If you copy files into that directory, you will see Emissary process them. Keep in mind, only toUpper and toLower are configured, so the output will not be too interesting.
The agents command shows the number of MobileAgents for the configured host and what those
agents are doing. By default, the port is 9001, but you can use -p or --port to change that.
Assuming you are running on 8001 from the server command above, try:
./emissary agents -p 8001
Pool is a collapsed view of agents for a node. It, too, defaults to port 9001. To run for the standalone server started above run
./emissary pool -p 8001
This command is more useful for a cluster as it a more digestible view of every node.
The Env Command requires a server to be running. It will ask the server for some configuration values, like PROJECT_BASE and BIN_DIR. With no arguments, it will dump an unformatted json response.
./emissary env
But you can also dump a response suitable for sourcing in bash.
./emissary env --bashable
Starting the Emissary server actually calls this endpoint and dumps out $PROJECT_BASE}/env.sh
with the configured variables. This is done so that shell scripts can source $PROJECT_BASE}/env.sh
and then have those variable available without having to worry with configuring them elsewhere.
The config command allows you to see the effective configuration for a specified place/service/class. Since Emissary uses
flavors, this command will show the resulting configuration of a class after all flavors have been applied. This command can
be used to connect to a running Emissary node by specifying the -h for host (default is localhost) and -p for
the port (default is 8001). To connect to a locally running Emissary on port 8001, any of the following commands will work:
./emissary config --place emissary.place.sample.ToLowerPlace
./emissary config --place emissary.place.sample.ToLowerPlace -h localhost -p 8001
Optionally, you can specify offline mode using --offline to use the configuration files specified in your local
CONFIG_DIR:
./emissary config --place emissary.place.sample.ToLowerPlace --offline
In offline mode, you can provide flavors to see the differences in configurations:
./emissary config --place emissary.place.sample.ToLowerPlace --offline --flavor STANDALONE,TESTING
These are useful to see the effective configuration, but we can also run in a verbose mode to
see all the configuration files along with the final output. This is controlled with the
--detailed flag:
./emissary config --place emissary.place.sample.ToLowerPlace --detailed
or in offline mode:
./emissary config --place emissary.place.sample.ToLowerPlace --offline --detailed
Emissary is fun in standalone, but running cluster is more appropriate for real work. The way to run clustered is similar to the standalone, but you need to -m cluster to tell the node to connect to other nodes. In clustered mode Emissary will also start up the PickUpClient instead of the PickUpPlace, so you will need to start a feeder.
Look at the target/config/peers.cfg to see the rendezvous peers. In this case, there are 3. Nodes running on port 8001 and 9001 are just Emissary nodes. The node running on 7001 is the feeder. So let's start up 8001 and 9001 in two different terminals.
./emissary server -a 2 -m cluster
./emissary server -a 2 -m cluster -p 9001
Because these nodes all know about ports 8001, 9001 and 7001, you will see errors in the logs as they continue to try to connect.
Note, in real world deployments we don't run multiple Emissary processes on the same node. You can configure the hostname with -h.
With nodes started on port 8001 and 9001, we need to start the feeder. The feed command uses port 7001 by default, but we need to set up a directory that the feeder will read from. Files dropped into that directory will be available for worker nodes to take and the work should be distributed amongst the cluster. Start up the feed with
mkdir ~/Desktop/feed1
./emissary feed -i ~/Desktop/feed1/
You should be able to hit http://localhost:8001, http://localhost:9001 and http://localhost:7001 in the browser and look at the configured places. Drop some files in the ~/Desktop/feed1 and see the 2 nodes process them. It may take a minute for them to start processing
Agents in clustered mode again shows details about the mobileAgents. It starts at with the node you configure (localhost:9001 by default), then calls out to all nodes it knows about and gets the same information. Run it with:
./emissary agents --cluster
Pool in clustered mode also does the same as pool in standalone. It starts at the node (locahost:9001) by default then goes to all the nodes it knows about and aggregates a collapsed view of the cluster. Run it with
./emissary pool --cluster
The topology talks to the configured node (localhost:8001 by default) and talks to every node it knows about. The response is what all those nodes know about, so you can build up a network topology of your cluster. Run it with
./emissary topology
The keystore and keystore password are in the emissary.client.EmissaryClient-SSL.cfg file. Included and configured by default is a sample keystore you can use for testing this functionality. We do not recommend using the sample keystore in production environments. To use your own keystore, change configuration values in the emissary.client.EmissaryClient-SSL.cfg file.
Standalone
./emissary server -p 8443 --ssl --disableSniHostCheck
Clustered
./emissary server -p 8443 --ssl --disableSniHostCheck --mode cluster
./emissary server -p 9443 --ssl --disableSniHostCheck --mode cluster
mkdir ~/Desktop/feed1
./emissary feed -p 7443 --ssl --disableSniHostCheck -i ~/Desktop/feed1/
If you have any questions or concerns about this project, you can contact us at: EmissarySupport@uwe.nsa.gov
For security questions and vulnerability reporting, please refer to SECURITY.md
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