generator-container

The generator container generates stars by random-sampling random values on the Navarro-Frenk-White profile.

In order to do so, it functions as a manager-container creating random stars. In the end, the generator container doesn't calculate the NFW-values by itself, but accesses the NFW-containers that is specialized on this job.

This has the advantage that a lot of manager containers can be started an the generator container interacts with a reverse proxy such as traefik that load-balances the request. The complete process of generating stars can though be speed up a lot.

Instructing the generator container about where to look for the nfw-containers works in the following way: simply set the environment variable nfwurl to the base-url of the nfw-container or proxy.

Examples

• single nfw-container

  Let's suppose we've got a generator-container running on localhost:8080 and we want it to access the nfw-container running on localhost:8081. The solution is to simply set the nfwurl to localhost:8081:

  $ go build . -o generator
  $ nfwurl=localhost:8081 ./generator 

  As soon as we access the /gen endpoint of the generator endpoint, the generator generates a random star and makes a request to the NFW-container with the coordinates of the star. The nfw-container returns the NFW-value of the given star and allows the generator container to continue testing if the star exists or not.

• multiple nfw-containers

  Let's suppose the amount of stars we want to generate is really big and generating them on a single host is not fast enough: the solution is to use more hardware!

  So let's assume we've got multiple nodes running in a docker-swarm environment that uses traefik as a reverse-proxy. We instruct the generator-container to use the nfw.docker.localhost endpoint that is balanced through traefik.

  $ go build . -o generator
  $ nfwurl=nfw.docker.localhost ./generator