How to solve liquibase waiting for changelog lock problem in several pods in OpenShift cluster?

Question

We are supporting several microservices written in Java using Spring Boot and deployed in OpenShift. Some microservices communicate with databases. We often run a single microservice in multiple pods in a single deployment. When each microservice starts, it starts liquibase, which tries to update the database. The problem is that sometimes one pod fails while waiting for the changelog lock. When this happens in our production OpenShift cluster, we expect other pods to fail while restarting because of the same problem with changelog lock issue. So, in the worst case scenario, all pods will wait for the lock to be lifted.

We want liquidbase to automatically prepare our database schemas when each pod is starting.

Is it good to store this logic in every microservice? How can we automatically solve the problem when the liquidbase changelog lock problem appears? Do we need to put the database preparation logic in a separate deployment?

So maybe I should paraphrase my question. What is the best way to run db migration in term of microservice architecture? Maybe we should not use db migration in each pod? Maybe it is better to do it with separate deployment or do it with some extra Jenkins job not in OpenShift at all?

Answer 1

We're running liquibase migrations as an init-container in Kubernetes. The problem with running Liquibase in micro-services is that Kubernetes will terminate the pod if the readiness probe is not successful before the configured timeout. In our case this happened sometimes during large DB migrations, which could take a few minutes to complete. Kubernetes will terminate the pod, leaving DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK in a locked state. With init-containers you will not have this problem. See https://www.liquibase.org/blog/using-liquibase-in-kubernetes for a detailed explanation.

UPDATE Please take a look at this Liquibase extension, which replaces the StandardLockService, by using database locks: https://github.com/blagerweij/liquibase-sessionlock

This extension uses MySQL or Postgres user lock statements, which are automatically released when the database connection is closed (e.g. when the container is stopped unexpectedly). The only thing required to use the extension is to add a dependency to the library. Liquibase will automatically detect the improved LockService.

I'm not the author of the library, but I stumbled upon the library when I was searching for a solution. I helped the author by releasing the library to Maven central. Currently supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, but should be fairly easy to support other RDBMS.

Answer 2

When Liquibase kicks in during the spring-boot app deployment, it performs (on a very high level) the following steps:

1. lock the database (create a record in databasechangeloglock)
2. execute changeLogs;
3. remove database lock;

So if you interrupt application deployment while Liquibase is between steps 1 and 3, then your database will remain locked. So when you'll try to redeploy your app, Liquibase will fail, because it will treat your database as locked.

So you have to unlock the database before deploying the app again.

There are two options that I'm aware of:

1. Clear databasechangeloglock table or set locked to false. Which is DELETE FROM databasechangeloglock or UPDATE databasechangeloglock SET locked=0
2. Execute liquibase releaseLocks command. You can find documentation about it here and here.

Answer 3

We managed to solve this in my company by following also the same approach Liquibase suggests with Init Containers, but instead of using a new container and run the Liquibase migration via Liquibase CLI, we are reusing the existing Spring Boot service setup but just executing the Liquibase logic. We have created an alternative main class that can be used in an entrypoint to populate the database using Liquibase.

The InitContainerApplication class brings the minimal configuration required to start the application and set up Liquibase.

Typical usage:

entrypoint: "java -cp /app/extras/*:/app/WEB-INF/classes:/app/WEB-INF/lib/* com.backbase.buildingblocks.auxiliaryconfig.InitContainerApplication"

Here the class

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.ApplicationArguments;
import org.springframework.boot.ApplicationRunner;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringBootConfiguration;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.ImportAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;

@SpringBootConfiguration
@ImportAutoConfiguration(InitContainerAutoConfigurationSelector.class)
public class InitContainerApplication implements ApplicationRunner {

    @Autowired
    private ApplicationContext appContext;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(InitContainerApplication.class, args);
    }

    @Override
    public void run(ApplicationArguments args) throws Exception {
        SpringApplication.exit(appContext, () -> 0);
    }

}

Here is the use as an Init Container:

spec:
  initContainers:
    - name: init-liquibase
      command: ['java']
      args: ['-cp', '/app/extras/*:/app/WEB-INF/classes:/app/WEB-INF/lib/*',
                 'com.backbase.buildingblocks.auxiliaryconfig.InitContainerApplication']

Answer 4

Finally we solved this problem in another project by removing liquibase migration at microservice start time. Now separate Jenkins job apply the migration and separate Jenkins job deploy and start microservice after migration apply. So now microservice itself doesn’t apply database update

Answer 5

I encountered this issue when one of the Java applications I manage abruptly shut down.

The logs were displaying the error below when the application tries to start:

waiting to acquire changelock

Here's how I solved it

I fixed this issue by:

• Stopping the application
• Deleting the databasechangelog and databasechangelog.lock files in the database connected to the application.
• Restarting the application

In my case the application was connected to 2 databases. I had to delete the databasechangelog and databasechangelog.lock files in the both databases and then restarted the application. The both database databasechangelog and databasechangelog.lock files have to be at sync.

After this the application was able to acquire changelock file.