Support of Unified CW agent for Alpine

[aws]

Support of Unified CW agent for Alpine

[haojhcwa]

Hi manas86,

Thanks for your interest in cwagent! Is there any reason you want to install the agent in an alpine image? CloudWatch Agent is programmed in golang with CGO=0 flag, which does not have an external dependency on any c library when running, thus its docker image does not need any os base, (scratch was used instead, see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/ContainerInsights-build-docker-image.html and https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-cloudwatch-container-insights/blob/master/cloudwatch-agent-dockerfile/Dockerfile#L14)

And since it is generally recommended to run one process per container, it probably makes more sense to have the agent run in its own container rather than be installed in the same container as the service.

[manas86]

Thanks, I will try your suggestion and let me come back to you on that.
And regarding recommendation running ONE process in a container is right, but in our case, it is necessary due to our requirement.

[haojhcwa]

The agent binaries for linux are built with "CGO=0", which means the binaries should not have any incompatibility issues with musl. However, our packaging and control scripts does not work with openRC yet (we only support systemd and upstart atm).

[manas86]

I get it that, binary should not have the compatibility issue. However, when you mentioned "our packaging and control scripts do not work with openRC yet (we only support systemd and upstart atm)" --> Is there any possibility that these are going to make available for openRC?

[github-actions]

This issue was marked stale due to lack of activity.

[jhnlsn]

Just to close this out, you can take the linux amd64 version of the agent binary and copy it to your alpine container to use the agent in your container. No need to perform a special compile.