Serializing Flux in Reactor - project-reactor

Is possible to serialize Reactor Flux. For example my Flux is in some state and is currently processing some event. And suddenly service is terminated. Current state of Flux is saved to database or to file. And then on restart of aplication I just take all Flux from that file/table and subscribe them to restart processing from last state. This is possible in reactor?

No, this is not possible. Flux are not serializable and are closer to a chain of functions, they don't necessarily have a state[1] but describe what to do given an input (provided by an initial generating Flux)...
So in order to "restart" a Flux, you'd have to actually create a new one that gets fed the remaining input the original one would have received upon service termination.
Thus it would be more up to the source of your data to save the last emitted state and allow restarting a new Flux sequence from there.
[1] Although, depending on what operators you chained in, you could have it impact some external state. In that case things will get more complicated, as you'll have to also persist that state.

Related

Apache Beam: read from UnboundedSource with fixed windows

I have an UnboundedSource that generates N items (it's not in batch mode, it's a stream -- one that only generates a certain amount of items and then stops emitting new items but a stream nonetheless). Then I apply a certain PTransform to the collection I'm getting from that source. I also apply the Window.into(FixedWindows.of(...)) transform and then group the results by window using Combine. So it's kind of like this:
pipeline.apply(Read.from(new SomeUnboundedSource(...)) // extends UnboundedSource
.apply(Window.into(FixedWindows.of(Duration.millis(5000))))
.apply(new SomeTransform())
.apply(Combine.globally(new SomeCombineFn()).withoutDefaults())
And I assumed that would mean new events are generated for 5 seconds, then SomeTransform is applied to the data in the 5 seconds window, then a new set of data is polled and therefore generated. Instead all N events are generated first, and only after that is SomeTransform applied to the data (but the windowing works as expected). Is it supposed to work like this? Does Beam and/or the runner (I'm using the Flink runner but the Direct runner seems to exhibit the same behavior) have some sort of queue where it stores items before passing it on to the next operator? Does that depend on what kind of UnboundedSource is used? In my case it's a generator of sorts. Is there a way to achieve the behavior that I expected or is it unreasonable? I am very new to working with streaming pipelines in general, let alone Beam. I assume, however, it would be somewhat illogical to try to read everything from the source first, seeing as it's, you know, unbounded.
An important thing to note is that windows in Beam operate on event time, not processing time. Adding 5 second windows to your data is not a way to prescribe how the data should be processed, only the end result of aggregations for that processing. Further, windows only affect the data once an aggregation is reached, like your Combine.globally. Until that point in your pipeline the windowing you applied has no effect.
As to whether it is supposed to work that way, the beam model doesn't specify any specific processing behavior so other runners may process elements slightly differently. However, this is still a correct implementation. It isn't trying to read everything from the source; generally streaming sources in Beam will attempt to read all elements available before moving on and coming back to the source later. If you were to adjust your stream to stream in elements slowly over a long period of time you will likely see more processing in between reading from the source.

Calculating periodic checkpoints for an unbounded stream in Apache Beam/DataFlow

I am using a global unbounded stream in combination with Stateful processing and timers in order to totally order a stream per key by event timestamp. The solution is described with the answer to this question:
Processing Total Ordering of Events By Key using Apache Beam
In order to restart the pipeline after a failure or stopping for some other reason, I need to determine the lowest event timestamp at which we are guaranteed that all other events have been processed downstream. This timestamp can be calculated periodically and persisted to a datastore and used as the input to the source IO (Kinesis) so that the stream can be re-read without having to go back to the beginning. (It is ok for us to have events replayed)
I considered having the stateful transformation emit the lowest processed timestamp as the output when the timer triggers and then combine all the outputs globally to find the minimum value. However, it is not possible to use a Global combine operation because a either a Window or a Trigger must be applied first.
Assuming that my stateful transform emits a Long when the timer fires which represents the smallest timestamp, I am defining the pipeline like this:
p.apply(events)
.apply("StatefulTransform", ParDo.of(new StatefulTransform()))
.apply(Window.<Long>configure().triggering(Repeatedly.forever(AfterFirst.of(
AfterPane.elementCountAtLeast(100),
AfterProcessingTime.pastFirstElementInPane().plusDelayOf(Duration.standardMinutes(1))))))
.apply(Combine.globally(new MinLongFn()))
.apply("WriteCheckpoint", ParDo.of(new WriteCheckpoint()));
Will this ensure that the checkpoints will only be written when all of the parallel workers have emitted at least one of their panes? I am concerned that a the combine operation may operate on panes from only some of the workers, e.g. there may be a worker that has either failed or is still waiting for another event to trigger it's timer.
I'm a newbie of the Beam, but according to this blog https://beam.apache.org/blog/2017/08/16/splittable-do-fn.html, Splittable DoFn might be the thing you are looking for!
You could create an SDF to fetch the stream and accept the input element as the start point.

Remove duplicates across window triggers/firings

Let's say I have an unbounded pcollection of sentences keyed by userid, and I want a constantly updated value for whether the user is annoying, we can calculate whether a user is annoying by passing all of the sentences they've ever said into the funcion isAnnoying(). Forever.
I set the window to global with a trigger afterElement(1), accumulatingFiredPanes(), do GroupByKey, then have a ParDo that emits userid,isAnnoying
That works forever, keeps accumulating the state for each user etc. Except it turns out the vast majority of the time a new sentence does not change whether a user isAnnoying, and so most of the times the window fires and emits a userid,isAnnoying tuple it's a redundant update and the io was unnecessary. How do I catch these duplicate updates and drop while still getting an update every time a sentence comes in that does change the isAnnoying value?
Today there is no way to directly express "output only when the combined result has changed".
One approach that you may be able to apply to reduce data volume, depending on your pipeline: Use .discardingFiredPanes() and then follow the GroupByKey with an immediate filter that drops any zero values, where "zero" means the identity element of your CombineFn. I'm using the fact that associativity requirements of Combine mean you must be able to independently calculate the incremental "annoying-ness" of a sentence without reference to the history.
When BEAM-23 (cross-bundle mutable per-key-and-window state for ParDo) is implemented, you will be able to manually maintain the state and implement this sort of "only send output when the result changes" logic yourself.
However, I think this scenario likely deserves explicit consideration in the model. It blends the concepts embodied today by triggers and the accumulation mode.

Real-time pipeline feedback loop

I have a dataset with potentially corrupted/malicious data. The data is timestamped. I'm rating the data with a heuristic function. After a period of time I know that all new data items coming with some IDs needs to be discarded and they represent a significant portion of data (up to 40%).
Right now I have two batch pipelines:
First one just runs the rating over the data.
The second one first filters out the corrupted data and runs the analysis.
I would like to switch from batch mode (say, running every day) into an online processing mode (hope to get a delay < 10 minutes).
The second pipeline uses a global window which makes processing easy. When the corrupted data key is detected, all other records are simply discarded (also using the discarded keys from previous days as a pre-filter is easy). Additionally it makes it easier to make decisions about the output data as during the processing all historic data for a given key is available.
The main question is: can I create a loop in a Dataflow DAG? Let's say I would like to accumulate quality-rates given to each session window I process and if the rate sum is over X, some a filter function in earlier stage of pipeline should filter out malicious keys.
I know about side input, I don't know if it can change during runtime.
I'm aware that DAG by definition cannot have cycle, but how achieve same result without it?
Idea that comes to my mind is to use side output to mark ID as malicious and make fake unbounded output/input. The output would dump the data to some storage and the input would load it every hour and stream so it can be joined.
Side inputs in the Beam programming model are windowed.
So you were on the right path: it seems reasonable to have a pipeline structured as two parts: 1) computing a detection model for the malicious data, and 2) taking the model as a side input and the data as a main input, and filtering the data according to the model. This second part of the pipeline will get the model for the matching window, which seems to be exactly what you want.
In fact, this is one of the main examples in the Millwheel paper (page 2), upon which Dataflow's streaming runner is based.

Is it possible implement Pregel in Erlang without supersteps?

Let's say we implement Pregel with Erlang. Why do we actually need supersteps? Isn't it better to just send messages from one supervisor to processes that represent nodes? They could just apply the calculation function to themselves, send messages to each other and then send a 'done' message to the supervisor.
What is the whole purpose of supersteps in concurrent Erlang implementation of Pregel?
The SuperStep concept as espoused by the Pregel model could be viewed as sort of a Barrier for parallel-y executing entities. At the end of each superstep, each worker, flushes it state to the persistent store.
The algorithm is check-pointed at the end of each SuperStep so that in case of failure, when a new node has to take over the function of a failed peer, it has a point to start from. Pregel guarantees that since the data of the node has been flushed to disk before the SuperStep started, it can reliably start from exactly that point.
It also in a way signifies "progress" of the algorithm. A pregel algorithm/job can be provided with a "max number of supersteps" after which the algorithm should terminate.
What you specified in your question (about superisors sending worker a calculation function and waiting for a "done") can definitely be implemented (although I dont think the current supervisor packaged with OTP can do stuff like that out of the box) but I guess the concept of a SuperStep is just a requirement of a Pregel model. If on the other hand, you were implementing something like a parallel mapper (like what Joe implements in his book) you wont need supersteps/

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