Apache Storm - use multiple spouts? - amazon-sqs

So I'm trying to configure my spout(s) to read from an Amazon SQS queue. Now, I want a situation wherein I can share the load across multiple spouts.
I understand it's possible to have multiple threads, but can I have two or more different spout instances/applications which are reading from the same queue and emitting to the same topology? For eg. Spout A and Spout B read from the SQS and then both emit to bolt C?

Of course, you can have multiple spouts, but you have to define them accordingly to prevent double submit of the same element (or your topology does accept that by design). Multiple processes of the same element imply bad counters for instance.
Check Storm concurrency as a start with executors (threads) and tasks (instances) per spout / bolt and choose the number you want.
In your code, you have to be sure that you don't manage the same tuples twice or more, either you do it before storm (a queue which doesn't accept the same element twice which is processed / emptied by many spouts for instance, or multiple queues - one for each spout, beware of transactions) or you do it in storm (process messages only with x param in one spout, with y in another and a message cannot be x and y at the same time).

SQS Queue -----> Spout (N Number of Executors).
This model will perfectly fine. as soon as, any of executor instance will pick up message, message will become invisible from SQS.
Keep Message Invisibility time Much higher than Message Processing time with in Storm Topology.
You can keep delete SQS message logic inside ack method.

Related

Streaming Beam pipeline with "lookbehind"

I am new to Beam/Dataflow and am trying to figure out if it is suited to this problem. I am trying to keep a running sum of which types of messages are currently backlogged in a queueing system. The system uses a monotonically increasing offset number to order messages: producers learn the number when the send a message, and consumers track the watermark offset as they process each message in FIFO order. This pipeline would have two inputs: counts from the producers and watermarks from the consumers.
The queue producer would regularly flush a batch of count metrics to Beam:
(type1, offset, count)
(type2, offset, count)
...
where the offset was the last offset the producer wrote for typeN, and count is how many typeN messages it enqueued in the current batch period.
The queue consumer will regularly send its latest consumed watermark offset. The effect this should have is to invalidate any counts that have an offset lower than this consumer watermark.
The output of the pipeline is the sum of all counts with a higher offset than the largest consumer watermark yet seen, grouped by message type. (snapshotted every 5 minutes or so.)
(Of course there would be 100k message "types", hundreds of producer servers, occasional 2-hour periods where the consumer doesn't report an advancing watermark, etc.)
Is this doable? That this pipeline would need to maintain and scan an unbounded-ish history of count records is the part that seems maybe unsuited to Beam.
One possible approach would be to model this as two timeseries (left , right) where you want to match left.timestamp <= right.timestamp. You can do this using the State and Timer API.
In order to achieve this unbounded, you will need to be working within a GlobalWindow. Important note in the Global Window there is no expiry of the state, so you will need to make sure to do Garbage Collection on your left and right streams. Also data will arrive in the onprocess unordered, so you will need to make use of Event Time timers to do the actual work.
Very roughly:
onProcess(){
Store data in BagState.
Setup Event time timer to go off
}
OnTimer(){
Do your buiss logic.
}
This is a lot easier with Apache Beam > 2.24.0 as OrderedListState has been added.
Although the timeseries use case is different from the one in this question, this talk from the 2019 Beam summit also has some pointers (but does not make use of OrderedListState, which was not available at the time);
State and Timer API and Timeseries

How to structure a Dask application that processes a fixed number of inputs from a queue?

We have a requirement to implement the following. Given a Redis channel that will provide a known number of messages:
For each message consumed from the channel:
Get a JSON document from Redis
Parse the JSON document, extracting a list of result objects
Aggregate across all result objects to produce a single result
We would like to distribute both steps 1 and 2 across many workers, and avoid collecting all results into memory. We would also like to display progress bars for both steps.
However, we can't see a nice way to structure the application such that we can see progress and keep work moving through the system without blocking as inopportune times.
For example, in step 1 if we read from the Redis channel into a queue then we can pass the queue to Dask, in which case we start processing each message as it comes in without waiting for all messages. However, we can't see a way to show progress if we use a queue (presumably because a queue typically has an unknown size?)
If we collect from the Redis channel into a list and pass this to Dask then we can see progress, but we have to wait for all messages from Redis before we can start processing the first one.
Is there a recommended way to approach this kind of problem?
If your Redis channels are concurrent-access-safe then you might submit many futures to pull an element from the channel. These would run on different machines.
from dask.distributed import Client, progress
client = Client(...)
futures = [client.submit(pull_from_redis_channel, ..., pure=False) for _ in range(n_items)]
futures2 = client.map(process, futures)
progress(futures2)

Control rate of individual topic consumption in Kafka Streams 0.9.1.0-cp1?

I am trying to backprocess data in Kafka topics using a Kafka Streams application that involves a join. One of the streams to be joined has much larger volume of data per unit of time in the corresponding topic. I would like to control the consumption from the individual topics so that I get roughly the same event timestamps from each topic in a single consumer.poll(). However, there doesn't appear to be any way to control the behavior of the KafkaConsumer backing the source stream. Is there any way around this? Any insight would be appreciated.
Currently Kafka cannot control the rate limit on both Producers and Consumers.
Refer:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-13+-+Quotas
But if you are using Apache Spark as the stream processing platform, you can limit the input rate for the Kafka receivers.
in the consumer side you can use consume([num_messages=1][, timeout=-1])
function instead of poll.
consume([num_messages=1][, timeout=-1]):
Consumes a list of messages (possibly empty on timeout). Callbacks may be executed as a side effect of calling this method.
The application must check the returned Message object’s Message.error() method to distinguish between proper messages (error() returns None) and errors for each Message in the list (see error().code() for specifics). If the enable.partition.eof configuration property is set to True, partition EOF events will also be exposed as Messages with error().code() set to _PARTITION_EOF.
num_messages (int) – The maximum number of messages to return (default: 1).
timeout (float) – The maximum time to block waiting for message, event or callback (default: infinite (-1)). (Seconds)

Erlang/OTP How to notify parent process that child processes are idle and no messages in their mailbox

I would like to design a process hierarchy where there is a a parent process P which acts like a gatekeeper and delegates the work(messages/events from its client processes) to it's children processes C1,C2..Cn which collaborate with each other and may send the result back to P. The children processes cannot talk to any process outside, only P.
The challenge is that though P may have multiple messages from its clients, it should accept only one message, delegate the work to C1..Cn and ONLY accept the next message from its clients
when all its children processes are done(or idle) and there are no more messages circulating between C1 to Cn.
P finishes accepting messages from C1..Cn so that it can return the result to its clients
Constraints:
Idle for me is when they are waiting with a receive (blocking) or simply exited.
C1 to Cn are finite state machines. Some or all of them may send messages back to C. Or there may be no messages to be sent back to C. Even if no messages are sent back to C, C has to figure out that all of them are done with no messages between them.
If any of C1 to Cn have been pre-empted, then it is considered busy(this may be obvious but I thought I'll put it here for completion) and C will not receive the next message
Is there an OTP pattern or library which will do this for me (before I hack something?). I know that process_info can let me know if the mailbox of a process are empty and I could keep on checking the children's mailboxes from P but it would be unnecessary polling from P.
EDIT GENERAL: I am trying to implement a reactive variant of Flow Based Programming on the Erlang platform. This has the notion of 'hierarchical processes' or composites which themselves may contain composite processes until we reach some boxes of actual code...I am going to research(looking at monitor,process_info,process_flag) but I wanted to respond to your excellent answers
EDIT RECURSIVE PARENTS: Each of C1 and Cn can themselves be parent/composite processes. If I just spawn processes and let them exit immediately, I'll have to create the chain of Composites everytime as C1..Cn may themselves be composites (which spawn composites..and so on). Finally, when we reach a leaf box(which is not a composite node), they are supposed to be finite state machines.. so I'm not sure of spawning and making them exit quickly if the are FSMs.
EDIT TKOWAL: Since I am trying to create a generic parent/composite process, it does not know 'when' the task ends. All it does is relay the messages it receives from its children to it's siblings with the 'constraint' that it will not accept the next message from its client/siblings until its children are 'done'. The children C1..Cn may send not just one but many messages. I understand from your proposal, that wait_for_task_finish will stop blocking the moment it gets the first message. But more messages may be emitted too by P's children. P should wait for all messages. Also, having a task_end symbol will not work for the same reason(i.e. multiple messages possible from the children)
Given how inexpensive it is to start up Erlang processes, your gatekeeper could start new children for each incoming task, and then wait for them all to exit normally once they complete their work.
But in general, it sounds like you're looking for a process pool. There are a few of these already available, such as poolboy and sidejob. Pools can be harder to get right than you think, so I advise using an existing proven pool implementation before attempting to write your own.
After edits, this became entirely different question, so I am posting new answer.
If you are trying to write Flow Based Programming, then you are probably solving wrong problem. FBP is effective, because almost everything is asynchronous and you start processing next request immediately after you finished with previous one.
So, the answer is - don't wait for children to finish:
In FBP, there is no time dependencies between the components. So if I
have a chunk of data, it should be able to flow from one end of the
diagram to the other regardless of how any other pieces of data are
being handled. In order to program an FBP system, you have to minimize
your dependencies.
source
When creating parent and children, you know all the connections between blocks, so just configure children to send processed data directly to next block. For example: P1 has children C1 and C2. You send message to P1, it delegates it to C1, packet flows couple of times between C1 and C2 and after that, C1 or C2 sends it directly to P2.
Blocks should be stateless. They output should not depend on previous requests, so even if C1 and C2 are processing data from two different requests to P1 - it is OK. There could be situations, where P1 gets data packet D1 and then D2, but will output answers in different order R2 and then R1. It is also OK. You can use Erlang reference to tag messages and then check, which response is from which request.
I don't think, there is ready library for that, but it is really easy to hack, unless I missed something. Your P process should look like this:
ready_for_next_task() ->
receive
{task, Task, CallerPid} ->
send_task_to_workers(Task)
end,
wait_for_task_finish(CallerPid).
wait_for_task_finish(CallerPid) ->
receive
{task_end, Response} ->
CallerPid ! Response
end,
ready_for_next_task().
In wait_for_task_finish/1 you have only one clause for receive, so it will not accept next task, until current one is finished. If you are waiting for multiple responses from workers, you can simply add second clause to receive with some partial response and call wait_for_task_finish/1 recursively.
It is always better to have some indicator, that the processing ended, because you don't have guarantees on message delivery time. This means, that you could check, that all processes currently are waiting for message and think, that they ended processing, but actually, they did not started yet or one of them send message to other and you caught them before the second one had it in message box.
If the processes C1..Cn have only parts of actual work and don't know about the progress, than the gatekeeper P should know how many parts there were, receive all of them one by one and then call ready_for_next_task/1.

Questions about the nextTuple method in the Spout of Storm stream processing

I am developing some data analysis algorithms on top of Storm and have some questions about the internal design of Storm. I want to simulate a sensor data yielding and processing in Storm, and therefore I use Spout to push sensor data into the succeeding bolts at a constant time interval via setting a sleep method in nextTuple method of Spout. But from the experiment results, it appeared that spout didn't push data at the specified rate. In the experiment, there was no bottleneck bolt in the system.
Then I checked some material about the ack and nextTuple methods of Storm. Now my doubt is if the nextTuple method is called only when the previous tuples are fully processed and acked in the ack method?
If this is true, does it means that I cannot set a fixed time interval to emit data?
Thx a lot!
My experience has been that you should not expect Storm to make any real-time guarantees, including in your case the rate of tuple processing. You can certainly write a spout that only emits tuples on some time schedule, but Storm can't really guarantee that it will always call on the spout as often as you would like.
Note that nextTuple should be called whenever there is room available for more pending tuples in the topology. If the topology has free capacity, I would expect Storm to try to fill it up if it can with whatever it can get.
I had a similar use-case, and the way I accomplished it is by using TICK_TUPLE
Config tickConfig = new Config();
tickConfig.put(Config.TOPOLOGY_TICK_TUPLE_FREQ_SECS, 15);
...
...
builder.setBolt("storage_bolt", new S3Bolt(), 4).fieldsGrouping("shuffle_bolt", new Fields("hash")).addConfigurations(tickConfig);
Then in my storage_bolt (note it's written in python, but you will get an idea) i check if message is tick_tuple if it is then execute my code:
def process(self, tup):
if tup.stream == '__tick':
# Your logic that need to be executed every 15 seconds,
# or what ever you specified in tickConfig.
# NOTE: the maximum time is 600 s.
storm.ack(tup)
return

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