Does Kafka DSL context.forward() ensures delivery? - apache-kafka-streams

I'm writing my custom KStream transformer and I want to store certain records to state store and later (from punctuate) resend them.
Yet I don't want to keep them in state store - and I have no tombstone in my flow to clean them later from the store - so I want to explicitly clean the records from store after they are forwarded:
context.forward(key, value)
store.delete(key)
I'm not sure if the message is not lost when there is failure later in topology.
Does KStream still ensures at-least-once delivery with such usage. For example by:
context.forward() returns only after successful processing
context.forward() return immediately but record is deleted from store only when all messages from context are processed
any other mechanism....

Related

What is the most efficient way to know that a Kafka event is visible in a K-Table?

We use Kafka topics as both events and a repository. Using the kafka-streams API we define a simple K-Table that represents all the events in the topic.
In our use case we publish events to the topic and subsequently reference the K-Table as the backing repository. The main issue is that the published events are not immediately visible on the K-Table.
We tried transactions and exactly once semantics as described here (https://kafka.apache.org/26/documentation/streams/core-concepts#streams_processing_guarantee) but there is always a delay we cannot control.
Publish Event
Undetermined amount of time
Published Event is visible in the K-Table
Is there a way to eliminate the delay or otherwise know that a specific event has been consumed by the K-Table.
NOTE: We tried both partition and global tables with similar results.
Thanks
Because Kafka is an asynchronous system the observed delay is expected and you cannot do anything to avoid it.
However, if you publish a message to a topic, the KafkaProducer allows you to pass in a Callback to the send() method and the callback will be executed after the message was written to the topic providing the record's metadata like topic, partition, and offset.
After Kafka Streams processed messages, it will eventually commit the offsets (you can configure the commit interval, too). Thus, you can know if the message is in the KTable after the offset was committed. By default, committing happens every 30 seconds only and it's not recommended to use a very short commit interval because it implies large overhead. Thus, I am not sure if this would help for your case, as it seem you want a more timely "response".
As an alternative, you can also disable caching on the KTable and use a toStream().process() step -- after each update to the KTable, the changelog stream provided by toStream() will contain the record and you can access the record metadata (including its offset) in the Processor via the given ProcessorContext object. Thus should also allow you to figure out, when the record is available in the KTable.

Which guarantees does Kafka Stream provide when using a RocksDb state store with changelog?

I'm building a Kafka Streams application that generates change events by comparing every new calculated object with the last known object.
So for every message on the input topic, I update an object in a state store and every once in a while (using punctuate), I apply a calculation on this object and compare the result with the previous calculation result (coming from another state store).
To make sure this operation is consistent, I do the following after the punctuate triggers:
write a tuple to the state store
compare the two values, create change events and context.forward them. So the events go to the results topic.
swap the tuple by the new_value and write it to the state store
I use this tuple for scenario's where the application crashes or rebalances, so I can always send out the correct set of events before continuing.
Now, I noticed the resulting events are not always consistent, especially if the application frequently rebalances. It looks like in rare cases the Kafka Streams application emits events to the results topic, but the changelog topic is not up to date yet. In other words, I produced something to the results topic, but my changelog topic is not at the same state yet.
So, when I do a stateStore.put() and the method call returns successfully, are there any guarantees when it will be on the changelog topic?
Can I enforce a changelog flush? When I do context.commit(), when will that flush+commit happen?
To get complete consistency, you will need to enable processing.guarantee="exaclty_once" -- otherwise, with a potential error, you might get inconsistent results.
If you want to stay with "at_least_once", you might want to use a single store, and update the store after processing is done (ie, after calling forward()). This minimized the time window to get inconsistencies.
And yes, if you call context.commit(), before input topic offsets are committed, all stores will be flushed to disk, and all pending producer writes will also be flushed.

CQRS + Microservices Handling event rollback

We are using microservices, cqrs, event store using nodejs cqrs-domain, everything works like a charm and the typical flow goes like:
REST->2. Service->3. Command validation->4. Command->5. aggregate->6. event->7. eventstore(transactional Data)->8. returns aggregate with aggregate ID-> 9. store in microservice local DB(essentially the read DB)-> 10. Publish Event to the Queue
The problem with the flow above is that since the transactional data save i.e. persistence to the event store and storage to the microservice's read data happen in a different transaction context if there is any failure at step 9 how should i handle the event which has already been propagated to the event store and the aggregate which has already been updated?
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
The problem with the flow above is that since the transactional data save i.e. persistence to the event store and storage to the microservice's read data happen in a different transaction context if there is any failure at step 9 how should i handle the event which has already been propagated to the event store and the aggregate which has already been updated?
You retry it later.
The "book of record" is the event store. The downstream views (the "published events", the read models) are derived from the book of record. They are typically behind the book of record in time (eventual consistency) and are not typically synchronized with each other.
So you might have, at some point in time, 105 events written to the book of record, but only 100 published to the queue, and a representation in your service database constructed from only 98.
Updating a view is typically done in one of two ways. You can, of course, start with a brand new representation and replay all of the events into it as part of each update. Alternatively, you track in the metadata of the view how far along in the event history you have already gotten, and use that information to determine where the next read of the event history begins.
Inside your event store, you could track whether read-side replication was successful.
As soon as step 9 suceeds, you can flag the event as 'replicated'.
That way, you could introduce a component watching for unreplicated events and trigger step 9. You could also track whether the replication failed multiple times.
Updating the read-side (step 9) and flagigng an event as replicated should happen consistently. You could use a saga pattern here.
I think i have now understood it to a better extent.
The Aggregate would still be created, answer is that all the validations for any type of consistency should happen before my aggregate is constructed, it is in case of a failure beyond the purview of the code that a failure exists while updating the read side DB of the microservice which needs to be handled.
So in an ideal case aggregate would be created however the event associated would remain as undispatched unless all the read dependencies are updated, if not it remains as undispatched and that can be handled seperately.
The Event Store will still have all the event and the eventual consistency this way is maintained as is.

Is there a way to get offset for each message consumed in kafka streams?

In order to avoid reading of messages which are processed but missed to get committed when a KAFKA STREAMS is killed , I want to get the offset for each message along with the key and value so that I can store it somewhere and use it to avoid the reprocessing of already processed messages.
Yes, this is possible. See the FAQ entry at http://docs.confluent.io/current/streams/faq.html#accessing-record-metadata-such-as-topic-partition-and-offset-information.
I'll copy-paste the key information below:
Accessing record metadata such as topic, partition, and offset information?
Record metadata is accessible through the Processor API.
It is also accessible indirectly through the DSL thanks to its
Processor API integration.
With the Processor API, you can access record metadata through a
ProcessorContext. You can store a reference to the context in an
instance field of your processor during Processor#init(), and then
query the processor context within Processor#process(), for example
(same for Transformer). The context is updated automatically to match
the record that is currently being processed, which means that methods
such as ProcessorContext#partition() always return the current
record’s metadata. Some caveats apply when calling the processor
context within punctuate(), see the Javadocs for details.
If you use the DSL combined with a custom Transformer, for example,
you could transform an input record’s value to also include partition
and offset metadata, and subsequent DSL operations such as map or
filter could then leverage this information.

Spring Cloud Dataflow - Retaining Order of Messages

Let's say I have a stream with 3 applications - a source, processor, and sink.
I need to retain the order of my the messages I received from my source. When I receive messages A,B,C,D, I have to send them to sink as A,B,C,D. (I can't send them as B,A,C,D).
If I have just have 1 instance of each application, everything will run sequentially and the order will be retained.
If I have 10 instances of each application, the messages A,B,C,D might get processed at the same time in different instances. I don't know what order these messages will wind up in.
So is there any way I can ensure that I retain the order of my messages when using multiple instances?
No; when you scale out (either by concurrency in the binder or by deploying multiple instances), you lose order. This is true for any multi-threaded application, not just spring-cloud-stream.
You can use partitioning so that each instance gets a partition of the data, but ordering is only retained within each partition.
If you have sequence information in your messages, you can add a custom module using a Spring Integration Resequencer to reassemble your messages back into the same sequence - but you'll need a single instance of the resequencer before a single sink instance.

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