Read data directly from REST Api with Kafka - spring-boot

Is such a situation even possible ? :
There is an application "XYZ" (in which there is no Kafka) that exposes a REST api. It is a SpringBoot application with which Angular application communicates.
A new application (SpringBoot) is created which wants to use Kafka and needs to fetch data from "XYZ" application. And it wants to do this using Kafka.
The "XYZ" application has an example endpoint [GET] api/message/all which displays all messages.
Is there a way to "connect" Kafka directly to this endpoint and read data from it ? In short, the idea is for Kafka to consume data directly from the EP. Communication between two microservices, where one microservice does not have a kafka.
What suggestions do you have for solving this situation. Because I guess this option is not possible. Is it necessary to add a publisher in application XYZ which will send data to the queue and only then will they be available for consumption by a new application ??

Getting them via the REST-Interface might not be a very good idea.
Simply put, in the messaging world, message delivery guarantees are a big topic and the standard ways to solve that with Kafka are usually
Producing messages from your service using the Producer-API to a Kafka topic.
Using Kafka-Connect to read from an outbox-table.
Since you most likely have a database already attached to your API-Service, there might arise the problem of dual writes if you choose to produce the messages directly to a topic. What this means, is that writes to a database might fail while it might be successfully written to Kafka/vice-versa. So you can end up with inconsistent states. Depending on your use case this might be a problem or not.
Nevertheless, to overcome that, the outbox pattern can come in handy.
Via the outbox pattern, you'd basically write your messages to a table, a so-called outbox-table, and then you'd use Kafka-Connect to poll this table of the database. Kafka Connect is basically a cluster of workers that consume this database table and forward the entries of the table to a Kafka topic. You might want to look at confluent cloud, they offer a fully managed Kafka-Connect service. Like this you don't have to manage the cluster of workers yourself. Once you have the messages in a Kafka topic, you can consume them with the standard Kafka Consumer-API/ Stream-API.
What you're looking for is a Source-Connector.
A source connector for a specific database. E.g. MongoDB
E.g. https://www.confluent.io/hub/mongodb/kafka-connect-mongodb
For now, most source-connectors produce in an at-least-once fashion. This means that the topic you configure the connector to write to might contain a message twice. So make sure that if you need them to be consumed exactly once, you think about deduplicating these messages.

Related

Microservice failure Scenario

I am working on Microservice architecture. One of my service is exposed to source system which is used to post the data. This microservice published the data to redis. I am using redis pub/sub. Which is further consumed by couple of microservices.
Now if the other microservice is down and not able to process the data from redis pub/sub than I have to retry with the published data when microservice comes up. Source can not push the data again. As source can not repush the data and manual intervention is not possible so I tohught of 3 approaches.
Additionally Using redis data for storing and retrieving.
Using database for storing before publishing. I have many source and target microservices which use redis pub/sub. Now If I use this approach everytime i have to insert the request in DB first than its response status. Now I have to use shared database, this approach itself adding couple of more exception handling cases and doesnt look very efficient to me.
Use kafka inplace if redis pub/sub. As traffic is low so I used Redis pub/sub and not feasible to change.
In both of the above cases, I have to use scheduler and I have a duration before which I have to retry else subsequent request will fail.
Is there any other way to handle above cases.
For the point 2,
- Store the data in DB.
- Create a daemon process which will process the data from the table.
- This Daemon process can be configured well as per our needs.
- Daemon process will poll the DB and publish the data, if any. Also, it will delete the data once published.
Not in micro service architecture, But I have seen this approach working efficiently while communicating 3rd party services.
At the very outset, as you mentioned, we do indeed seem to have only three possibilities
This is one of those situations where you want to get a handshake from the service after pushing and after processing. In order to accomplish the same, using a middleware queuing system would be a right shot.
Although a bit more complex to accomplish, what you can do is use Kafka for streaming this. Configuring producer and consumer groups properly can help you do the job smoothly.
Using a DB to store would be a overkill, considering the situation where you "this data is to be processed and to be persisted"
BUT, alternatively, storing data to Redis and reading it in a cron-job/scheduled job would make your job much simpler. Once the job is run successfully, you may remove the data from cache and thus save Redis Memory.
If you can comment further more on the architecture and the implementation, I can go ahead and update my answer accordingly. :)

streaming data from oracle with kafka

I'm starting with kafka and I need to control the inserts in a specific Oracle table, send the new records through kafka at the moment. I have no control over the database, so, in principle, Debizium is excluded. How can I do this? Without using triggers.
I've made a producer read data from Oracle with a java program in eclipse but, that would make constant requests to the database. I use java for simulated a ETL with consumer.
PS: I work with Windows but that's secondary.
If I understand your problem correctly, you are trying to route inserts from Kafka to Oracle Database. There could be few possibilities:
You implement Kafka consumer and as soon as your kafka cluster gets a message consumer makes a insert. You could reuse your java code here- just remove the polling part. Please visit here
If you have kafka deployed in a cloud environment and are using it as a service(aws msk) you would have the option to handling the events. Again you can use java program or can write a python script to make inserts. Please visit here
I would like to understand your throughput requirements, whether you really need kafka as a distributed messaging system or a simple aws sqs would work just fine. If you can use sqs things would be straightforward for you. You create a queue and you write a listener in
python or java
boto3 is an excellent python library for working with sqs

Spring boot applications high availability

We have a microservice which is developed using spring boot. couple of the functionalities it implements is
1) A scheduler that triggers, at a specified time, a file download using webhdfs and process it and once the data is processed, it will send an email to users with the data process summary.
2) Read messages from kafka and once the data is read, send an email to users.
We are now planning to make this application high available either in Active-Active or Active-passive set up. The problem we are facing now is if both the instances of the application are running then both of them will try to download the file/read the data from kafka, process it and send emails. How can this be avoided? I mean to ensure that only one instance triggers the download and process it ?
Please let me know if there is known solution for this kind of scenarios as this seems to be a common scenario in most of the projects? Is master-slave/leader election approach a correct solution?
Thanks
Let the service download that file, extract the information and publish them via kafka.
Check beforehand if the information was already processed by querying kafka or a local DB.
You also could publish an DataProcessed-Event that triggers the EmailService, that sends the corresponding E-Mail.

Fluentd vs Kafka

The use case is this:
I've several java applications running which all have to interact with different (each one has a specific target) elasticsearch indices. For instance an application A uses the indices A,B,C of ElasticSearch to query and update. Application B uses indices A,C,D(say).
Some common interface is required which can manage all these data streams. Currently I'm evaluating Kafka and fluentd for this purpose.
Can someone explain which will be better suited for this situation. I've looked at features of both Kafka and Fluentd and I don't really understand the difference it would make here.
Thanks a lot.
kafka provides publish/subscribe messaging as a distributed commit log. Usually you install kafka on each host where you need to produce some data to be forwarded somewhere else and all those hosts will together form a cluster. The good thing here is that if for some reason network connectivity becomes unstable or goes down, your application can continue to produce data/logs and they won't be lost. Whereas if your application directly sends logs to some remote centralized logging host, you might lose some logs during the time the network goes down.
fluentd is a centralized log collector which is commonly installed on one host (or more if you need horizontal scaling). It connects to remote data sources, applies filtering and sends unified log data to remote data sinks.
From the fluentd docs, you can see that fluentd can consume data from kafka and produce data towards kafka as well. This alone should hint that fluentd and kafka are on different layers since the former uses the latter.
It would be more logical to compare fluentd and logstash actually. As far as fluentd is concerned, kafka is just another data source and/or data sink, but they are different beasts altogether.
If you want the best of both worlds, use kafka as input/output data pipes from/to your apps and fluentd (or logstash) as your centralized logging system reading from those kafka topics.
If you want to read more on the topic, you can read how fluentd and kafka complement each other very well, read they are not competing against each other.
From: The Life Blood Of Your Data Pipeline
Kafka is primarily related to holding log data rather than moving log
data. Thus, Kafka producers need to write the code to put data in
Kafka, and Kafka consumers need to write the code to pull data out of
Kafka.
Fluentd has both input and output plugins for Kafka so that data
engineers can write less code to get data in and out of Kafka. We have
many users that use Fluentd as a Kafka producer and/or consumer.

Using Akka.net / Actor System for an ETL process

I'm new in the world of actor modeling and I am in love with the idea. But does some pattern exists for processing a batch of messages simply for bulk storage in a safe manner?
I'm afraid if I read 400 messages of expected 500 and put them in a list, if the system closes, I don't want to lose those 400 messages from the (persisted)
mailbox. In a service bus world you could ask for a batch of messages and only when processed, commit all of them. Thank you.
You may want to combine your actor system with some service bus/reliable queues, like RabbitMQ or Azure Service Bus, at use actor system only for message processing.
From within Akka.NET itself, you have persistence extension, which can be used for storing actor state in persistent backend of your choice. It also contains a dedicated kind of an actor, AtLeastOnceDeliveryActor that may be used to resend messages until they will be confirmed.
you can extend split and aggregate in your ESB to do it, I made something similar with mule ESB from long time.

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