Using my own Cassandra driver to write aggregations results - apache-kafka-streams

I'm trying to create a simple application which writes to Cassandra the page views of each web page on my site. I want to write every 5 minutes the accumulative page views from the start of a logical hour.
My code for this looks something like this:
KTable<Windowed<String>, Long> hourlyPageViewsCounts = keyedPageViews
.groupByKey()
.count(TimeWindows.of(TimeUnit.MINUTES.toMillis(60)), "HourlyPageViewsAgg")
Where I also set my commit interval to 5 minutes by setting the COMMIT_INTERVAL_MS_CONFIG property. To my understanding that should aggregate on full hour and output intermediate accumulation state every 5 minutes.
My questions now are two:
Given that I have my own Cassandra driver, how do I write the 5 min intermediate results of the aggregation to Cassandra? Tried to use foreach but that doesn't seem to work.
I need a write only after 5 min of aggregation, not on each update. Is it possible? Reading here suggests it might not without using low-level API, which I'm trying to avoid as it seems like a simple enough task to be accomplished with the higher level APIs.

Committing and producing/writing output is two different concepts in Kafka Streams API. In Kafka Streams API, output is produced continuously and commits are used to "mark progress" (ie, to commit consumer offsets including the flushing of all stores and buffered producer records).
You might want to check out this blog post for more details: https://www.confluent.io/blog/watermarks-tables-event-time-dataflow-model/
1) To write to Casandra, it is recommended to write the result of you application back into a topic (via #to("topic-name")) and use Kafka Connect to get the data into Casandra.
Compare: External system queries during Kafka Stream processing
2) Using low-level API is the only way to go (as you pointed out already) if you want to have strict 5-minutes intervals. Note, that next release (Kafka 1.0) will include wall-clock-time punctuations which should make it easier for you to achieve your goal.

Related

Best way to track/trace a JSON Object (a time series data) as it flows through a system of microservices on a IOT platform

We are working on an IOT platform, which ingests many device parameter
values (time series) every second from may devices. Once ingested the
each JSON (batch of multiple parameter values captured at a particular
instance) What is the best way to track the JSON as it flows through
many microservices down stream in an event driven way?
We use spring boot technology predominantly and all the services are
containerised.
Eg: Option 1 - Is associating UUID to each object and then updating
the states idempotently in Redis as each microservice processes it
ideal? Problem is each microservice will be tied to Redis now and we
have seen performance of Redis going down as number api calls to Redis
increase as it is single threaded (We can scale this out though).
Option 2 - Zipkin?
Note: We use Kafka/RabbitMQ to process the messages in a distributed
way as you mentioned here. My question is about a strategy to track
each of this message and its status (to enable replay if needed to
attain only once delivery). Let's say a message1 is being by processed
by Service A, Service B, Service C. Now we are having issues to track
if the message failed getting processed at Service B or Service C as
we get a lot of messages
Better approach will be using Kafka instead of Redis.
Create a topic for every microservice & keep moving the packet from
one topic to another after processing.
topic(raw-data) - |MS One| - topic(processed-data-1) - |MS Two| - topic(processed-data-2) ... etc
Keep appending the results to same object and keep moving it down the line, untill every micro-service has processed it.

Apache Flink relating/caching data options

This is a very broad question, I’m new to Flink and looking into the possibility of using it as a replacement for a current analytics engine.
The scenario is, data collected from various equipment, the data is received As a JSON encoded string with the format of {“location.attribute”:value, “TimeStamp”:value}
For example a unitary traceability code is received for a location, after which various process parameters are received in a real-time stream. The analysis is to be ran over the process parameters however the output needs to include a relation to a traceability code. For example {“location.alarm”:value, “location.traceability”:value, “TimeStamp”:value}
What method does Flink use for caching values, in this case the current traceability code whilst running analysis over other parameters received at a later time?
I’m mainly just looking for the area to research as so far I’ve been unable to find any examples of this kind of scenario. Perhaps it’s not the kind of process that Flink can handle
A natural way to do this sort of thing with Flink would be to key the stream by the location, and then use keyed state in a ProcessFunction (or RichFlatMapFunction) to store the partial results until ready to emit the output.
With a keyed stream, you are guaranteed that every event with the same key will be processed by the same instance. You can then use keyed state, which is effectively a sharded key/value store, to store per-key information.
The Apache Flink training includes some explanatory material on keyed streams and working with keyed state, as well as an exercise or two that explore how to use these mechanisms to do roughly what you need.
Alternatively, you could do this with the Table or SQL API, and implement this as a join of the stream with itself.

Kafka streams window batching

Coming from a Spark Streaming background - getting a grasp on Kafka streams.
I have a simple Spark Streaming application that reads from Kafka,
and returns the latest event per user in that minute
Sample events would look like {"user": 1, "timestamp": "2018-05-18T16:56:30.754Z", "count": 3}, {"user": 1, "timestamp": "2018-05-22T16:56:39.754Z", "count": 4}
I'm interested in how this would work in Kafka Streams, as it seems that there is an output for each event - when my use case is to reduce the traffic.
From my reading so far it seems that this is not straight forward, and you would have to use the processor api.
Ideally I would like to use the DSL instead of the processor API, as I am just starting to look at Kafka streams, but it seems that I would have to use the processor API's punctuate method to read from a state store every n seconds?
I'm using kafka 0.11.0
At DSL level, Kafka Streams allows to configure KTable caches (enabled by default) that reduce downstream load. The cache is an LRU cache that is flushed regularly. Thus, while the cache reduces downstream load, it does not guarantee how many outputs per window you get. (cf. https://docs.confluent.io/current/streams/developer-guide/memory-mgmt.html)
If you strictly need a single output per window, using the Processor API is the right way to go.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but Kafka Streams now supports suppress operation. Take a look here:
You can use Suppress to effectively rate-limit just one KTable output
or callback. Or, especially valuable for non-retractable outputs like
alerts, you can use it to get only the final results of a windowed
aggregation. The clearest use case for Suppress at the moment is
getting final results
Based on the article, the code can look like:
events
.groupByKey()
.windowedBy(
TimeWindows.of(Duration.ofMinutes(2).withGrace(Duration.ofMinutes(2))
)
.count(Materialized.as("count-metric"))
.suppress(Suppressed.untilWindowClose(BufferConfig.unbounded()))
.filter( _ < 4 )
.toStream()
.foreach( /* Send that email! */)
I'm using Kafka Streams 2.6.0 and I'm able to reuse the same approach to build a stream.

Queueing mechanism and Elasticsearch 1.4.0

I have a RabbitMQ broker, on which I post different messages that will end up as documents in Elasticsearch. There are multiple consumers from the broker, which are actually different threads in a task executor assigned to an amqp inbound gateway (using spring integration and spring amqp here).
Think at the following scenario: I have created a doc in ES with the structure
{
"field1" : "value1",
"field2" : "value2"
}
Afterwards I send two update requests, both updating the same field, let's say field1. If I send this messages one right after another(common use case in production), my consumer threads will fetch the messages in the right order(amqp allows this), but the processing could happen in the wrong order and the later updated value could be overwritten by the first one. I will end up having wring data.
How can I make sure my data won't get corrupted? =>Having 1 single consumer thread is not enough, because if I want to scale out by adding more machines with my consuming app, I will still end up having multiple consumers. I might need ordering of messages, but having multiple machines I will probably need to create some sort of a cluster aware component, I am using SI, so this seems really hard to do in my opinion.
In pre 1.2 versions of ES, we used an external version, like a timestamp, and ES would have thrown VersionConflictException in my scenario:first update would have had version 10000 let's say, the second 10001 and if the first would have been processed first, ES would reject the request with version 10000 as it's lower than the existing one. But from the latest versions, ES guys have removed this functionality for update operations.
One solution might be to use multiple queues and have a single consumer on each queue; use a hash function to always route updates to the same document to the same queue see the RabbitMQ Tutorials for the various options.
You can scale out by adding more queues (and changing your hash function).
For resiliency, consider running your consumers in Spring XD. You can have a single instance of each rabbit source (for each queue) and XD will take care of failing it over to another container node if it goes down.
Otherwise you could roll your own by having a warm standby - inbound adapters configured with auto-startup="false" and have something monitor and use a <control-bus/> to start a new instance if the active one goes down.
EDIT:
In response to the fourth comment below.
As I said above, to scale out, you would have to change the hash function. So adding consumers automatically while running would be tricky.
You don't have to hard-code the queue names in the jar, you can use a property placeholder and fill it from properties, system properties, or an environment variable.
This solution is the simplest but does have these limitations.
You could, however, build a management app that could scale it out - stop the producer, wait for all queues to quiesce, reconfigure the consumers and restart the producer - Spring Integration provides a <control-bus/> to start/stop adapters; you can also do it via JMX.
Alternative solutions are possible but will generally require maintaining some shared state across a cluster (perhaps using zookeeper etc), so are much more complex; and you still have to deal with race conditions (where the second update might arrive at some consumer before the first).
You can use the default mechanism for consistency checks. Basically you want to verify that you have the latest version of whatever you are updating.
So for that you need to fetch the _version with the object. In queries you can do this by setting version=true on the toplevel. That will cause the _version to be returned along with your query results. Then when doing an update, you simply set the version parameter in the url to the value you have and it will generate a version conflict if it doesn't match.
Nicer is to handle updates using closures. Basically this works as follows: have an update method that fetches the object by id, applies a closure (parameter to the update function) that encapsulate the modifications you want to make, and then stores modified object. If you trap the still possible version conflict, you can simply get the object again and re-apply the closure to the object. We do this and added a random sleep before the retry as well, this vastly reduces the chance of multiple updates failing and is a nice design pattern. Keeping the read and write together minimizes the chance of a conflict and then retrying with a sleep before that minimizes it further. You could add multiple retries to further reduce the risk.

#Storm: how to setup various metrics for the same data source

I'm trying to setup Storm to aggregate a stream, but with various (DRPC available) metrics on the same stream.
E.g. the stream is consisted of messages that have a sender, a recipient, the channel through which the message arrived and a gateway through which it was delivered. I'm having trouble deciding how to organize one or more topologies that could give me e.g. total count of messages by gateway and/or by channel. And besides the total, counts per minute would be nice too.
The basic idea is to have a spout that will accept messaging events, and from there aggregate the data as needed. Currently I'm playing around with Trident and DRPC and I've came up with two possible topologies that solve the problem at this stage. Can't decide which approach is better, if any?!
The entire source is available at this gist.
It has three classes:
RandomMessageSpout
used to emit the messaging data
simulates the real data source
SeparateTopology
creates a separate DRPC stream for each metric needed
also a separate query state is created for each metric
they all use the same spout instance
CombinedTopology
creates a single DRPC stream with all the metrics needed
creates a separate query state for each metric
each query state extracts the desired metric and groups results for it
Now, for the problems and questions:
SeparateTopology
is it necessary to use the same spout instance or can I just say new RandomMessageSpout() each time?
I like the idea that I don't need to persist grouped data by all the metrics, but just the groupings we need to extract later
is the spout emitted data actually processed by all the state/query combinations, e.g. not the first one that comes?
would this also later enable dynamic addition of new state/query combinations at runtime?
CombinedTopology
I don't really like the idea that I need to persist data grouped by all the metrics since I don't need all the combinations
it came as a surprise that the all the metrics always return the same data
e.g. channel and gateway inquiries return status metrics data
I found that this was always the data grouped by the first field in state definition
this topic explains the reasoning behind this behaviour
but I'm wondering if this is a good way of doing thins in the first place (and will find a way around this issue if need be)
SnapshotGet vs TupleCollectionGet in stateQuery
with SnapshotGet things tended to work, but not always, only TupleCollectionGet solved the issue
any pointers as to what is correct way of doing that?
I guess this is a longish question / topic, but any help is really appreciated!
Also, if I missed the architecture entirely, suggestions on how to accomplish this would be most welcome.
Thanks in advance :-)
You can't actually split a stream in SeparateTopology by invoking newStream() using the same spout instance, since that would create new instances of the same RandomMessageSpout spout, which would result in duplicate values being emitted to your topology by multiple, separate spout instances. (Spout parallelization is only possible in Storm with partitioned spouts, where each spout instance processes a partition of the whole dataset -- a Kafka partition, for example).
The correct approach here is to modify the CombinedTopology to split the stream into multiple streams as needed for each metric you need (see below), and then do a groupBy() by that metric's field and persistentAggregate() on each newly branched stream.
From the Trident FAQ,
"each" returns a Stream object, which you can store in a variable. You can then run multiple eaches on the same Stream to split it, e.g.:
Stream s = topology.each(...).groupBy(...).aggregate(...)
Stream branch1 = s.each(...)
Stream branch2 = s.each(...)
See this thread on Storm's mailing list, and this one for more information.

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