I have a reporting application that uses Celery to process thousands of jobs per day. There is a python module per each report type that encapsulates all job steps. Jobs take customer-specific parameters and typically complete within a few minutes. Currently, jobs are triggered by customers on-demand when they create a new report or request a refresh of an existing one.
Now, I would like to add scheduling, so the jobs run daily, and reports get refreshed automatically. I understand that Airflow shines at task orchestration and scheduling. I also like the idea of expressing my jobs as DAGs and getting the benefit of task retries. I can see how I can use Airflow to run scheduled batch-processing jobs, but I am unsure about my use case.
If I express my jobs as Airflow DAGs, I will still need to run them parametrized for each customer. It means, if the customer creates a new report, I will need to have a way to trigger a DAG with the customer-specific configuration. And with a scheduled execution, I will need to enumerate all customers and create a parametrized (sub-)DAG for each of them. My understanding this should be possible since Airflow supports DAGs created dynamically, however, I am not sure if this is an efficient and correct way to use Airflow.
I wonder if anyway considered using Airflow for a scenario similar to mine.
Celery workflows do literally the same, and you can create and run them at any point of time. Also, Celery has a pretty good scheduler (I have never seen it failing in 5 years of using Celery) - Celery Beat.
Sure, Airflow can be used to do what you need without any problems.
You can use Airflow to create DAGs dynamically, I am not sure if this will work with a scale of 1000 of DAGs though. There are some good examples on astronomer.io on Dynamically Generating DAGs in Airflow.
I have some DAGs and task that are dynamically generated by a yaml configuration with different schedules and configurations. It all works without any issue.
Only thing that might be challenging is the "jobs are triggered by customers on-demand" - I guess you could trigger any DAG with Airflow's REST API, but it's still in a experimental state.
Related
I am trying to find a solution to run a cron job in a Kubernetes-deployed app without unwanted duplicates. Let me describe my scenario, to give you a little bit of context.
I want to schedule jobs that execute once at a specified date. More precisely: creating such a job can happen anytime and its execution date will be known only at that time. The job that needs to be done is always the same, but it needs parametrization.
My application is running inside a Kubernetes cluster, and I cannot assume that there always will be only one instance of it running at the any moment in time. Therefore, creating the said job will lead to multiple executions of it due to the fact that all of my application instances will spawn it. However, I want to guarantee that a job runs exactly once in the whole cluster.
I tried to find solutions for this problem and came up with the following ideas.
Create a local file and check if it is already there when starting a new job. If it is there, cancel the job.
Not possible in my case, since the duplicate jobs might run on other machines!
Utilize the Kubernetes CronJob API.
I cannot use this feature because I have to create cron jobs dynamically from inside my application. I cannot change the cluster configuration from a pod running inside that cluster. Maybe there is a way, but it seems to me there have to be a better solution than giving the application access to the cluster it is running in.
Would you please be as kind as to give me any directions at which I might find a solution?
I am using a managed Kubernetes Cluster on Digital Ocean (Client Version: v1.22.4, Server Version: v1.21.5).
After thinking about a solution for a rather long time I found it.
The solution is to take the scheduling of the jobs to a central place. It is as easy as building a job web service that exposes endpoints to create jobs. An instance of a backend creating a job at this service will also provide a callback endpoint in the request which the job web service will call at the execution date and time.
The endpoint in my case links back to the calling backend server which carries the logic to be executed. It would be rather tedious to make the job service execute the logic directly since there are a lot of dependencies involved in the job. I keep a separate database in my job service just to store information about whom to call and how. Addressing the startup after crash problem becomes trivial since there is only one instance of the job web service and it can just re-create the jobs normally after retrieving them from the database in case the service crashed.
Do not forget to take care of failing jobs. If your backends are not reachable for some reason to take the callback, there must be some reconciliation mechanism in place that will prevent this failure from staying unnoticed.
A little note I want to add: In case you also want to scale the job service horizontally you run into very similar problems again. However, if you think about what is the actual work to be done in that service, you realize that it is very lightweight. I am not sure if horizontal scaling is ever a requirement, since it is only doing requests at specified times and is not executing heavy work.
I have a cluster in Google Kubernetes Engine, in that cluster there is a workload which runs every 4 hours, its a cron job that was set up by someone. I want to make that run whenever I need it. I am trying to achieve this by using the google Kubernetes API, sending requests from my app whenever a button is clicked to run that cron job, unfortunately the API has no apparent way to do that, or does not have a way at all. What would be some good advice to achieve my goal?
This is a Community Wiki answer, posted for better visibility, so feel free to edit it and add any additional details you consider important.
CronJob resource in kubernetes is not meant to be used one-off tasks, that are run on demand. It is rather configured to run on a regular schedule.
Manuel Polacek has already mentioned that in his comment:
For this scenario you don't need a cron job. A simple bare pod or a
job would be enough, i would say. You can apply a resource on button
push, for example with kubectl – Manuel Polacek Apr 24 at 19:25
So rather than trying to find a way to run your CronJobs on demand, regardless of how they are originally scheduled (usually to be repeated at regular intervals), you should copy the code of such CronJob and find a different way of running it. A Job fits ideally to such use case as it is designed to run one-off tasks.
Current Setup
We have kubernetes cluster setup with 3 kubernetes pods which run spring boot application. We run a job every 12 hrs using spring boot scheduler to get some data and cache it.(there is queue setup but I will not go on those details as my query is for the setup before we get to queue)
Problem
Because we have 3 pods and scheduler is at application level , we make 3 calls for data set and each pod gets the response and pod which processes at caches it first becomes the master and other 2 pods replicate the data from that instance.
I see this as a problem because we will increase number of jobs for get more datasets , so this will multiply the number of calls made.
I am not from Devops side and have limited azure knowledge hence I need some help from community
Need
What are the options available to improve this? I want to separate out Cron schedule to run only once and not for each pod
1 - Can I keep cronjob at cluster level , i have read about it here https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/cron-jobs/
Will this solve a problem?
2 - I googled and found other option is to run a Cronjob which will schedule a job to completion, will that help and not sure what it really means.
Thanks in Advance to taking out time to read it.
Based on my understanding of your problem, it looks like you have following two choices (at least) -
If you continue to have scheduling logic within your springboot main app, then you may want to explore something like shedlock that helps make sure your scheduled job through app code executes only once via an external lock provider like MySQL, Redis, etc. when the app code is running on multiple nodes (or kubernetes pods in your case).
If you can separate out the scheduler specific app code into its own executable process (i.e. that code can run in separate set of pods than your main application code pods), then you can levarage kubernetes cronjob to schedule kubernetes job that internally creates pods and runs your application logic. Benefit of this approach is that you can use native kubernetes cronjob parameters like concurrency and few others to ensure the job runs only once during scheduled time through single pod.
With approach (1), you get to couple your scheduler code with your main app and run them together in same pods.
With approach (2), you'd have to separate your code (that runs in scheduler) from overall application code, containerize it into its own image, and then configure kubernetes cronjob schedule with this new image referring official guide example and kubernetes cronjob best practices (authored by me but can find other examples).
Both approaches have their own merits and de-merits, so you can evaluate them to suit your needs best.
I want to consolidate a couple of historically grown scripts (Python, Bash and Powershell) which purpose is to sync data between a lot of different database backends (mostly postgres, but also oracle and sqlserver) and on different sites. There isn't really a master, its more like a loose couple of partner companies working on the same domain specific use cases, everyone with its own data silo and its my job to hold all this together as good as I can.
Currently those scripts I mentioned are cron scheduled and need to run on the origin server where a dataset gets initially written, to sync it to every partner over night.
I am also familiar with and use Apache Airflow in another project. So my idea was to use an workflow management tool like Airflow to streamline the sync process and get it more centralized. But also with Airflow there is only a time interval scheduler available to trigger a DAG.
As most writes come in over postgres databases, I'd like to make use of the NOTIFY/LISTEN feature and already have a python daemon based on this listening to any database change (via triggers) and calling an event handler then.
The last missing piece is how its probably best done to trigger an airflow DAG with this handler and how to keep all this running reliably?
Perhaps there is a better solution?
I am working to migrate from Quartz 1.6 to 2.1 and use a JDBCJobStore. Previously, the the jobs were loaded via an xml file when the webapp started. The scheduler is now running using the JDBCJobStore but I don't understand how to add the jobs to the database which need to run on an ongoing basis (not one-off jobs).
My first thought is to create a servlet which runs on startup which adds the jobs to the database. But my concern is that this will be executed every time I need to restart the app and the jobs will get duplicated.
Thanks,
steve
The Jobs wont disappear from the database when you do a restart. So within your servlet, when it starts up before adding any jobs check to see if they already exist. When you create your jobs you can give them identities. Using the identities and some quartz methods you check if they already exist.
It sounds like the memory based scheduler is a better fit for these fixed jobs. You can create more than one scheduler, one memory, one JDBC if that makes sense for your application.