I was looking for a microservice orchestrator and came across Uber Cadence. I have gone through the documentation and also used it in the development setup.
I had a few questions for production scenarios:
Is it recommended to have a dedicated tasklist for the workflow and the different activities used by it? Or, should we use a single tasklist for all? Does this decision impact the scalability or performance?
When we add a new worker machine, is it a common practice to run all the workers for different activities/workflows in the same machine? Example:
Worker.Factory factory = new Worker.Factory("samples-domain");
Worker helloWorkflowWorker = factory.newWorker("HelloWorkflowTaskList");
helloWorkflowWorker.registerWorkflowImplementationTypes(HelloWorkflowImpl.class);
Worker helloActivityWorker = factory.newWorker("HelloActivityTaskList");
helloActivityWorker.registerActivitiesImplementations(new HelloActivityImpl());
Worker upperCaseActivityWorker = factory.newWorker("UpperCaseActivityTaskList");
upperCaseActivityWorker.registerActivitiesImplementations(new UpperCaseActivityImpl());
factory.start();
Or should we run each activity/workflow worker in a dedicated machine?
In a single worker machine, how many workers can we create for a given activity? For example, if we have activity HelloActivityImpl, should we create multiple workers for it in the same worker machine?
I have not found any documentation for production set up. For example, how to install and configure the Cadence Service in production? It will be great if someone can direct me to the right material for this.
In some of the video tutorials, it was mentioned that, for High Availability, we can setup Cadence Service across multiple data centers. How do I configure Cadence service for that?
Unless you need to have separate flow control and rate limiting for a set of activities there is no reason to use more than one task queue per worker process.
As I mentioned in 1 I would rewrite your code as:
Worker.Factory factory = new Worker.Factory("samples-domain");
Worker worker = factory.newWorker("HelloWorkflow");
worker.registerWorkflowImplementationTypes(HelloWorkflowImpl.class);
worker.registerActivitiesImplementations(new HelloActivityImpl(), new UpperCaseActivityImpl());
factory.start();
There is no reason to create more than one worker for the same activity.
Not sure about Cadence. Here is the Temporal documentation that shows how to deploy to Kubernetes.
This documentation is not yet available. We at Temporal are working on it.
You can also use Cadence helmchart https://hub.helm.sh/charts/banzaicloud-stable/cadence
I am actively working with Cadence team to have operation documentation for the community. It will be useful for those don't want to run on K8s, like myself. I will come back later as we make progress.
Current draft version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tQyLv2gEMDOjzFibKeuVYAA4fucjUFlxpojkOMAIwnA
will be published to cadence-docs soon.
Related
I am working on a cloud service platform that consists of getting tasks from users, executing them, and giving back the results.
TL;DR
Is there a way to have a "task queue", where tasks can be inserted via a REST API, and extracted automatically by the Google Kubernetes Engine cluster by guaranteeing an automatic scaling?
Long description
Users can send tasks in parallel, and each task is time consuming and need to be performed on a GPU. So, setting up an auto-scaling GPU cluster is what I thought of.
More in particular, in my idea, users could send tasks/data through a REST API, the REST API provides in filling a task queue, and the task queue itself will feed tasks to workers on the GPU auto-scaling cluster. Of course, there are other details (authentication, database, storage, etc.) that have to be addressed but are not the point of my question.
For reasons I don't specify here, the project is already started on the Google Cloud Platform, so switching to AWS or other providers is not an option.
For what I understood, things seem a bit different from standard Docker-only clusters in AWS, that is, we have to use the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to setup the auto-scaling cluster, even for "simple" GPU-enabled Docker containers.
By looking at the not-so-exhaustive documentation, I know that queues are used, but what I don't know is whether feeding of tasks to the cluster is automatically handled. Also, the so-called "Task Queue" service has been deprecated.
Thank you!
First I thought Cloud Tasks queues may be the answer to your troubles, but more this post seems to promote Cloud Pub/Sub as a better alternative.
After a quick chat with batch developers, the current solution (before the batch service become public) is to adopt a third-party queue system like Slurm.
I am currently running a Flink session cluster (Kubernetes, 1 JobManager, 1 TaskManager, Zookeeper, S3) in which multiple jobs run.
As we are working on adding more jobs, we are looking to improve our deployment and cluster management strategies. We are considering migrating to using job clusters, however there is reservation about the number of containers which will be spawned. One container per job is not an issue, but two containers (1 JM and 1 TM) per job raises concerns about memory consumption. Several of the jobs need high-availability and the ability to use checkpoints and restore from/take savepoints as they aggregate events over a window.
From my reading of the documentation and spending time on Google, I haven't found anything that seems to state whether or not what is being considered is really possible.
Is it possible to do any of these three things:
run both the JobManager and TaskManager as separate processes in the same container and have that serve as the Flink cluster, or
run the JobManager and TaskManager as literally the same process, or
run the job as a standalone JAR with the ability to recover from/take checkpoints and the ability to take a savepoint and restore from that savepoint?
(If anyone has any better ideas, I'm all ears.)
One of the responsibilities of the job manager is to monitor the task manager(s), and initiate restarts when failures have occurred. That works nicely in containerized environments when the JM and TMs are in separate containers; otherwise it seems like you're asking for trouble. Keeping the TMs separate also makes sense if you are ever going to scale up, though that may moot in your case.
What might be workable, though, would be to run the job using a LocalExecutionEnvironment (so that everything is in one process -- this is sometimes called a Flink minicluster). This path strikes me as feasible, if you're willing to work at it, but I can't recommend it. You'll have to somehow keep track of the checkpoints, and arrange for the container to be restarted from a checkpoint when things fail. And there are other things that may not work very well -- see this question for details. The LocalExecutionEnvironment wasn't designed with production deployments in mind.
What I'd suggest you explore instead is to see how far you can go toward making the standard, separate container solution affordable. For starters, you should be able to run the JM with minimal resources, since it doesn't have much to do.
Check this operator which automates the lifecycle of deploying and managing Flink in Kubernetes. The project is in beta but you can still get some idea about how to do it or directly use this operator if it fits your requirement. Here Job Manager and Task manager is separate kubernetes deployment.
Zookeeper plays several roles in the open-source workflow framework dolphinscheduler, such as heartbeat detection among masters and workers, task queue，event listener and distributed lock.
dolphin-sche framework
Is it possible to replace it by using database (mysql)? The main reason is to simplify the project structure .
zookeeper in DS is mainly used as:
Task queue, for master sending tasks to worker
Lock, for the communication between host(masters and workers)
Event watcher. Master listens the event that worker added or removed
it costs to replace zk as mysql.
zk mainly assumes the responsibility of the registry and monitors the application status. zk is very mature in this area and is a recognized solution in the industry. If MySQL wants to do this, the technical implementation cost will be larger, and may not achieve the desired effect.
BTW, their team is currently working on the SPI development for the registry, and in later versions, perhaps you can use other components, such as etcd, to achieve similar functionality.
for now, MasterServer and the WorkerServer nodes in the system all use the Zookeeper for cluster management and fault tolerance. In addition, the system also performs event monitoring and distributed locking based on ZooKeeper. We have also implemented queues based on Redis, but we hope that DolphinScheduler relies on as few components as possible, so we finally removed the Redis implementation.
so now DolphinScheduler can't work fine without Zookeeper, maybe in the future.
DolphinScheduler System Architecture:
For more documents please refer: Official Document.
I would like to run a sequence of Kubernetes jobs one after another. It's okay if they are run on different nodes, but it's important that each one run to completion before the next one starts. Is there anything built into Kubernetes to facilitate this? Other architecture recommendations also welcome!
This requirement to add control flow, even if it's a simple sequential flow, is outside the scope of Kubernetes native entities as far as I know.
There are many workflow engine implementations for Kubernetes, most of them are focusing on solving CI/CD but are generic enough for you to use however you want.
Argo: https://applatix.com/open-source/argo/
Added a custom resource deginition in Kubernetes entity for Workflow
Brigade: https://brigade.sh/
Takes a more serverless like approach and is built on Javascript which is very flexible
Codefresh: https://codefresh.io
Has a unique approach where you can use the SaaS to easily get started without complicated installation and maintenance, and you can point Codefresh at your Kubernetes nodes to run the workflow on.
Feel free to Google for "Kubernetes Workflow", and discover the right platform for yourself.
Disclaimer: I work at Codefresh
I would try to use cronjobs and set the concurrency policy to forbid so it doesn't run concurrent jobs.
I have worked on IBM TWS (Workload Automation) which is a scheduler similar to cronjob where you can mention the dependencies of the jobs.
You can specify a job to run only after it's dependencies has run using follows keyword.
Recently I've discovered such a thing as a Apache Mesos.
It all looks amazingly in all that demos and examples. I could easily imagine how one would run for stateless jobs - that fits to the whole idea naturally.
Bot how to deal with long running jobs that are stateful?
Say, I have a cluster that consists of N machines (and that is scheduled via Marathon). And I want to run a postgresql server there.
That's it - at first I don't even want it to be highly available, but just simply a single job (actually Dockerized) that hosts a postgresql server.
1- How would one organize it? Constraint a server to a particular cluster node? Use some distributed FS?
2- DRBD, MooseFS, GlusterFS, NFS, CephFS, which one of those play well with Mesos and services like postgres? (I'm thinking here on the possibility that Mesos/marathon could relocate the service if goes down)
3- Please tell if my approach is wrong in terms of philosophy (DFS for data servers and some kind of switchover for servers like postgres on the top of Mesos)
Question largely copied from Persistent storage for Apache Mesos, asked by zerkms on Programmers Stack Exchange.
Excellent question. Here are a few upcoming features in Mesos to improve support for stateful services, and corresponding current workarounds.
Persistent volumes (0.23): When launching a task, you can create a volume that exists outside of the task's sandbox and will persist on the node even after the task dies/completes. When the task exits, its resources -- including the persistent volume -- can be offered back to the framework, so that the framework can launch the same task again, launch a recovery task, or launch a new task that consumes the previous task's output as its input.
Current workaround: Persist your state in some known location outside the sandbox, and have your tasks try to recover it manually. Maybe persist it in a distributed filesystem/database, so that it can be accessed from any node.
Disk Isolation (0.22): Enforce disk quota limits on sandboxes as well as persistent volumes. This ensures that your storage-heavy framework won't be able to clog up the disk and prevent other tasks from running.
Current workaround: Monitor disk usage out of band, and run periodic cleanup jobs.
Dynamic Reservations (0.23): Upon launching a task, you can reserve the resources your task uses (including persistent volumes) to guarantee that they are offered back to you upon task exit, instead of going to whichever framework is furthest below its fair share.
Current workaround: Use the slave's --resources flag to statically reserve resources for your framework upon slave startup.
As for your specific use case and questions:
1a) How would one organize it? You could do this with Marathon, perhaps creating a separate Marathon instance for your stateful services, so that you can create static reservations for the 'stateful' role, such that only the stateful Marathon will be guaranteed those resources.
1b) Constraint a server to a particular cluster node? You can do this easily in Marathon, constraining an application to a specific hostname, or any node with a specific attribute value (e.g. NFS_Access=true). See Marathon Constraints. If you only wanted to run your tasks on a specific set of nodes, you would only need to create the static reservations on those nodes. And if you need discoverability of those nodes, you should check out Mesos-DNS and/or Marathon's HAProxy integration.
1c) Use some distributed FS? The data replication provided by many distributed filesystems would guarantee that your data can survive the failure of any single node. Persisting to a DFS would also provide more flexibility in where you can schedule your tasks, although at the cost of the difference in latency between network and local disk. Mesos has built-in support for fetching binaries from HDFS uris, and many customers use HDFS for passing executor binaries, config files, and input data to the slaves where their tasks will run.
2) DRBD, MooseFS, GlusterFS, NFS, CephFS? I've heard of customers using CephFS, HDFS, and MapRFS with Mesos. NFS would seem an easy fit too. It really doesn't matter to Mesos what you use as long as your task knows how to access it from whatever node where it's placed.
Hope that helps!