k8s job with an unlimited/unknown number of work-items (completions) - kubernetes

I have a queue which filled (consistently) with work-item by one of my k8s pod.
I want to use k8s job to process each work item as I want each job to be handle by new pod as I want to use multiple container as suggest here, but jobs don't seem to support an infinite number of completions.
When I use spec.completions: null I got BackoffLimitExceeded.
Any Idea how to implement job without the need to specify the number of work item?
Is there alternative to job for implementing background worker in k8s ?
Thank you

My suggestion is to use Kubernetes resources in the way they have been designed: Job resources are one-off tasks that can ben triggered many times but they differ from the background jobs you're eager to implement.
If your application is popping jobs from a queue/backend, it's better to put in a Deployment with a for loop (YMMV according to programming language) and, eventually, scale it to down with another component if you don't want to allocate unused resources.
Another solution could be the specialization of each Job, using UUID as the name of the jobs and labelling them in order to group them: anyway, first suggestion of using Kubernetes in the Kubernetes way is strongly recommended.

Related

Work shift scheduling with break times for specific agents

I am building a simulation model for a production line. There are two shifts (morning and night shift, 12 hours each) daily. Within each shift, the workers are split into 4 groups and each group goes for meal breaks at a staggered timing (eg. 4 workers in morning shift, first worker goes for break at 9am, second goes at 10am, etc.). These workers will also take ad-hoc breaks at random occurrences during their shift.
Not sure which method would work:
Creating an individual schedule within the agent and let it change states according to the schedule?
Use a common schedule for the entire resource pool, but will it be possible to pick which agent goes for break at the break time? Or will the agent be picked at random? Caus my concern is that i'll need the agents to take breaks but at staggered intervals.
Or should I generate this in a different approach?
Good question!
On option 2)
If you use the resource pool you will not be able to choose a specific agent as shifts and breaks are created for the entire pool.
What you can do is to define the capacity of the resource pool using, multiple schedules
This can help you artificially define the staggered. nature of the break-taking for resources.
Refer to the help for more details - https://anylogic.help/library-reference-guides/process-modeling-library/resourcepool.html
I believe this answers your question already but here are my notes on the other option.
Option 1)
If you require more advanced flexibility and control over the breaks and you do have the required Java skills (and time!) you can create custom code that controls when to send agents on a break and when to to return. You can use StateCharts inside your agents to build this logic. But then this will not be compatible with the resource pool since the resource pool will be oblivious to the state of the agents inside the pool and it will seize units that are taking a break...
So in this case your size delay and release will also be custom.
This is a lot of work and should only be attempted if you have the time, skills and require a level of flexibility and customization not offered by the resource pool.

Reliably running hundreds of scheduled functions every minute

I am building an application that will need to run hundreds of short running tasks every minute. These functions are not doing anything special other than making calls to an HTTP endpoint. I need a reliable mechanism for scheduling these invocations every minute indefinitely. Failures to run at the scheduled time cannot be tolerated. I have considered the following options for the scheduler:
AWS Lambda
Mesosphere Chronos
Cron
Python Celery
Obviously there is a trade off between cost, maintainability (I will need to update the logic of these functions every once in a while), and reliability.
My question is, which of these options would be the most appropriate if I am most concerned about consistency/reliability? Are there options I'm missing that I should consider?
As you already mentioned, there are multiple technologies that could help you do this, I would say that the trick is more to find the logic flow/model to use.
For example, If the number of tasks are not fixed, a publish/subscribe pattern could apply, for this something like rabbitMQ or AWS SQS could be used.
There are multiple ways about how to submit a task to the queue and also how to de-queue, you could have multiple workers reading/waiting for events in where they could read one by one or by chunks (based on the num of cores per server) all this bound to the speed and precision you may want.
Scaling I would say is easier since if need more speed (precision to do all tasks every minute) just need to add more workers.
For more ideas check this article Using AWS Lambda with Amazon DynamoDB it covers a stream-based model / event-sourcing.

Parallelism static job with static work assignment

This document describes options for running parallel jobs. The one I'm interested in is "Single job with static work assignment" Where I would create a job, set parallelism > 0 and completions == count of my work items.
The problem is, I don't know how would the pods know which item they should process? environment variables look identical... not sure if k8s passes some sequence number I can use... ideas?
The best approach in your case is to use some MQ services.
Your actions order may be the next:
Start MQ service
Create a queue and fill it with messages
Start a Job that works on tasks from the queue
Here you can find the latest documentation on Job Patterns.
Also look at kube examples that you can find here and here.
In these examples/tasks, Kubernetes uses RabbitMQ.

Apache Spark - How does internal job scheduler in spark define what are users and what are pools

I am sorry about being a little general here, but I am a little confused about how job scheduling works internally in spark. From the documentation here I get that it is some sort of implementation of Hadoop Fair Scheduler.
I am unable to come around to understand that who exactly are users here (are the linux users, hadoop users, spark clients?). I am also unable to understand how are the pools defined here. For example, In my hadoop cluster I have given resource allocation to two different pools (lets call them team 1 and team 2). But in spark cluster, wont different pools and the users in them instantiate their own spark context? Which again brings me to question that what parameters do I pass when I am setting property to spark.scheduler.pool.
I have a basic understanding of how driver instantiates a spark context and then splits them into task and jobs. May be I am missing the point completely here but I would really like to understand how Spark's internal scheduler works in context of actions, tasks and job
I find official documentation quite thorough and covering all your questions. However, one might find it hard to digest from the first time.
Let us put some definitions and rough analogues before we delve into details. application is what creates SparkContext sc and may be referred to as something you deploy with spark-submit. job is an action in spark definition of transformation and action meaning anything like count, collect etc.
There are two main and in some sense separate topics: Scheduling Across applications and Scheduling Within application. The former relates more to Resource Managers including Spark Standalone FIFO only mode and also concept of static and dynamic allocation.
The later, Scheduling Within Spark application is the matter of your question, as I understood from your comment. Let me try to describe what happens there at some level of abstraction.
Suppose, you submitted your application and you have two jobs
sc.textFile("..").count() //job1
sc.textFile("..").collect() //job2
If this code happens to be executed in the same thread there is no much interesting happening here, job2 and all its tasks get resources only after job1 is done.
Now say you have the following
thread1 { job1 }
thread2 { job2 }
This is getting interesting. By default, within your application scheduler will use FIFO to allocate resources to all the tasks of whichever job happens to appear to scheduler as first. Tasks for the other job will get resources only when there are spare cores and no more pending tasks from more "prioritized" first job.
Now suppose you set spark.scheduler.mode=FAIR for your application. From now on each job has a notion of pool it belongs to. If you do nothing then for every job pool label is "default". To set the label for your job you can do the following
sc.setLocalProperty("spark.scheduler.pool", "pool1").textFile("").count() // job1
sc.setLocalProperty("spark.scheduler.pool", "pool2").textFile("").collect() // job2
One important note here is that setLocalProperty is effective per thread and also all spawned threads. What it means for us? Well if you are within the same thread it means nothing as jobs are executed one after another.
However, once you have the following
thread1 { job1 } // pool1
thread2 { job2 } // pool2
job1 and job2 become unrelated in the sense of resource allocation. In general, properly configuring each pool in fairscheduler file with minShare > 0 you can be sure that jobs from different pools will have resources to proceed.
However, you can go even further. By default, within each pool jobs are queued up in a FIFO manner and this situation is basically the same as in the scenario when we have had FIFO mode and jobs from different threads. To change that you you need to change the pool in the xml file to have <schedulingMode>FAIR</schedulingMode>.
Given all that, if you just set spark.scheduler.mode=FAIR and let all the jobs fall into the same "default" pool, this is roughly the same as if you would use default spark.scheduler.mode=FIFO and have your jobs be launched in different threads. If you still just want single "default" fair pool just change config for "default" pool in xml file to reflect that.
To leverage the mechanism of pools you need to define the concept of user which is the same as setting "spark.scheduler.pool" from a proper thread to a proper value. For example, if your application listens to JMS, then a message processor may set the pool label for each message processing job depending on its content.
Eventually, not sure if the number of words is less than in the official doc, but hopefully it helps is some way :)
By default spark works with FIFO scheduler where jobs are executed in FIFO manner.
But if you have your cluster on YARN, YARN has pluggable scheduler, it means in YARN you can scheduler of your choice. If you are using YARN distributed by CDH you will have FAIR scheduler by deafult but you can also go for Capacity scheduler.
If you are using YARN distributed by HDP you will have CAPACITY scheduler by default and you can move to FAIR if you need that.
How Scheduler works with spark?
I'm assuming that you have your spark cluster on YARN.
When you submit a job in spark, it first hits your resource manager. Now your resource manager is responsible for all the scheduling and allocating resources. So its basically same as that of submitting a job in Hadoop.
How scheduler works?
Fair scheduling is a method of assigning resources to jobs such that all jobs get, on average, an equal share of resources over time. When there is a single job running, that job uses the entire cluster. When other jobs are submitted, tasks slots that free up are assigned to the new jobs, so that each job gets roughly the same amount of CPU time(using preemption killing all over used tasks). Unlike the default Hadoop scheduler(FIFO), which forms a queue of jobs, this lets short jobs finish in reasonable time while not starving long jobs. It is also a reasonable way to share a cluster between a number of users. Finally, fair sharing can also work with job priorities - the priorities are used as weights to determine the fraction of total compute time that each job should get.
The CapacityScheduler is designed to allow sharing a large cluster while giving each organization a minimum capacity guarantee. The central idea is that the available resources in the Hadoop Map-Reduce cluster are partitioned among multiple organizations who collectively fund the cluster based on computing needs. There is an added benefit that an organization can access any excess capacity no being used by others. This provides elasticity for the organizations in a cost-effective manner.
Spark internally uses FIFO/FCFS job scheduler. But, when you talk about the tasks, it works in a Round Robin fashion. It will be clear if we concentrate on the below example:
Suppose, the first job in Spark's own queue doesn't require all the resources of the cluster to be utilized; so, immediately second job in the queue will also start getting executed. Now, both jobs are running simultaneously. Each job has few tasks to be executed in order to execute the whole job. Assume, the first job assigns 10 tasks and the second one assigns 8. Then, those 18 tasks will share the CPU cycles of the whole cluster in a preemptive manner. If you want to further drill down, lets start with executors.
There will be few executors in the cluster. Assume the number is 6. So, in an ideal condition, each executor will be assigned 3 tasks and those 3 tasks will get same CPU time of the executors(separate JVM).
This is how spark internally schedules the tasks.

Select node in Quartz cluster to execute a job

I have some questions about Quartz clustering, specifically about how triggers fire / jobs execute within the cluster.
Does quartz give any preference to nodes when executing jobs? Such as always or never the node that executed the same job the last time, or is it simply whichever node that gets to the job first?
Is it possible to specify the node which should execute the job?
The answer to this will be something of a "it depends".
For quartz 1.x, the answer is that the execution of the job is always (only) on a more-or-less random node. Where "randomness" is really based on whichever node gets to it first. For "busy" schedulers (where there are always a lot of jobs to run) this ends up giving a pretty balanced load across the cluster nodes. For non-busy scheduler (only an occasional job to fire) it may sometimes look like a single node is firing all the jobs (because the scheduler looks for the next job to fire whenever a job execution completes - so the node just finishing an execution tends to find the next job to execute).
With quartz 2.0 (which is in beta) the answer is the same as above, for standard quartz. But the Terracotta folks have built an Enterprise Edition of their TerracottaJobStore which offers more complex clustering control - as you schedule jobs you can specify which nodes of the cluster are valid for the execution of the job, or you can specify node characteristics/requisites, such as "a node with at least 100 MB RAM available". This also works along with ehcache, such that you can specify the job to run "on the node where the data keyed by X is local".
I solved this question for my web application using Spring + AOP + memcached. My jobs do know from the data they traverse if the job has already been executed, so the only thing I need to avoid is two or more nodes running at the same time.
You can read it here:
http://blog.oio.de/2013/07/03/cluster-job-synchronization-with-spring-aop-and-memcached/