For migration purpose, we need to produce records using two different serialisers, and thus two different KafkaProducers ( one String and one Avro) in the same transaction.
But all the transaction stuff is done through one KafkaProducer instance as follows :
kafkaProducer.beginTransaction();
...
kafkaProducer.send(record);
...
kafkaProducer.commitTransaction();
Can I use a second kafkaProducer (with the second serializer) and use the same transactionnal.id and do like this :
kafkaProducer.beginTransaction();
...
kafkaProducer.send(record);
kafkaProducer2.send(record);
...
kafkaProducer.commitTransaction();
All will be part of the same transaction , all consistent ?
EDIT 1 :
According to what I saw in the java implementation, there is some mechanism when calling commitTransaction() like calling flush() on the producer itself.. so I think the model above won't work..
Any chance of achieving this without instantiating a full new instance of everything in parallel ?
You can only have a single producer active in a transaction at a time.
If you start 2 producers with the same transactional.id, one of them will be fenced and won't be able to commit its records and all ecords won't be part of the same transaction.
You need to use a single producer and one possible workaround is to configure it to use the BytesSerializer and handle the convertion of your Objects to bytes in your logic explicitely.
Related
How do I get the records where an acknowledgement was received in apache beam KafkaIO?
Basically I want all the records where I didn't get any acknowledgement to go to a bigquery table so that I can retry sometime later. I used the following code snippet from the docs
.apply(KafkaIO.<Long, String>read()
.withBootstrapServers("broker_1:9092,broker_2:9092")
.withTopic("my_topic") // use withTopics(List<String>) to read from multiple topics.
.withKeyDeserializer(LongDeserializer.class)
.withValueDeserializer(StringDeserializer.class)
// Above four are required configuration. returns PCollection<KafkaRecord<Long, String>>
// Rest of the settings are optional :
// you can further customize KafkaConsumer used to read the records by adding more
// settings for ConsumerConfig. e.g :
.updateConsumerProperties(ImmutableMap.of("group.id", "my_beam_app_1"))
// set event times and watermark based on LogAppendTime. To provide a custom
// policy see withTimestampPolicyFactory(). withProcessingTime() is the default.
.withLogAppendTime()
// restrict reader to committed messages on Kafka (see method documentation).
.withReadCommitted()
// offset consumed by the pipeline can be committed back.
.commitOffsetsInFinalize()
// finally, if you don't need Kafka metadata, you can drop it.g
.withoutMetadata() // PCollection<KV<Long, String>>
)
.apply(Values.<String>create()) // PCollection<String>
By Default Beam IOs are designed to keep attempting to write/read/process elements until . (Batch pipelines will fail after repeated errors)
What you are referring to is usually called a Dead Letter Queue, to take the failed records and add them to a PCollection, Pubsub topic, queuing service, etc. This is often desire-able as it allows a streaming pipeline to make progress (not block), when errors writing some records are encountered, but allowing the onces which succeed to be written.
Unfortunately, unless I am mistaken there is no dead letter queue implemented in Kafka IO. It may be possible to modify KafkaIO to support this. There was some discussion on the beam mailing list with some ideas proposed to implement this, which might have some ideas.
I suspect it may be possible to add this to KafkaWriter, catching the records that failed and outputting them to another PCollection. If you choose to implement this, please also contact the beam community mailing list, if you would like help merging it into master, they will be able to help make sure the change covers necessary requirements so that it can be merged and makes sense as a whole for beam.
Your pipeline can then write those elsewhere (i.e. a different source). Of course, if that secondary source simultaneously has an outage/issue, you would need another DLQ.
I have many transactional consumers with a ChainedKafkaTransactionManager based on a JpaTransactionManager and a KafkaTransactionManager (all #KafkaListener's).
The JPA one needs a ThreadLocal variable to be set, to be able to know to which DB to connect to (is the tenant id).
When starting the application, in the onPartitionsAssigned listener, spring-kafka is trying to create a chained txn, hence trying to create a JPA txn, but there's no tenant set, then it fails.
That tenant is set through a http filter and/or kafka interceptors (through event headers).
I tried using the auto-wired KafkaListenerEndpointRegistry with setAutoStartup(false), but I see that the consumers don't receive any events, probably because they aren't initialized yet (I thought they were initialized on-demand).
If I set a mock tenant id and call registry.start() when the application is ready, the initializations seem to be done in other threads (probably because I'm using a ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory), so it doesn't work.
Is there a way to avoid the JPA transaction on that initial onPartitionsAssigned listener, that is part of the consumer initialization?
If your chained TM has the KafkaTM first, followed by JPA TM (which would be the normal case), you can achieve similar functionality by just injecting the Kafka TM into the container and using #Transactional (with just the JPA TM on the listener) to start the JPA transaction when the listener is called.
The time between the transaction commits will be marginally increased but it would provide similar functionality.
If that won't work for you, open a GitHub issue; we can either disable the initial commit on assignment, or do it without a transaction at all (optionally).
We have a micro-services architecture, with Kafka used as the communication mechanism between the services. Some of the services have their own databases. Say the user makes a call to Service A, which should result in a record (or set of records) being created in that service’s database. Additionally, this event should be reported to other services, as an item on a Kafka topic. What is the best way of ensuring that the database record(s) are only written if the Kafka topic is successfully updated (essentially creating a distributed transaction around the database update and the Kafka update)?
We are thinking of using spring-kafka (in a Spring Boot WebFlux service), and I can see that it has a KafkaTransactionManager, but from what I understand this is more about Kafka transactions themselves (ensuring consistency across the Kafka producers and consumers), rather than synchronising transactions across two systems (see here: “Kafka doesn't support XA and you have to deal with the possibility that the DB tx might commit while the Kafka tx rolls back.”). Additionally, I think this class relies on Spring’s transaction framework which, at least as far as I currently understand, is thread-bound, and won’t work if using a reactive approach (e.g. WebFlux) where different parts of an operation may execute on different threads. (We are using reactive-pg-client, so are manually handling transactions, rather than using Spring’s framework.)
Some options I can think of:
Don’t write the data to the database: only write it to Kafka. Then use a consumer (in Service A) to update the database. This seems like it might not be the most efficient, and will have problems in that the service which the user called cannot immediately see the database changes it should have just created.
Don’t write directly to Kafka: write to the database only, and use something like Debezium to report the change to Kafka. The problem here is that the changes are based on individual database records, whereas the business significant event to store in Kafka might involve a combination of data from multiple tables.
Write to the database first (if that fails, do nothing and just throw the exception). Then, when writing to Kafka, assume that the write might fail. Use the built-in auto-retry functionality to get it to keep trying for a while. If that eventually completely fails, try to write to a dead letter queue and create some sort of manual mechanism for admins to sort it out. And if writing to the DLQ fails (i.e. Kafka is completely down), just log it some other way (e.g. to the database), and again create some sort of manual mechanism for admins to sort it out.
Anyone got any thoughts or advice on the above, or able to correct any mistakes in my assumptions above?
Thanks in advance!
I'd suggest to use a slightly altered variant of approach 2.
Write into your database only, but in addition to the actual table writes, also write "events" into a special table within that same database; these event records would contain the aggregations you need. In the easiest way, you'd simply insert another entity e.g. mapped by JPA, which contains a JSON property with the aggregate payload. Of course this could be automated by some means of transaction listener / framework component.
Then use Debezium to capture the changes just from that table and stream them into Kafka. That way you have both: eventually consistent state in Kafka (the events in Kafka may trail behind or you might see a few events a second time after a restart, but eventually they'll reflect the database state) without the need for distributed transactions, and the business level event semantics you're after.
(Disclaimer: I'm the lead of Debezium; funnily enough I'm just in the process of writing a blog post discussing this approach in more detail)
Here are the posts
https://debezium.io/blog/2018/09/20/materializing-aggregate-views-with-hibernate-and-debezium/
https://debezium.io/blog/2019/02/19/reliable-microservices-data-exchange-with-the-outbox-pattern/
first of all, I have to say that I’m no Kafka, nor a Spring expert but I think that it’s more a conceptual challenge when writing to independent resources and the solution should be adaptable to your technology stack. Furthermore, I should say that this solution tries to solve the problem without an external component like Debezium, because in my opinion each additional component brings challenges in testing, maintaining and running an application which is often underestimated when choosing such an option. Also not every database can be used as a Debezium-source.
To make sure that we are talking about the same goals, let’s clarify the situation in an simplified airline example, where customers can buy tickets. After a successful order the customer will receive a message (mail, push-notification, …) that is sent by an external messaging system (the system we have to talk with).
In a traditional JMS world with an XA transaction between our database (where we store orders) and the JMS provider it would look like the following: The client sets the order to our app where we start a transaction. The app stores the order in its database. Then the message is sent to JMS and you can commit the transaction. Both operations participate at the transaction even when they’re talking to their own resources. As the XA transaction guarantees ACID we’re fine.
Let’s bring Kafka (or any other resource that is not able to participate at the XA transaction) in the game. As there is no coordinator that syncs both transactions anymore the main idea of the following is to split processing in two parts with a persistent state.
When you store the order in your database you can also store the message (with aggregated data) in the same database (e.g. as JSON in a CLOB-column) that you want to send to Kafka afterwards. Same resource – ACID guaranteed, everything fine so far. Now you need a mechanism that polls your “KafkaTasks”-Table for new tasks that should be send to a Kafka-Topic (e.g. with a timer service, maybe #Scheduled annotation can be used in Spring). After the message has been successfully sent to Kafka you can delete the task entry. This ensures that the message to Kafka is only sent when the order is also successfully stored in application database. Did we achieve the same guarantees as we have when using a XA transaction? Unfortunately, no, as there is still the chance that writing to Kafka works but the deletion of the task fails. In this case the retry-mechanism (you would need one as mentioned in your question) would reprocess the task an sends the message twice. If your business case is happy with this “at-least-once”-guarantee you’re done here with a imho semi-complex solution that could be easily implemented as framework functionality so not everyone has to bother with the details.
If you need “exactly-once” then you cannot store your state in the application database (in this case “deletion of a task” is the “state”) but instead you must store it in Kafka (assuming that you have ACID guarantees between two Kafka topics). An example: Let’s say you have 100 tasks in the table (IDs 1 to 100) and the task job processes the first 10. You write your Kafka messages to their topic and another message with the ID 10 to “your topic”. All in the same Kafka-transaction. In the next cycle you consume your topic (value is 10) and take this value to get the next 10 tasks (and delete the already processed tasks).
If there are easier (in-application) solutions with the same guarantees I’m looking forward to hear from you!
Sorry for the long answer but I hope it helps.
All the approach described above are the best way to approach the problem and are well defined pattern. You can explore these in the links provided below.
Pattern: Transactional outbox
Publish an event or message as part of a database transaction by saving it in an OUTBOX in the database.
http://microservices.io/patterns/data/transactional-outbox.html
Pattern: Polling publisher
Publish messages by polling the outbox in the database.
http://microservices.io/patterns/data/polling-publisher.html
Pattern: Transaction log tailing
Publish changes made to the database by tailing the transaction log.
http://microservices.io/patterns/data/transaction-log-tailing.html
Debezium is a valid answer but (as I've experienced) it can require some extra overhead of running an extra pod and making sure that pod doesn't fall over. This could just be me griping about a few back to back instances where pods OOM errored and didn't come back up, networking rule rollouts dropped some messages, WAL access to an aws aurora db started behaving oddly... It seems that everything that could have gone wrong, did. Not saying Debezium is bad, it's fantastically stable, but often for devs running it becomes a networking skill rather than a coding skill.
As a KISS solution using normal coding solutions that will work 99.99% of the time (and inform you of the .01%) would be:
Start Transaction
Sync save to DB
-> If fail, then bail out.
Async send message to kafka.
Block until the topic reports that it has received the
message.
-> if it times out or fails Abort Transaction.
-> if it succeeds Commit Transaction.
I'd suggest to use a new approach 2-phase message. In this new approach, much less codes are needed, and you don't need Debeziums any more.
https://betterprogramming.pub/an-alternative-to-outbox-pattern-7564562843ae
For this new approach, what you need to do is:
When writing your database, write an event record to an auxiliary table.
Submit a 2-phase message to DTM
Write a service to query whether an event is saved in the auxiliary table.
With the help of DTM SDK, you can accomplish the above 3 steps with 8 lines in Go, much less codes than other solutions.
msg := dtmcli.NewMsg(DtmServer, gid).
Add(busi.Busi+"/TransIn", &TransReq{Amount: 30})
err := msg.DoAndSubmitDB(busi.Busi+"/QueryPrepared", db, func(tx *sql.Tx) error {
return AdjustBalance(tx, busi.TransOutUID, -req.Amount)
})
app.GET(BusiAPI+"/QueryPrepared", dtmutil.WrapHandler2(func(c *gin.Context) interface{} {
return MustBarrierFromGin(c).QueryPrepared(db)
}))
Each of your origin options has its disadvantage:
The user cannot immediately see the database changes it have just created.
Debezium will capture the log of the database, which may be much larger than the events you wanted. Also deployment and maintenance of Debezium is not an easy job.
"built-in auto-retry functionality" is not cheap, it may require much codes or maintenance efforts.
We've started experimenting with Kafka to see if it can be used to aggregate our application data. I think our use case is a match for Kafka streams, but we aren't sure if we are using the tool correctly. The proof of concept we've built seems to be working as designed, I'm not sure that we are using the APIs appropriately.
Our proof of concept is to use kafka streams to keep a running tally of information about a program in an output topic, e.g.
{
"numberActive": 0,
"numberInactive": 0,
"lastLogin": "01-01-1970T00:00:00Z"
}
Computing the tally is easy, it is essentially executing a compare and swap (CAS) operation based on the input topic & output field.
The local state contains the most recent program for a given key. We join an input stream against the state store and run the CAS operation using a TransformSupplier, which explictly writes the data to the state store using
context.put(...)
context.commit();
Is this an appropriate use of the local state store? Is there another another approach to keeping a stateful running tally in a topic?
Your design sounds right to me (I presume you are using PAPI not the Streams DSL), that you are reading in one stream, calling transform() on the stream in which an state store is associated with the operator. Since your update logic seems to be only key-dependent and hence can be embarrassingly parallelizable via Streams library based on key partitioning.
One thing to note that, it seems you are calling "context.commit()" after every single put call, which is not a recommended pattern. This is because commit() operation is a pretty heavy call that will involves flushing the state store, sending commit offset request to the Kafka broker etc, calling it on every single call would result in very low throughput. It is recommended to only call commit() only after a bunch of records are processed, or you can just rely on the Streams config "commit.interval.ms" to rely on Streams library to only call commit() internally after every time interval. Note that this will not affect your processing semantics upon graceful shutting down, since upon shutdown Streams will always enforce a commit() call.
Can I control the intervals at which the put() method of my Kafka Connect Sink tasks is triggered? What is the expected behavior of the Kafka Connect framework in this respect? Ideally, I would like to specify, for example, "don't call me unless you have X new records/Y new bytes, or Z milliseconds passed since the last invocation". This could potentially make the batching logic within the sink task simpler (quoting the documentation, "in many cases internal buffering will be useful so an entire batch of records can be sent at once, reducing the overhead of inserting events into the downstream data store).
Today, put from a SinkTask is only called when deliverMessages is invoked in a WorkerSinkTask. The good news is that the only time deliverMessages happens is within poll so you should have some control over how often you poll for new records by overriding consumer properties.
If you want to do internal buffering, you could have a look at how the HDFSConnector is handling this in its implementation of SinkTask. However, right now, Connect will immediately put any records that get returned by the poll.
All of that said, if you are really looking to batch messages before they hit the downstream system, you might consider looking into offset.flush.interval.ms and offset.flush.timeout.ms which control how often flush() is invoked.