Kafka Connector - distributed - load balancing tasks - apache-kafka

I am running development environment for Confluent Kafka, Community edition on Windows, version 3.0.1-2.11.
I am trying to achieve load balancing of tasks between 2 instances of connector. I am running Kafka Zookepper, Server, REST services and 2 instance of Connect distributed on the same machine.
Only difference between properties file for connectors is rest port since they are running on the same machine.
I don't create topics for connector offsets, config, status. Should I?
I have custom code for sink connector.
When I create worker for my sink connector I do this by executing POST request
POST http://localhost:8083/connectors
toward any of the running connectors. Checking is there loaded worker is done at URL
GET http://localhost:8083/connectors
My sink connector has System.out.println() lines in code with which I can follow output of my code in the console log.
When my worker is running I can see that only one instance of connector is executing code. If I terminate one connector another instance will take over the worker and execution will resume. However this is not what I want.
My goal is that both connector instances are running worker code so that they can share the load between them.
I've tried to got over some open source connectors to see is there specifics in writing code of connectors but with no success.
I've made some different attempts to tackle this problem but with no success.
I could rewrite my business code to come around this but I'm pretty sure I'm missing on something not obvious for me.
Recently I commented on Robin Moffatt's answer of this question.

From the sounds of it your custom code is not correctly spawning the number of tasks that you are expecting.
Make sure that you've set tasks.max >1 in your config
Make sure that your connector is correctly creating the appropriate number of tasks to taskConfigs
References:
https://opencredo.com/blogs/kafka-connect-source-connectors-a-detailed-guide-to-connecting-to-what-you-love/
https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/devguide.html
https://enfuse.io/a-diy-guide-to-kafka-connectors/

Related

How to get dedicated Apache Kafka MirrorMaker 2.0 Rest API exposed

I am trying to reach a dedicated MirrorMaker 2.0 cluster to see the status of connectors/tasks etc. On this README in their git Apache kafka people claims that when used with dedicated.mode.enable.internal.rest=true MirrorMaker nodes are starting with an internal listener port to communicate with each other.
My question is; Is there a way to advertise this port to outside so I can send curl requests to the dedicated MirrorMaker nodes as we do in general like curl http://localhost:8083/connectors to see the connectors running etc?
I have already tried multiple solutions I've found online they simply do not work. It seems to me this is impossible when you start mirrormaker 2.0 with ./bin/connect-mirror-maker. I know this is possible, If I add every single required connector manually to an existing Kafka Connect cluster, but thats not what I am looking for.
I am also curious if there is a way to add the dedicated MirrorMaker cluster connectors into a already running kafka connect cluster.
This is important because we would like to get curl responses to check tasks status for MirrorMaker.
Thanks.
You should be able to run connect-distributed like normal, have its REST API available, then configure and monitor MM2 without using its dedicated scripts. Similarly, this is how you'd add to other existing Connect cluster.
Ideally, you should monitor from JMX, instead, where you get count of the running tasks, not use curl. Or, add Jolokia or Prometheus JMX Exporter to run their own http server, then curl that, and grep for the tasks metric

Kafka Connect - connectors stop after no data for some time

I am running Kafka Connect in distributed mode on Kubernetes with 3 sink connectors, Kafka -> S3.
When data flows into Kafka and at least one of the connectors has data to read, everything works fine.
But on periods when there is no data to read, for a few hours for example, and none of the connectors needs to read any data, all the connectors stop (the /connectors endpoint on the Rest API shows an empty list). So when new data comes in eventually - it is not read unless manually starting the connectors.
Is this common behavior or am I missing something? I can add additional information about the setup if needed.
Based on comments, your config.storage.topic was not created with cleanup.policy=compact, therefore Kafka is deleting your configs for idle configurations, not idle connector tasks. When the configs are deleted from the topic, then the REST API removes the /connector response information.
Refer documentation on appropriate configurations for the internal Connect topics
https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#connect

Kafka Connect instead of Flume Ingestion

I have been looking into the concepts and application of Kafka Connect, and I have even touched one project based on it in one of my intern. Now in my working scenario, now I am considering replacing the architecture of the our real time data ingestion platform which is currently based on flume -> Kafka with Kafka Connect and Kafka.
The reason why I am considering the switch can be concluded mainly into:
But if we use flume we need to install the agent on each remote machine which generates tons of workload for further devops, especially at the place where I am working where the authority of machines is managed in a rigid way that maintaining utilities on machines belonging to other departments.
Another reason for the consideration is that the machines' os environment varies, if we install flumes on a variety of machines , some machine with different os and jdks(I have met some with IBM jdk) just cannot make flume work well which in worst case can result in zero data ingestion.
It looks with Kafka Connect we can deploy it in a centralized way with our Kafka cluster so that the develops cost can go down. Beside, we can avoid installing flumes on machines belonging to others and avoid the risk of incompatible environment to ensure the stable ingestion of data from every remote machine.
Besides, the most ingestion scenario is only to ingest real-time-written log text file on remote machines(on linux and unix file system) into Kafka topics, that is it. So I won't need advanced connectors which is not supported in apache version of Kafka.
But I am not sure if I am understanding the usage or scenario of Kafka Connect the right way. Also I am wondering if Kafka Connect should be deployed on the same machine with the data source machines or if it is ok they resides on different machines. If they can be different then why flume requires the agent to be run on the same machine with the data source? So I wish someone more experienced can give me some lights on that.
Is Kafka Connect appropriate for ingesting data to Kafka? yes
Does Kafka Connect run local to the data source? only if it has to (e.g. reading a local file with Kafka Connect spooldir plug, FilePulse plugin, etc ).
Should you rip out something that works and replace it with Kafka Connect? not unless it's fixing a problem that you have
If you're not using either yet, should you use Kafka Connect instead of Flume? Quite possibly.
Learn more about Kafka Connect here: https://dev.to/rmoff/crunchconf-2019-from-zero-to-hero-with-kafka-connect-81o
For file ingest alone there's other tools too like Filebeat too

Kafka connect cluster setup or launching connect workers

I am going through kafka connect, and i am trying to get the concepts.
Let us say I have kafka cluster (nodes k1, k2 and k3) setup and it is running, now i want to run kafka connect workers in different nodes say c1 and c2 in distributed mode.
Few questions.
1) To run or launch kafka connect in distributed mode I need to use command ../bin/connect-distributed.sh, which is available in kakfa cluster nodes, so I need to launch kafka connect from any one of the kafka cluster nodes? or any node from where I launch kafka connect needs to have kafka binaries so that i will be able to use ../bin/connect-distributed.sh
2) I need to copy the my connector plugins to any kafka cluster node( or to all cluster nodes?) from where I do the step 1?
3) how does kafka copies these connector plugins to worker node before starting jvm process on the worker node? because the plugin is the one which has my task code and it needs to be copied to worker in order to start the process in worker.
4) Do i need to install anything in connect cluster nodes c1 and c2, like need to install java or any kafka connect related?
5) In some places it says use confluent platform but i would like to start it with apache kafka connect alone first.
can some one please through some light or even pointer to some resources would also help.
Thank you.
1) In order to have a highly available kafka-connect service you need to run at least two instances of connect-distributed.sh on two distinct machines that have the same group.id. You can find more details regarding the configuration of each worker here. For improved performance, Connect should be ran independently of the broker and Zookeeper machines.
2) Yes, you need to place all your connectors under plugin.path (normally under /usr/share/java/) on every machine that you are planning to run kafka-connect.
3) kafka-connect will load the connectors on startup. You don't need to handle this. Note that if your kafka-connect instance is running and a new connector is added, you need to restart the service.
4) You need to have Java installed on all your machines. For Confluent Platform particularly:
Java 1.7 and 1.8 are supported in this version of Confluent Platform
(Java 1.9 is currently not supported). You should run with the
Garbage-First (G1) garbage collector. For more information, see the
Supported Versions and Interoperability.
5) It depends. Confluent was founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka and it comes as a more complete distribution adding schema management, connectors and clients. It also comes with KSQL which is quite useful if you need to act on certain events. Confluent simply adds on top of the Apache Kafka distribution, it's not a modified version.
Answer given by Giorgos is correct. I ran few connectors and now I understand it better.
I am just trying to put it differently.
In Kafka connect there are two things involved one is Worker and second is connector.Below is on details about running distributed Kafka connect.
Kafka connect Worker is a Java process on which the connector/connect task will run. So first thing is we need to launch worker, to run/launch a worker we need java installed on that machine then we need Kafka connect related sh/bat files to launch worker and kafka libs which will be used by kafka connect worker, for this we will just simply copy/install Kafka in the worker machine, also we need to copy all the connector and connect-task related jars/dependencies in "plugin.path" as defined in the below worker properties file, now worker machine is ready, to start worker we need to invoke ./bin/connect-distributed.sh ./config/connect-distributed.properties, here connect-distributed.properties will have configuration for worker. The same thing has to be repeated in each machine where we need to run Kafka connect.
Now the worker java process is running in all machines, the woker config will have group.id property, the workers which have this same property value will be forming a group/cluster of workers.
Each worker process will expose rest endpoint (default http://localhost:8083/connectors), to launch/start a connector on the running workers, we need do http-post a connector config json, based on the given config the worker will start the connector and the number of tasks in the above group/cluster workers.
Example: Connect post,
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"name": "local-file-sink", "config": {"connector.class":"FileStreamSinkConnector", "tasks.max":"3", "file":"test.sink.txt", "topics":"connect-test" }}' http://localhost:8083/connectors

Kafka sink connector: No tasks assigned, even after restart

I am using Confluent 3.2 in a set of Docker containers, one of which is running a kafka-connect worker.
For reasons yet unclear to me, two of my four connectors - to be specific, hpgraphsl's MongoDB sink connector - stopped working. I was able to identify the main problem: The connectors did not have any tasks assigned, as could be seen by calling GET /connectors/{my_connector}/status. The other two connectors (of the same type) were not affected and were happily producing output.
I tried three different methods to get my connectors running again via the REST API:
Pausing and resuming the connectors
Restarting the connectors
Deleting and the creating the connector under the same name, using the same config
None of the methods worked. I finally got my connectors working again by:
Deleting and creating the connector under a different name, say my_connector_v2 instead of my_connector
What is going on here? Why am I not able to restart my existing connector and get it to start an actual task? Is there any stale data on the kafka-connect worker or in some kafka-connect-related topic on the Kafka brokers that needs to be cleaned?
I have filed an issue on the specific connector's github repo, but I feel like this might actually be general bug related to the intrinsics of kafka-connect. Any ideas?
I have faced this issue. If the resources are less for a SinkTask or SourceTask to start, this can happen.
Memory allocated to the worker may be less some time. By default workers are allocated 250MB. Please increase this. Below is an example to allocate 2GB memory for the worker running in distributed mode.
KAFKA_HEAP_OPTS="-Xmx2G" sh $KAFKA_SERVICE_HOME/connect-distributed $KAFKA_CONFIG_HOME/connect-avro-distributed.properties