How to evolve Avro schema with Akka Persistence without sending schema or using a registry? - scala

Question

We are considering a serialization approach for our scala-based Akka Persistence app. We consider it likely that our persisted events will "evolve" over time, so we want to support schema evolution, and are considering Avro first.
We'd like to avoid including the full schema with every message. However, for the foreseeable future, this Akka Persistence app is the only app that will be serializing and deserializing these messages, so we don't see a need for a separate schema registry.
Checking the docs for avro and the various scala libs, I see ways to include the schema with messages, and also how to use it "schema-less" by using a schema registry, but what about the in-between case? What's the correct approach for going schema-less, but somehow including an identifier to be able to look up the correct schema (available in the local deployed codebase) for the deserialized object? Would I literally just create a schema that represents my case class, but with an additional "identifier" field for schema version, and then have some sort of in-memory map of identifier->schema at runtime?
Also, is the correct approach to have one serializer/deserialize class for each version of the schema, so it knows how to translate every version to/from the most recent version?
Finally, are there recommendations on how to unit-test schema evolutions? For instance, store a message in akka-persistence, then actually change the definition of the case class, and then kill the actor and make sure it properly evolves. (I don't see how to change the definition of the case class at runtime.)

Answer 1

After spending more time on this, here are the answers I came up with.
Using avro4s, you can use the default data output stream to include the schema with every serialized message. Or, you can use the binary output stream, which simply omits the schema when serializing each message. ('binary' is a bit of a misnomer here since all it does is omit the schema. In either case it is still an Array[Byte].)
Akka itself supplies a Serializer trait or a SerializerWithStringManifest trait, which will automatically include a field for a "schema identifier" in the object of whatever you serialize.
So when you create your custom serializer, you can extend the appropriate trait, define your schema identifier, and use the binary output stream. When those techniques are combined, you'll successfully be using schema-less serialization while including a schema identifier.
One common technique is to "fingerprint" your schema - treat it as a string and then calculate its digest (MD5, SHA-256, whatever). If you construct an in-memory map of fingerprint to schema, that can serve as your application's in-memory schema registry.
So then when deserializing, your incoming object will have the schema identifier of the schema that was used to serialize it (the "writer"). While deserializing, you should know the identifier of the schema to use to deserialize it (the "reader"). Avro4s supports a way for you to specify both using a builder pattern, so avro can translate the object from the old format to the new. That's how you support "schema evolution". Because of how that works, you don't need a separate serializer for each schema version. Your custom serializer will know how to evolve your objects, because that's the part that Avro gives you for free.
As for unit testing, your best bet is exploratory testing. Actually define multiple versions of a case class in your test, and multiple accompanying versions of its schema, and then explore how Avro works by writing tests that will evolve an object between different versions of that schema.
Unfortunately that won't be directly relevant to the code you are writing, because it's hard to simulate actually changing the code you are testing as you test it.
I developed a prototype that demonstrates several of these answers, and it's available on github. It uses avro, avro4s, and akka persistence. For this one, I demonstrated a changing codebase by actually changing it across commits - you'd check out commit #1, run the code, then move to commit #2, etc. It runs against cassandra so it will demonstrate replaying events that need to be evolved using new schema, all without using an external schema registry.