The semantic of the workload is the following:
Flink operator reads events from the same Kafka topic. Each event needs to be processed by an expensive function f exactly once, ideally, if not at least once. There is correlation between events so each event should be processed based on the cumulative state (accumulated by events from initial state).
How can we scale horizontally for this use case in Flink? I want to process events concurrently but all event processing depends on the same state. In my use case the size of the state will first climb to and then fluctuate around one terabyte.
If your application needs to have a single, centralized data structure that is accessible to every event, then that application won't be horizontally scalable.
Flink approaches horizontal scaling by independently processing partitions of the data streams. This is usually done by computing a key from every event, and partitioning the stream around that key. State is maintained independently for each distinct key, and the limit to horizontal scaling is the number of distinct keys (the size of the key space). Rescaling is handled automatically, and is implemented by re-sharding the set of keys among the parallel instances.
Flink also supports non-keyed state, but the basic principle still applies: scaling can only be achieved by partitioning the stream, and maintaining state independently within each partition.
Related
I am trying to figure out a solution to the problem of watermarks progress when the number of Kafka partitions is larger than the Flink parallelism employed.
Consider for example that I have Flink app with parallelism of 3 and that it needs to read data from 5 Kafka partitions. My issue is that when starting the Flink app, it has to consume historical data from these partitions. As I understand it each Flink task starts consuming events from a corresponding partition (probably buffers a significant amount of events) and progress event time (therefore watermarks) before the same task transitions to another partition that now will have stale data according to watermarks already issued.
I tried considering a watermark strategy using watermark alignment of a few seconds but that
does not solve the problem since historical data are consumed immediately from one partition and therefore event time/watermark has progressed.Below is a snippet of code that showcases watermark strategy implemented.
WatermarkStrategy.forGenerator(ws)
.withTimestampAssigner(
(event, timestamp) -> (long) event.get("event_time))
.withIdleness(IDLENESS_PERIOD)
.withWatermarkAlignment(
GROUP,
Duration.ofMillis(DEFAULT_MAX_WATERMARK_DRIFT_BETWEEN_PARTITIONS),
Duration.ofMillis(DEFAULT_UPDATE_FOR_WATERMARK_DRIFT_BETWEEN_PARTITIONS));
I also tried using a downstream operator to sort events as described here Sorting union of streams to identify user sessions in Apache Flink but then again also this cannot effectively tackle my issue since event record times can deviate significantly.
How can I tackle this issue ? Do I need to have the same number of Flink tasks as the number of Kafka partitions or I am missing something regarding the way data are read from Kafka partitions
The easiest solution to this problem will be using the fromSource with WatermarkStrategy instead of assigning that by using assignTimestampsAndWatermarks.
When You use the WatermarkStrategy directly in fromSource with kafka connector, the watermarks will be partition aware, so the Watermark generated by the given operator will be minimum of all partitions assinged to this operator.
Assigning watermarks directly in source will solve the problem You are facing, but it has one main drawback, since the generated watermark in min of all partitions processed by the given operator, if some partition is idle watermark for this operator will not progress either.
The docs describe kafka connector watermarking here.
I am using Flink 1.11.
My application read data from Kafka, so messages are already in ordered in Kafka partition. After consuming message from Kafka, I want to apply TumblingWindow. As per Flink Documentation, keyBy is required to use TumblingWindow. Using keyby , it means it will trigger shuffling of data, which I want to avoid. Since in each Task slot, records are already in ordered (due to its consumption from Kafka), how can shuffling be avoided ? Number of parallelism can be greater, equal or lesser to Kafka partitions. my concern is :
Can TumblingWindow be used without keyby ?
If not, how keyby can be customised to ensure data remain on same task slot and no shuffling is triggered.
What are you asking for is very difficult to achieve using the DataStream API. But the SQL/Table API automatically applies various optimizations when you use window-valued table functions, which will likely be good enough. See the docs for tumble window TVF, mini-batch aggregation and local/global aggregation.
Note however that window TVFs were added to Flink in 1.13.
My flink job as of now does KeyBy on client id and thes uses window operator to accumulate data for 1 minute and then aggregates data. After aggregation we sink these accumulated data in hdfs files. Number of unique keys(client id) are more than 70 millions daily.
Issue is when we do keyBy it distributes data on cluster(my assumption) but i want data to be aggregated for 1 minute on same slot(or node) for incoming events.
NOTE : In sink we can have multiple data for same client for 1 minute window. I want to save network calls.
You're right that doing a stream.keyBy() will cause network traffic when the data is partitioned/distributed (assuming you have parallelism > 1, of course). But the standard window operators require a keyed stream.
You could create a ProcessFunction that implements the CheckpointedFunction interface, and use that to maintain state in an unkeyed stream. But you'd still have to implement your own timers (standard Flink timers require a keyed stream), and save the time windows as part of the state.
You could write your own custom RichFlatMapFunction, and have an in-memory Map<time window, Map<ip address, count>> do to pre-keyed aggregations. You'd still need to follow this with a keyBy() and window operation to do the aggregation, but there would be much less network traffic.
I think it's OK that this is stateless. Though you'd likely need to make this an LRU cache, to avoid blowing memory. And you'd need to create your own timer to flush the windows.
But the golden rule is to measure first, the optimize. As in confirming that network traffic really is a problem, before performing helicopter stunts to try to reduce it.
I need to enrich my fast changing streamA keyed by (userId, startTripTimestamp) with slowly changing streamB keyed by (userId).
I use Flink 1.8 with DataStream API. I consider 2 approaches:
Broadcast streamB and join stream by userId and most recent timestamp. Would it be equivalent of DynamicTable from the TableAPI? I can see some downsides of this solution: streamB needs to fit into RAM of each worker node, it increase utilization of RAM as whole streamB needs to be stored in RAM of each worker.
Generalise state of streamA to a stream keyed by just (userId), let's name it streamC, to have common key with the streamB. Then I am able to union streamC with streamB, order by processing time, and handle both types of events in state. It's more complex to handle generaised stream (more code in the process function), but not consume that much RAM to have all streamB on all nodes. Are they any more downsides or upsides of this solution?
I have also seen this proposal https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-17+Side+Inputs+for+DataStream+API where it is said:
In general, most of these follow the pattern of joining a main stream
of high throughput with one or several inputs of slowly changing or
static data:
[...]
Join stream with slowly evolving data: This is very similar to
the above case but the side input that we use for enriching is
evolving over time. This can be done by waiting for some initial data
to be available before processing the main input and the continuously
ingesting new data into the internal side input structure as it
arrives.
Unfortunately, it looks like a long time ahead to reach this feature https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-6131 and no alternatives are described. Therefore I would like to ask of the currently recommended approach for the described use case.
I've seen Combining low-latency streams with multiple meta-data streams in Flink (enrichment), but it not specify what are keys of that streams, and moreover it is answered at the time of Flink 1.4, so I expect the recommended solution might have changed.
Building on top of what Gaurav Kumar has already answered.
The main question is do you need to exactly match records from streamA and streamB or is it best effort match? For example, is it an issue for you, that because of a race condition some (a lot of?) records from streamA can be processed before some updates from streamB arrive, for example during the start up?
I would suggest to draw an inspiration from how Table API is solving this issue. Probably Temporal Table Join is the right choice for you, which would leave you with the choice: processing time or event time?
Both of the Gaurav Kumar's proposal are implementations of processing time Temporal Table joins, which assumes that records can be very loosely joined and do not have to timed properly.
If records from streamA and streamB have to be timed properly, then one way or another you have to buffer some of the records from both of the streams. There are various of ways how to do it, depending on what semantic you want to achieve. After deciding on that, the actual implementation is not that difficult and you can draw an inspiration from Table API join operators (org.apache.flink.table.runtime.join package in flink-table-planner module).
Side inputs (that you referenced) and/or input selection are just tools for controlling the amount of unnecessary buffered records. You can implement a valid Flink job without them, but the memory consumption can be hard to control if one stream significantly overtakes the other (in terms of event time - for processing time it's non-issue).
The answer depends on size of your state of streamB that needs to be used to enrich streamA
If you broadcast your streamB state, then you are putting all userIDs from streamB to each of the task managers. Each task on task manager will only have a subset of these userIds from streamA on it. So some userId data from streamB will never be used and will stay as a waste. So if you think that the size of streamB state is not big enough to really impact your job and doesn't take significant memory to leave less memory for state management, you can keep the whole streamB state. This is your #1.
If your streamB state is really huge and can consume considerable memory on task managers, you should consider approach #2. KeyBy same Id both the streams to make sure that elements with same userID reach the same tasks, and then you can use managed state to maintain the per key streamB state and enrich streamA elements using this managed state.
I am pretty new to flink and about to load our first production version. We have a stream of data. The stateful filter is checking if the data is new.
would it be better to split the stream to different jobs to gain more control on the parallelism as shown in option 1 or option 2 is better ?
following the documentation recommendation. should I put uid per operator e.g :
dataStream
.uid("firstid")
.keyBy(0)
.flatMap(flatMapFunction)
.uid("mappedId)
should I add rebalance after each uid if at all?
what is the difference if I setMaxParallelism as described here or setting parallelism from flink UI/cli ?
You only need to define .uid("someName") for your stateful operators. Not much need for operators which do not hold state as there is nothing in the savepoints that needs to be mapped back to them (more on this here). Won't hurt if you do though.
rebalance will only help you in the presence of data skew and that only if you aren't using keyed streams. If you process data based on a key, and your load isn't uniformly distributed across your keys (ie you have loads of "hot" keys) then rebalancing won't help you much.
In your example above I would start Option 2 and potentially move to Option 1 if the job proves to be too heavy. In general stateless processes are very fast in Flink so unless you want to add other consumers to the output of your stateful filter then don't bother to split it up at this stage.
There isn't right and wrong though, depends on your problem. Start simple and take it from there.
[Update] Re 4, setMaxParallelism if I am not mistaken defines the number of key groups and thus the maximum number of parallel instances your stream can be rescaled to. This is used by Flink internally but it doesn't set the parallelism of your job. You usually have to set that to some multiple of the actually parallelism you set for you job (via -p <n> in the CLI/UI when you deploy it).