I have a Flink Application that reads some events from Kafka, does some enrichment of the data from MySQL, buffers the data using a window function and writes the data inside a window to HBase. I've currently enabled checkpointing, but it turns out that the checkpointing is quite expensive and over time it takes longer and longer and affects my job's latency (falling behind on kafka ingest rate). If I figure out a way to make my HBase writes idempotent, is there a strong reason for me to use checkpointing? I can just configure the internal kafka consumer client to commit every so often right?
If the only thing you are checkpointing is the Kafka provider offset(s), then it would surprise me that the checkpointing time is significant enough to slow down your workflow. Or is state being saved elsewhere as well? If so, you could skip that (as long as, per your note, the HBase writes are idempotent).
Note that you can also adjust the checkpointing interval, and (if need be) use incremental checkpoints with RocksDB.
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everyone.
Please help me.
I write apache flink streraming job, which reads json messages from apache kafka (500-1000 messages in seconds), deserialize them in POJO and performs some operations (filter-keyby-process-sink). I used RocksDB state backend with ExactlyOnce semantic. But I do not understand which checkpointing interval I need set?
Some forums peoples write mostly 1000 or 5000 ms.
I tried to set interval 10ms, 100ms, 500ms, 1000ms, 5000ms. I have not noticed any differences.
Two factors argue in favor of a reasonably small checkpoint interval:
(1) If you are using a sink that does two-phase transactional commits, such as Kafka or the StreamingFileSink, then those transactions will only be committed during checkpointing. Thus any downstream consumers of the output of your job will experience latency that is governed by the checkpoint interval.
Note that you will not experience this delay with Kafka unless you have taken all of the steps required to have exactly-once semantics, end-to-end. This means that you must set Semantic.EXACTLY_ONCE in the Kafka producer, and set the isolation.level in downstream consumers to read_committed. And if you are doing this, you should also increase transaction.max.timeout.ms beyond the default (which is 15 minutes). See the docs for more.
(2) If your job fails and needs to recover from a checkpoint, the inputs will be rewound to the offsets recorded in the checkpoint, and processing will resume from there. If the checkpoint interval is very long (e.g., 30 minutes), then your job may take quite a while to catch back up to the point where it is once again processing events in near real-time (assuming you are processing live data).
On the other hand, checkpointing does add some overhead, so doing it more often than necessary has an impact on performance.
In addition to the points described by #David, my suggestion is also to use the following function to configure the checkpoint time:
StreamExecutionEnvironment.getCheckpointConfig().setMinPauseBetweenCheckpoints(milliseconds)
This way, you guarantee that your job will be able to make some progress in case the state gets bigger than planned or the storage where the checkpoints are made is slow.
I recommend reading the Flink documentation on Tuning Checkpointing to better understand these scenarios.
I have 2 questions regarding Flink checkpointing strategy,
I know that checkpoint is related to state (right?), so if I'm not using state (ValueState sort of things) explicitly in my job code, do I need to care about checkpoint? Is it still necessary?
If I need to enable the checkpointing, what should the interval be? Are there any basic rules for setting the interval? Suppose we're talking about a quite busy system (Kafka+Flink), like several billions messages per day.
Many thanks.
Even if you are not using state explicitly in your application, Flink's Kafka source and sink connectors are using state on your behalf in order to provide you with either at-least-once or exactly-once guarantees -- assuming you care about those guarantees. Also, some other operators will also use state somewhat transparently, on your behalf, such as windows and other streaming aggregations.
If your Flink job fails, then it will be rewound back to the most recent successful checkpoint, and resume processing from there. So, for example, if your checkpoint interval is 10 minutes, then after recovery your job might have 10+ minutes of data to catch up on before it can resume processing live data. So choose a checkpoint interval that you can live with from this perspective.
We are using Flink Kinesis Consumer to consume data from Kinesis stream into our Flink application.
KCL library uses a DynamoDB table to store last successfully processed Kinesis stream sequence nos. so that the next time application starts, it resumes from where it left off.
But, it seems that Flink Kinesis Consumer does not maintain any such sequence nos. in any persistent store. As a result, we need to rely upon ShardIteratortype (trim_horizen, latest, etc) to decide where to resume Flink application processing upon application restart.
A possible solution to this could be to rely on Flink checkpointing mechanism, but that only works when application resumes upon failure, and not when the application has been deliberately cancelled and is needed to be restarted from the last successfully consumed Kinesis stream sequence no.
Do we need to store these last successfully consumed sequence nos ourselves ?
Best practice with Flink is to use checkpoints and savepoints, as these create consistent snapshots that contain offsets into your message queues (in this case, Kinesis stream sequence numbers) together with all of the state throughout the rest of the job graph that resulted from having consumed the data up to those offsets. This makes it possible to recover or restart without any loss or duplication of data.
Flink's checkpoints are snapshots taken automatically by Flink itself for the purpose of recovery from failures, and are in a format optimized for rapid restoration. Savepoints use the same underlying snapshot mechanism, but are triggered manually, and their format is more concerned about operational flexibility than performance.
Savepoints are what you are looking for. In particular, cancel with savepoint and resume from savepoint are very useful.
Another option is to use retained checkpoints with ExternalizedCheckpointCleanup.RETAIN_ON_CANCELLATION.
To add to David's response, I'd like to explain the reasoning behind not storing sequence numbers.
Any kind of offsets committing into the source system would limit the checkpointing/savepointing feature only to fault tolerance. That is, only the latest checkpoint/savepoint would be able to recover.
However, Flink actually supports to jump back to a previous checkpoint/savepoint. Consider an application upgrade. You make a savepoint before, upgrade and let it run for a couple of minutes where it creates a few checkpoints. Then, you discover a critical bug. You would like to rollback to the savepoint that you have taken and discard all checkpoints.
Now if Flink commits the source offsets only to the source systems, we would not be able to replay the data between now and the restored savepoint. So, Flink needs to store the offsets in the savepoint itself as David pointed out. At this point, additionally committing to source system does not yield any benefit and is confusing while restoring to a previous savepoint/checkpoint.
Do you see any benefit in storing the offsets additionally?
Can someone please help me understand the difference between Apache Flink's Checkpoints & Savepoints.
While i read the documentation, couldn't understand the difference! :s
Apache Flink's Checkpoints and Savepoints are similar in that way they both are mechanisms for preserving internal state of Flink's applications.
Checkpoints are taken automatically and are used for automatic restarting job in case of a failure.
Savepoints on the other hand are taken manually, are always stored externally and are used for starting a "new" job with previous internal state in case of e.g.
bug fixing
flink version upgrade
A/B testing, etc.
Underneath they are in fact the same mechanism/code path with some subtle nuances.
Edit:
You can also find a very good explanation in the official documentation https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-stable/ops/state/savepoints.html#what-is-a-savepoint-how-is-a-savepoint-different-from-a-checkpoint :
A Savepoint is a consistent image of the execution state of a streaming job, created via Flink’s checkpointing mechanism. You can use Savepoints to stop-and-resume, fork, or update your Flink jobs. Savepoints consist of two parts: a directory with (typically large) binary files on stable storage (e.g. HDFS, S3, …) and a (relatively small) meta data file. The files on stable storage represent the net data of the job’s execution state image. The meta data file of a Savepoint contains (primarily) pointers to all files on stable storage that are part of the Savepoint, in form of absolute paths.
Attention: In order to allow upgrades between programs and Flink versions, it is important to check out the following section about assigning IDs to your operators.
Conceptually, Flink’s Savepoints are different from Checkpoints in a similar way that backups are different from recovery logs in traditional database systems. The primary purpose of Checkpoints is to provide a recovery mechanism in case of unexpected job failures. A Checkpoint’s lifecycle is managed by Flink, i.e. a Checkpoint is created, owned, and released by Flink - without user interaction. As a method of recovery and being periodically triggered, two main design goals for the Checkpoint implementation are i) being as lightweight to create and ii) being as fast to restore from as possible. Optimizations towards those goals can exploit certain properties, e.g. that the job code doesn’t change between the execution attempts. Checkpoints are usually dropped after the job was terminated by the user (except if explicitly configured as retained Checkpoints).
In contrast to all this, Savepoints are created, owned, and deleted by the user. Their use-case is for planned, manual backup and resume. For example, this could be an update of your Flink version, changing your job graph, changing parallelism, forking a second job like for a red/blue deployment, and so on. Of course, Savepoints must survive job termination. Conceptually, Savepoints can be a bit more expensive to produce and restore and focus more on portability and support for the previously mentioned changes to the job.
Those conceptual differences aside, the current implementations of Checkpoints and Savepoints are basically using the same code and produce the same format. However, there is currently one exception from this, and we might introduce more differences in the future. The exception are incremental checkpoints with the RocksDB state backend. They are using some RocksDB internal format instead of Flink’s native savepoint format. This makes them the first instance of a more lightweight checkpointing mechanism, compared to Savepoints.
Savepoints
Savepoints usually apply to an individual transaction; it marks a
point to which the transaction can be rolled back, so subsequent
changes can be undone if necessary.
More See Here
https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-release-1.2/setup/cli.html#savepoints
Checkpoints
Checkpoints usually apply to whole systems, You can configure periodic checkpoints to be persisted externally. Externalized checkpoints write their meta data out to persistent storage and are not automatically cleaned up when the job fails.
More See Here:
https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-release-1.2/setup/checkpoints.html
On difference I would like to add is savepoint can be manually applied when we upgrade the pipeline vs checkpoint kicks in as useful in case the pipeline restarts or crashes abruptly. However, there could be side effects to later where application(pipeline) has to handle any scenarios like re-processing duplicate data etc.
Is it possible to trigger checkpoint from Flink streaming job?
My use case is that: I have two streams R and S to join with tumbling time windows. The source is Kafka. I use event time processing and BoundedOutOfOrdernessGenerator to make sure events from two streams end up in the same window.
The problem is my states are large and a regular periodic checkpoint takes too much time sometimes. At first, I wanted to disable checkpointing and rely on Kafka offset. But out of orderness means I have already some data in future windows from current offset. So I need checkpointing.
If it was possible to trigger checkpoints after a window gets cleaned instead of periodic ones it would be more efficient. Maybe at evictAfter method.
Does that make sense and is it possible? IF not I'd appreciate a work around.
Seems the issue here is checkpoint efficiency. Consider using the RocksDB state backend with incremental checkpoints, discussed in the docs under Debugging and Tuning Checkpoints and Large State.