Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is fast. A single node can handle hundreds of read/writes from thousands of clients in real time. Kafka is also distributed and scalable. It creates and takes down nodes in an elastic manner, without incurring any downtime. Data streams are split into partitions and spread over different brokers for capability and redundancy.

History of Kafka

The result was a publish/subscribe messaging system that had an interface typical of messaging systems but a storage layer more like a log-aggregation system. Combined with the adoption of Apache Avro for message serialization, Kafka was effective for handling both metrics and user-activity tracking at a scale of billions of messages per day.

Kafka features

• Language Agnostic Producers and consumers use binary protocol to talk to a Kafka cluster.

• Durability Kafka does not track which messages were read by each consumer. Kafka keeps all messages for a finite amount of time, and it is consumers’ responsibility to track their location per topic, i.e. offsets.

Terminology:

Topic: a feed of messages or packages Partition: group of topics split for scalability and redundancy Producer: process that introduces messages into the queue Consumer: process that subscribes to various topics and processes from a feed of published messages Broker: a node that is part of the Kafka cluster

Topics and Partitions

Messages in Kafka are categorized into topics. The closest analogies for a topic are a database table or a folder in a filesystem. Topics are additionally broken down into a number of partitions. Going back to the “commit log” description, a partition is a sin‐ gle log. Messages are written to it in an append-only fashion, and are read in order from beginning to end. Note that as a topic typically has multiple partitions, there is no guarantee of message time-ordering across the entire topic, just within a single partition.

Partitions are also the way that Kafka provides redundancy and scalability. Each partition can be hosted on a different server, which means that a single topic can be scaled horizontally across multiple servers to provide performance far beyond the ability of a single server.

Producers and consumers

Kafka clients are users of the system, and there are two basic types: producers and consumers. There are also advanced client APIs—Kafka Connect API for data inte‐ gration and Kafka Streams for stream processing. The advanced clients use producers and consumers as building blocks and provide higher-level functionality on top.

producers

Producers create new messages. In other publish/subscribe systems, these may be called publishers or writers. In general, a message will be produced to a specific topic. By default, the producer does not care what partition a specific message is written to and will balance messages over all partitions of a topic evenly. In some cases, the pro‐ ducer will direct messages to specific partitions. This is typically done using the mes‐ sage key and a partitioner that will generate a hash of the key and map it to a specific partition. This assures that all messages produced with a given key will get written to the same partition. The producer could also use a custom partitioner that follows other business rules for mapping messages to partitions.

Consumers

Consumers read messages. In other publish/subscribe systems, these clients may be called subscribers or readers. The consumer subscribes to one or more topics and reads the messages in the order in which they were produced. The consumer keeps track of which messages it has already consumed by keeping track of the offset of messages. The offset is another bit of metadata—an integer value that continually increases—that Kafka adds to each message as it is produced. Each message in a given partition has a unique offset. By storing the offset of the last consumed message for each partition, either in Zookeeper or in Kafka itself, a consumer can stop and restart without losing its place.

Consumers work as part of a consumer group, which is one or more consumers that work together to consume a topic. The group assures that each partition is only con‐ sumed by one member. there are three consumers in a single group consuming a topic. Two of the consumers are working from one partition each, while the third consumer is working from two partitions. The mapping of a consumer to a partition is often called ownership of the partition by the consumer.

Consumer group

Consumers may be grouped in a consumer group with multiple consumers. Each consumer in a consumer group will read messages from a unique subset of partitions in each topic they subscribe to. Each message is delivered to one consumer in the group, and all messages with the same key arrive at the same consumer.

Brokers and Clusters

A single Kafka server is called a broker. The broker receives messages from producers, assigns offsets to them, and commits the messages to storage on disk. It also services consumers, responding to fetch requests for partitions and responding with the mes‐ sages that have been committed to disk. Depending on the specific hardware and its performance characteristics, a single broker can easily handle thousands of partitions and millions of messages per second. Kafka brokers are designed to operate as part of a cluster. Within a cluster of brokers, one broker will also function as the cluster controller (elected automatically from the live members of the cluster). The controller is responsible for administrative operations, including assigning partitions to brokers and monitoring for broker failures. A partition is owned by a single broker in the cluster, and that broker is called the leader of the partition. A partition may be assigned to multiple brokers, which will result in the partition being replicated This provides redundancy of messages in the partition, such that another broker can take over leadership if there is a broker failure. However, all consumers and producers operating on that partition must connect to the leader.

retentions

A key feature of Apache Kafka is that of retention, which is the durable storage of messages for some period of time. Kafka brokers are configured with a default reten‐ tion setting for topics, either retaining messages for some period of time (e.g., 7 days) or until the topic reaches a certain size in bytes (e.g., 1 GB). Once these limits are reached, messages are expired and deleted so that the retention configuration is a minimum amount of data available at any time. Individual topics can also be config‐ ured with their own retention settings so that messages are stored for only as long as they are useful. For example, a tracking topic might be retained for several days, whereas application metrics might be retained for only a few hours. Topics can also be configured as log compacted, which means that Kafka will retain only the last mes‐ sage produced with a specific key. This can be useful for changelog-type data, where only the last update is interesting.

mirror maker

The Kafka project includes a tool called MirrorMaker, used for this purpose. At its core, MirrorMaker is simply a Kafka consumer and producer, linked together with a queue. Messages are consumed from one Kafka cluster and produced for another.

Why Kafka?

Multiple Producers

Kafka is able to seamlessly handle multiple producers, whether those clients are using many topics or the same topic.

Multiple Consumers

In addition to multiple producers, Kafka is designed for multiple consumers to read any single stream of messages without interfering with each other. This is in contrast to many queuing systems where once a message is consumed by one client, it is not available to any other. Multiple Kafka consumers can choose to operate as part of a group and share a stream, assuring that the entire group processes a given message only once.

##Disk-Based Retention Not only can Kafka handle multiple consumers, but durable message retention means that consumers do not always need to work in real time. Messages are committed to disk, and will be stored with configurable retention rules.

Scalable

Kafka’s flexible scalability makes it easy to handle any amount of data. Users can start with a single broker as a proof of concept, expand to a small development cluster of three brokers, and move into production with a larger cluster of tens or even hun‐ dreds of brokers that grows over time as the data scales up.

High Performance

All of these features come together to make Apache Kafka a publish/subscribe mes‐ saging system with excellent performance under high load. Producers, consumers, and brokers can all be scaled out to handle very large message streams with ease. This can be done while still providing subsecond message latency from producing a mes‐ sage to availability to consumers.

Process of producing message

We start producing messages to Kafka by creating a ProducerRecord, which must include the topic we want to send the record to and a value. Optionally, we can also specify a key and/or a partition. Once we send the ProducerRecord, the first thing the producer will do is serialize the key and value objects to ByteArrays so they can be sent over the network. Next, the data is sent to a partitioner. If we specified a partition in the ProducerRecord, the partitioner doesn’t do anything and simply returns the partition we specified. If we didn’t, the partitioner will choose a partition for us, usually based on the ProducerRecord key. Once a partition is selected, the producer knows which topic and partition the record will go to. It then adds the record to a batch of records that will also be sent to the same topic and partition. A separate thread is responsible for sending those batches of records to the appropriate Kafka brokers. When the broker receives the messages, it sends back a response. If the messages were successfully written to Kafka, it will return a RecordMetadata object with the topic, partition, and the offset of the record within the partition. If the broker failed to write the messages, it will return an error. When the producer receives an error, it may retry sending the message a few more times before giving up and returning an error.

Constructing a Kafka Producer

The first step in writing messages to Kafka is to create a producer object with the properties you want to pass to the producer. A Kafka producer has three mandatory properties:

bootstrap.servers

List of host:port pairs of brokers that the producer will use to establish initial connection to the Kafka cluster. This list doesn’t need to include all brokers, since the producer will get more information after the initial connection. But it is rec‐ ommended to include at least two, so in case one broker goes down, the producer will still be able to connect to the cluster.

key.serializer

Name of a class that will be used to serialize the keys of the records we will pro‐ duce to Kafka. Kafka brokers expect byte arrays as keys and values of messages. However, the producer interface allows, using parameterized types, any Java object to be sent as a key and value. This makes for very readable code, but it also means that the producer has to know how to convert these objects to byte arrays. key.serializer should be set to a name of a class that implements the org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.Serializer interface. The producer will use this class to serialize the key object to a byte array. The Kafka client pack‐ age includes ByteArraySerializer (which doesn’t do much), StringSerializer, and IntegerSerializer, so if you use common types, there is no need to implement your own serializers. Setting key.serializer is required even if you intend to send only values.

value.serializer

Name of a class that will be used to serialize the values of the records we will pro‐ duce to Kafka. The same way you set key.serializer to a name of a class that will serialize the message key object to a byte array, you set value.serializer to a class that will serialize the message value object.

Sample code to generate producer record

private Properties kafkaProps = new Properties();
    kafkaProps.put("bootstrap.servers", "broker1:9092,broker2:9092");
    kafkaProps.put("key.serializer",       "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringSerializer");
    kafkaProps.put("value.serializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringSerializer");
    producer = new KafkaProducer<String, String>(kafkaProps);

Deliver message

Once we instantiate a producer, it is time to start sending messages. There are three primary methods of sending messages:

Fire-and-forget

We send a message to the server and don’t really care if it arrives succesfully or not. Most of the time, it will arrive successfully, since Kafka is highly available and the producer will retry sending messages automatically. However, some mes‐ sages will get lost using this method.

Synchronous send

We send a message, the send() method returns a Future object, and we use get() to wait on the future and see if the send() was successful or not.

Asynchronous send

We call the send() method with a callback function, which gets triggered when it receives a response from the Kafka broker.

Sample code

ProducerRecord<String, String> record =
            new ProducerRecord<>("CustomerCountry", "Precision Products",
"France");
    try {
      producer.send(record);  //fire and forget
      producer.send(record).get(); // synchronously, calling Future.get()
    } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
}

We use the producer object send() method to send the ProducerRecord. As we’ve seen in the producer architecture diagram in Figure 3-1, the message will be placed in a buffer and will be sent to the broker in a separate thread. The send() method returns a Java Future object with RecordMetadata

Samle code of asynchronous

private class DemoProducerCallback implements Callback {
            @Override
        public void onCompletion(RecordMetadata recordMetadata, Exception e) {
         if (e != null) {
             e.printStackTrace();
            }
} }
    ProducerRecord<String, String> record =
            new ProducerRecord<>("CustomerCountry", "Biomedical Materials", "USA");
    producer.send(record, new DemoProducerCallback());

Rebalancing

Moving partition ownership from one consumer to another is called a rebalance. Rebalances are important because they provide the consumer group with high availa‐ bility and scalability (allowing us to easily and safely add and remove consumers), but in the normal course of events they are fairly undesirable. During a rebalance, con‐ sumers can’t consume messages, so a rebalance is basically a short window of unavail‐ ability of the entire consumer group. In addition, when partitions are moved from one consumer to another, the consumer loses its current state; if it was caching any data, it will need to refresh its caches—slowing down the application until the con‐ sumer sets up its state again. Throughout this chapter we will discuss how to safely handle rebalances and how to avoid unnecessary ones.

cosumber

Subscribing to Topics

Once we create a consumer, the next step is to subscribe to one or more topics. The subcribe() method takes a list of topics as a parameter, so it’s pretty simple to use:

    consumer.subscribe(Collections.singletonList("customerCountries"));

Here we simply create a list with a single element: the topic name customerCountries.

Sample consumer code

The Poll Loop At the heart of the consumer API is a simple loop for polling the server for more data. Once the consumer subscribes to topics, the poll loop handles all details of coordina‐ tion, partition rebalances, heartbeats, and data fetching, leaving the developer with a clean API that simply returns available data from the assigned partitions. The main body of a consumer will look as follows:

    try {
      while (true) {
          ConsumerRecords<String, String> records = consumer.poll(100);
          for (ConsumerRecord<String, String> record : records)
          {
              log.debug("topic = %s, partition = %s, offset = %d,
                 customer = %s, country = %s\n",
                 record.topic(), record.partition(), record.offset(),
                 record.key(), record.value());
              int updatedCount = 1;
              if (custCountryMap.countainsValue(record.value())) {
                  updatedCount = custCountryMap.get(record.value()) + 1;
              }
              custCountryMap.put(record.value(), updatedCount)
              JSONObject json = new JSONObject(custCountryMap);
              System.out.println(json.toString(4))
          }
}
} finally {
      consumer.close();
    }

Thread safety

Thread Safety You can’t have multiple consumers that belong to the same group in one thread and you can’t have multiple threads safely use the same consumer. One consumer per thread is the rule. To run mul‐ tiple consumers in the same group in one application, you will need to run each in its own thread. It is useful to wrap the con‐ sumer logic in its own object and then use Java’s ExecutorService to start multiple threads each with its own consumer.

Commit

As discussed before, one of Kafka’s unique characteristics is that it does not track acknowledgments from consumers the way many JMS queues do. Instead, it allows consumers to use Kafka to track their posi‐ tion (offset) in each partition. We call the action of updating the current position in the partition a commit.

How does a consumer commit an offset? It produces a message to Kafka, to a special __consumer_offsets topic, with the committed offset for each partition. As long as all your consumers are up, running, and churning away, this will have no impact. However, if a consumer crashes or a new consumer joins the consumer group, this will trigger a rebalance. After a rebalance, each consumer may be assigned a new set of partitions than the one it processed before. In order to know where to pick up the work, the consumer will read the latest committed offset of each partition and con‐ tinue from there.

Automatic Commit

With autocommit enabled, a call to poll will always commit the last offset returned by the previous poll. It doesn’t know which events were actually processed, so it is critical to always process all the events returned by poll() before calling poll() again. (Just like poll(), close() also commits offsets automatically.) This is usually not an issue, but pay attention when you handle exceptions or exit the poll loop prematurely.

Manual commit

It is important to remember that commitSync() will commit the latest offset returned by poll(), so make sure you call commitSync() after you are done processing all the records in the collection, or you risk missing messages as described previously. When rebalance is triggered, all the messages from the beginning of the most recent batch until the time of the rebalance will be processed twice. Here is how we would use commitSync to commit offsets after we finished processing the latest batch of messages:

while (true) {
        ConsumerRecords<String, String> records = consumer.poll(100);
        for (ConsumerRecord<String, String> record : records)
        {
            System.out.printf("topic = %s, partition = %s, offset =
              %d, customer = %s, country = %s\n",
                 record.topic(), record.partition(),
                 record.offset(), record.key(), record.value());
} try {
          consumer.commitSync();
        } catch (CommitFailedException e) {
            log.error("commit failed", e)
        }
}

Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Commits

Normally, occasional failures to commit without retrying are not a huge problem because if the problem is temporary, the following commit will be successful. But if we know that this is the last commit before we close the consumer, or before a reba‐ lance, we want to make extra sure that the commit succeeds. Therefore, a common pattern is to combine commitAsync() with commitSync() just before shutdown. Here is how it works (we will discuss how to commit just before rebalance when we get to the section about rebalance listeners):

    try {
        while (true) {
            ConsumerRecords<String, String> records = consumer.poll(100);
            for (ConsumerRecord<String, String> record : records) {
                System.out.printf("topic = %s, partition = %s, offset = %d,
                customer = %s, country = %s\n",
                record.topic(), record.partition(),
                record.offset(), record.key(), record.value());
}
            consumer.commitAsync();
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        log.error("Unexpected error", e);
    } finally {
        try {
            consumer.commitSync();
        } finally {
            consumer.close();
        }
}

Exit

When you decide to exit the poll loop, you will need another thread to call con sumer.wakeup(). If you are running the consumer loop in the main thread, this can be done from ShutdownHook. Note that consumer.wakeup() is the only consumer method that is safe to call from a different thread. Calling wakeup will cause poll() to exit with WakeupException, or if consumer.wakeup() was called while the thread was not waiting on poll, the exception will be thrown on the next iteration when poll() is called.

The Controller

The controller is one of the Kafka brokers that, in addition to the usual broker func‐ tionality, is responsible for electing partition leaders (we’ll discuss partition leaders and what they do in the next section). The first broker that starts in the cluster becomes the controller by creating an ephemeral node in ZooKeeper called /control ler. When other brokers start, they also try to create this node, but receive a “node already exists” exception, which causes them to “realize” that the controller node already exists and that the cluster already has a controller.

Replication

Replication is at the heart of Kafka’s architecture. The very first sentence in Kafka’s documentation describes it as “a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log ser‐ vice.” Replication is critical because it is the way Kafka guarantees availability and durability when individual nodes inevitably fail.

Memeroy

Kafka should run entirely on RAM. JVM heap size shouldn’t be bigger than your available RAM. That is to avoid swapping.

Swap usage

Watch for swap usage, as it will degrade performance on Kafka and lead to operations timing out (set vm.swappiness = 0). When used swap is > 128MB.

Kafka Monitoring Tools

Any monitoring tools with JMX support should be able to monitor a Kafka cluster. Here are 3 monitoring tools we liked:

First one is check_kafka.pl from Hari Sekhon. It performs a complete end to end test, i.e. it inserts a message in Kafka as a producer and then extracts it as a consumer. This makes our life easier when measuring service times.

Another useful tool is KafkaOffsetMonitor for monitoring Kafka consumers and their position (offset) in the queue. It aids our understanding of how our queue grows and which consumers groups are lagging behind.

Last but not least, the LinkedIn folks have developed what we think is the smartest tool out there: Burrow. It analyzes consumer offsets and lags over a window of time and determines the consumer status. You can retrieve this status over an HTTP endpoint and then plug it into your favourite monitoring tool (Server Density for example).

Oh, and we would be amiss if we didn’t mention Yahoo’s Kafka-Manager. While it does include some basic monitoring, it is more of a management tool. If you are just looking for a Kafka management tool, check out AirBnb’s kafkat.

commands

Start zookeeper

bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties

bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties

~/dev/git/kafka-demo/kafka_2.11-2.0.0/bin/kafka-topics.sh –create –zookeeper localhost:2181 –replication-factor 1 –partitions 1 –topic todtest bin/kafka-topics.sh –list –zookeeper localhost:2181 bin/kafka-console-producer.sh –broker-list localhost:9092 –topic todtest bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh –bootstrap-server localhost:9092 –topic todtest –from-beginning

bin/kafka-topics.sh –describe –zookeeper localhost:2181 –topic test

list topics

./kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181

describe topics

./kafka-topics.sh –describe –zookeeper localhost:2181

using connector

bin/connect-standalone.sh config/connect-standalone.properties config/connect-file-source.properties config/connect-file-sink.properties

mvn archetype:generate
-DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.kafka
-DarchetypeArtifactId=streams-quickstart-java
-DarchetypeVersion=2.0.0
-DgroupId=io
-DartifactId=todzhang
-Dversion=0.1
-Dpackage=todzhangapp

Security

The keystore stores each machine’s own identity. The truststore stores all the certificates that the machine should trust. Importing a certificate into one’s truststore also means trusting all certificates that are signed by that certificate. As the analogy above, trusting the government (CA) also means trusting all passports (certificates) that it has issued. This attribute is called the chain of trust, and it is particularly useful when deploying SSL on a large Kafka cluster. You can sign all certificates in the cluster with a single CA, and have all machines share the same truststore that trusts the CA. That way all machines can authenticate all other machines.

To deploy SSL, the general steps are:

• Generate the keys and certificates
• Create your own Certificate Authority (CA)
• Sign the certificate

Generate the key and the certificate for each Kafka broker in the cluster. Generate the key into a keystore called kafka.server.keystore so that you can export and sign it later with CA. The keystore file contains the private key of the certificate; therefore, it needs to be kept safely.

With user prompts

keytool -keystore kafka.server.keystore.jks -alias localhost -genkey

Without user prompts, pass command line arguments

keytool -keystore kafka.server.keystore.jks -alias localhost -validity {validity} -genkey -storepass {keystore-pass} -keypass {key-pass} -dname {distinguished-name} -ext SAN=DNS:{hostname} Ensure that the common name (CN) exactly matches the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the server. The client compares the CN with the DNS domain name to ensure that it is indeed connecting to the desired server, not a malicious one. The hostname of the server can also be specified in the Subject Alternative Name (SAN). Since the distinguished name is used as the server principal when SSL is used as the inter-broker security protocol, it is useful to have hostname as a SAN rather than the CN.

Create your own Certificate Authority (CA)

Generate a CA that is simply a public-private key pair and certificate, and it is intended to sign other certificates.

openssl req -new -x509 -keyout ca-key -out ca-cert -days {validity}

Add the generated CA to the clients’ truststore so that the clients can trust this CA:

keytool -keystore kafka.client.truststore.jks -alias CARoot -import -file ca-cert

Add the generated CA to the brokers’ truststore so that the brokers can trust this CA.

keytool -keystore kafka.server.truststore.jks -alias CARoot -import -file ca-cert

Sign the certificate

To sign all certificates in the keystore with the CA that you generated:

Export the certificate from the keystore:

keytool -keystore kafka.server.keystore.jks -alias localhost -certreq -file cert-file Sign it with the CA:

openssl x509 -req -CA ca-cert -CAkey ca-key -in cert-file -out cert-signed -days {validity} -CAcreateserial -passin pass:{ca-password} Import both the certificate of the CA and the signed certificate into the broker keystore:

keytool -keystore kafka.server.keystore.jks -alias CARoot -import -file ca-cert keytool -keystore kafka.server.keystore.jks -alias localhost -import -file cert-signed

SASL

Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) is a framework for authentication and data security in Internet protocols. It decouples authentication mechanisms from application protocols, in theory allowing any authentication mechanism supported by SASL to be used in any application protocol that uses SASL. Authentication mechanisms can also support proxy authorization, a facility allowing one user to assume the identity of another. They can also provide a data security layer offering data integrity and data confidentiality services. DIGEST-MD5 provides an example of mechanisms which can provide a data-security layer. Application protocols that support SASL typically also support Transport Layer Security (TLS) to complement the services offered by SASL.

References

• https://blog.serverdensity.com/how-to-monitor-kafka/

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