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Category: Streaming

Benchmarking Streaming Systems

Published 2017-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Burak Yavuz shares a benchmark of Spark Streaming versus Flink and Kafka Streams:

At Databricks, we used Databricks Notebooks and cluster management to set up a reproducible benchmarking harness that compares the performance of Apache Spark’s Structured Streaming, running on Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, against other open source streaming systems such as Apache Kafka Streams and Apache Flink. In particular, we used the following systems and versions in our benchmarks:

The Yahoo Streaming Benchmark is a well-known benchmark used in industry to evaluate streaming systems. When setting up our benchmark, we wanted to push each streaming system to its absolute limits, yet keep the business logic the same as in the Yahoo Streaming Benchmark. We shared some of the results we achieved from these benchmarks during Spark Summit West 2017 keynote showing that Spark can reach 5x or higher throughput over other popular streaming systems. In this blog, we discuss in more detail about how we performed this benchmark, and how you can reproduce the results yourselves.

Standard vendor-based metric warnings aside, you can get the benchmark details at their GitHub repo.

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Predicting Advertising Budgets With Kafka Streams

Published 2017-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

Boyang Chen explains how Pinterest uses Kafka Streams to reduce advertising overdelivery:

Overdelivery occurs when free ads are shown for out-of-budget advertisers. This reduces opportunities for advertisers with available budget to have their products and services discovered by potential customers.

Overdelivery is a difficult problem to solve for two reason:

  1. Real-time spend data: Information about ad impressions needs to be fed back into the system within seconds in order to shut down out-of-budget campaigns.

  2. Predictive spend: Fast, historical spend data isn’t enough. The system needs to be able to predict spend that might occur in the future and slow down campaigns close to reaching their budget. That’s because an inserted ad could remain available to be acted on by a user. This makes the spend information difficult to accurately measure in a short timeframe. Such a natural delay is inevitable, and the only thing we can be sure of is the ad insertion event.

This is a very interesting architectural overview.

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Using Akka In A Streaming Solution

Published 2017-10-05 by Kevin Feasel

Artem Rukavytsia shows us how you can easily integrate Akka into a solution with Kafka and Spark Streaming:

Akka gives you the opportunity to make logic for producing/consuming messages from Kafka with the Actor model. It’s very convenient if actors are widely used in your code and it significantly simplifies making data pipelines with actors. For example, you have your Akka Cluster, one part of which allows you to crawl of web pages and the other part of which makes it possible to index and send indexed data to Kafka. The consumer can aggregate this logic. Producing data to Kafka looks as follows:

The Actor model, which Akka implements, is something I kind of understand, but have never spent much time trying to implement.  I can see how it’d make perfect sense communicating with Kafka, though, given the scale and independence of consumers within a consumer group that Kafka provides.

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Using Spark Streaming On Kafka

Published 2017-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Ayush Tiwari has an introductory tutorial on using Spark Streaming on top of Kafka:

The Spark Streaming integration for Kafka 0.10 is similar in design to the 0.8 Direct Stream approach. It provides simple parallelism, 1:1 correspondence between Kafka partitions and Spark partitions, and access to offsets and metadata. However, because the newer integration uses the new Kafka consumer API instead of the simple API, there are notable differences in usage. This version of the integration is marked as experimental, so the API is potentially subject to change.

In this blog, I am going to implement the basic example on Spark Structured Streaming & Kafka Integration.

This is a code-heavy tutorial, so check it out.

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Joins With Kafka

Published 2017-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Florian Trossbach and Matthias J Sax show the various sorts of joins offered in Kafka, both streams and tables:

Apache Kafka’s Streams API provides a very sophisticated API for joins that can handle many use cases in a scalable way. However, some join semantics might be surprising to developers as streaming join semantics differ from SQL semantics. Furthermore, the semantics of changelog streams and tombstone messages (that are used for deletes) are a new concept in stream processing.

Kafka’s journey from Pub/Sub broker to distributed streaming platform is well underway, and our times as engineers are very exciting!

I didn’t know you could join streams together in Kafka, so that’s really cool.

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Creating A Simple Kafka Streams Application

Published 2017-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Bejeck has built a simple Kafka Streams application for us:

This blog post will quickly get you off the ground and show you how Kafka Streams works. We’re going to make a toy application that takes incoming messages and upper-cases the text of those messages, effectively yelling at anyone who reads the message. This application is called the yelling application.

Before diving into the code, let’s take a look at the processing topology you’ll assemble for this “yelling” application. We’ll build a processing graph topology, where each node in the graph has a particular function.

His entire application is 20 lines of code but it does function as a valid Kafka Streams app and works well as a demo.

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Message Transformation Within Kafka

Published 2017-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Robin Moffatt shows how to use Single Message Transforms inside Kafka Connect to reshape messages as you send them downstream:

Single Message Transforms (SMT) is a functionality within Kafka Connect that enables the transformation … of single messages. Clever naming, right?! Anything that’s more complex, such as aggregating or joins streams of data should be done with Kafka Streams — but simple transformations can be done within Kafka Connect itself, without needing a single line of code.

SMTs are applied to messages as they flow through Kafka Connect; inbound it modifies the message before it hits Kafka, outbound and the message in Kafka remains untouched but the data landed downstream is modified.

There’s quite a bit you can do with this, so check it out.

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How The New York Times Uses Apache Kafka

Published 2017-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Boerge Svingen gives us an architectural overview of how the New York Times uses Apache Kafka to link different services together:

These are all sources of what we call published content. This is content that has been written, edited, and that is considered ready for public consumption.

On the other side we have a wide range of services and applications that need access to this published content — there are search engines, personalization services, feed generators, as well as all the different front-end applications, like the website and the native apps. Whenever an asset is published, it should be made available to all these systems with very low latency — this is news, after all — and without data loss.

This article describes a new approach we developed to solving this problem, based on a log-based architecture powered by Apache KafkaTM. We call it the Publishing Pipeline. The focus of the article will be on back-end systems. Specifically, we will cover how Kafka is used for storing all the articles ever published by The New York Times, and how Kafka and the Streams API is used to feed published content in real-time to the various applications and systems that make it available to our readers.  The new architecture is summarized in the diagram below, and we will deep-dive into the architecture in the remainder of this article.

This is a nice write-up of a real-world use case for Kafka.

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Lambda And Kappa Architectures

Published 2017-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Verrilli has a post contrasting the Lambda and Kappa data architectures:

Any query may get a complete picture by retrieving data from both the batch views and the real-time views. The queries will get the best of both worlds. The batch views may be processed with more complex or expensive rules and may have better data quality and less skew, while the real-time views give you up to the moment access to the latest possible data. As time goes on, real-time data expires and is replaced with data in the batch views.

One additional benefit to this architecture is that you can replay the same incoming data and produce new views in case code or formula changes.

The biggest detraction to this architecture has been the need to maintain two distinct (and possibly complex) systems to generate both batch and speed layers. Luckily with Spark Streaming (abstraction layer) or Talend (Spark Batch and Streaming code generator), this has become far less of an issue… although the operational burden still exists.

I haven’t seen much on the topic of Big Data architectures this year; it seems like it was a much more popular topic last year.

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KSQL: Streaming SQL For Kafka

Published 2017-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Neha Narkhende announces KSQL:

I’m really excited to announce KSQL, a streaming SQL engine for Apache KafkaTM. KSQL lowers the entry bar to the world of stream processing, providing a simple and completely interactive SQL interface for processing data in Kafka. You no longer need to write code in a programming language such as Java or Python! KSQL is open-source (Apache 2.0 licensed), distributed, scalable, reliable, and real-time. It supports a wide range of powerful stream processing operations including aggregations, joins, windowing, sessionization, and much more.

Feasel’s Law wins again.  The syntax looks pretty similar to Spark Streaming and Stream Analytics, so if you get those, you’ll get this.

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