Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

...

  1. If the co-ordinator fails at step #1 after receiving a notification but not getting a chance to act on it, the new co-ordinator has to be able to detect the need for a rebalance operation on completing the failover. As part of failover, the co-ordinator reads a group's metadata from zookeeper, including the list of topics the group has subscribed to and the previous partition ownership decision. If the # of topics or # of partitions for the subscribed topics are different from the ones in the previous partition ownership decision, the new co-ordinator detects the need for a rebalance and initiates one for the group. Similarly if the consumers that connect to the new co-ordinator are different from the ones in the group's generation metadata in zookeeper, it initiates a rebalance for the group.
  2. If the co-ordinator fails at step #2, it might send a HeartbeatResponse with the error code to some consumers but not all. Similar to failure #1 above, the co-ordinator will detect the need for rebalance after failover and initiate a rebalance again. If a rebalance was initiated due to a consumer failure and the consumer recovers before the co-ordinator failover completes, the co-ordinator will not initiate a rebalance. However, if any consumer (with an empty or unknown consumer id) sends it a JoinGroupRequest, it will initiate a rebalance for the entire group.
  3. If a co-ordinator fails at step #3, it might receive JoinGroupRequests from only a subset of consumers in the group. After failover, the co-ordinator might receive a HeartbeatRequest from all alive consumers OR JoinGroupRequests from some. Similar to #1, it will trigger a rebalance for the group.
  4. If a co-ordinator fails at step #4, it might fail after writing the new generation id and group membership in zookeeper. The generation id and membership information is written in one atomic zookeeper write operation. After failover, the consumer will send HeartbeatRequests to the new co-ordinator with an older generation id. The co-ordinator triggers a rebalance by returning an IllegalGeneration error code in the response that causes the consumer to send it a JoinGroupRequest. Note that this is the reason why it is worth sending both the generation id as well as the consumer id in the HeartbeatRequest and OffsetCommitRequest
  5. If a co-ordinator fails at step #5, it might send the JoinGroupResponse to only a subset of the consumers in a group. A consumer that received a JoinGroupResponse will detect the failed co-ordinator while sending a heartbeat or committing offsets. At this point, it will discover the new co-ordinator and send it a heartbeat with the new generation id. The co-ordinator will send it a HeartbeatResponse with no error code at this point. A consumer that did not receive a JoinGroupResponse will discover the new co-ordinator and send it a JoinGroupRequest. This will cause the co-ordinator to trigger a rebalance for the group.

...