Motivation
Summary of existing controller
Current Kafka controller is a multi-threaded controller that emulates a state machine. It works in the following way.
Maintained state:
- Replicas of partitions on each machine.
- Leaders of partitions.
State change input source:
- Listeners Registered to Zookeeper.
- AddPartitionsListener
- BrokerChangeListener
- DeleteTopicListener
- PartitionReassignedListener(Admin)
- PreferredReplicaElectionListener(Admin)
- ReassignedPartitionsIsrChangeListener
- TopicChangeListener
- Channels to brokers (controlled shutdown)
- Internal scheduled tasks (preferred leader election)
State change execution:
- Listener threads, KafkaApi thread and internal scheduler thread makes state change concurrently.
State change propagation model:
- P2P blocking channel from controller to each broker.
- Dedicated message queue for each controller-to-broker connection.
- No synchronization on message sent to different brokers.
- No callback for sending messages except topic deletion.
Fail Over/Back model:
- Zookeeper based leader election
- Zookeeper as persistent state store for fault tolerance.
Problems of existing controller
- State change are executed by different listeners concurrently. Hence complicated synchronization is needed which is error prone and difficult to debug.
- State propagation is not synchronized. Brokers might be in different state for undetermined time. This leads to unnecessary extra data loss.
- During controlled shutdown process, two connections are used for controller to broker communication. This makes state change propagation and controlled shutdown approval out of order.
Some of the state changes are complicated because the ReplicaStateMachine and PartitionStateMachine are separate but the state changes themselves are not. So the controller has to maintain some sort of ordering between the state changes executed by the individual state machines. In the new design, we will look into folding them into a single one.
Many state changes are executed for one partition after another. It would be much more efficient to do it in one request.
Some long running operations need to support cancellation. For example, we want to support cancellation of partition reassignment for those partitions whose reassignment hasn't started yet. The new controller should be able to abort/cancel the long running process.
New controller design
Outline
We will keep maintained state and fail over/back model unchanged.
We are going to change the state change propagation model, state change execution and output of the state change input source. More specifically:
- Abstract the output of each state change input source to an event.
- Have a single execution thread to serially process events one at a time.
- The zk listeners are responsible for only context updating but not event execution.
- Use o.a.k.clients.NetworClient + callback for state change propagation.
We would also like to
- Modify KafkaServer to use new NetworkClient and prioritize the controller-to-broker traffic.
- Change the reads/writes to Zookeeper to maybe use multi-operation or async operation.
Related tickets
KAFKA-2139, KAFKA-2029, KAFKA-1305 (and definitely some other tickets... Appreciate it if people can add it here.)
Architecture
- The Controller Context contains two kinds of information: cluster reachability and Topic State(Partition, Replica, Leaders, etc)
- Two types of ZK listeners:
- Responsible of updating cluster reachability by listening to broker path in zookeeper.
- Responsible for create events and add them to Event Queue.
- A controlled shutdown event will be generated when receive controlled shutdown from broker.
- The controlled shutdown process will be changed to make state change and controlled shutdown approval occur in order. (This might involve broker side change as well)
- Scheduled tasks (e.g. preferred leader election) will
- On controller starting up or resignation, a ControllerStartUp/ControllerResignation event will be generated.
- Event Executor Thread:
- Change Topic State in Controller Context
- Propagate the new state to each broker using o.a.k.clients.NetworkClient in non-blocking way.
- Broker will only trigger Zookeeper data change when:
- Broker is down (or long GC)
- New topic automatically created
Event Types and Handling Process
Event Types
There will be eight types of events in the controller, which are defined as below. Each listener will generate one type of event, controlled shutdown is the eighth event type.
object ControllerEventType extends Enumeration { type ControllerEventType = Value val AddPartition, TopicChange, DeleteTopic, BrokerChange, PreferredReplicaElection, PartitionReassigned, ReassignedPartitionIsrChange, ControlledShutdown = Value }
KafkaControllerEvent
A generic controller event class will be defined:
abstract class KafkaControllerEvent(eventType: ControllerEventType) { // A set that tracks the responses from brokers val unAckedNode = new mutable.HashSet[Int] val eventDone = new CountDownLatch(1) def makeStatesChange(currentState: PartitionStateMachine): Map[Int, ClientRequest] def controllerRequestCallback(response: ClientResponse) { handleBrokerResponse(response) unAckedNode.remove(response.request().request().destination()) if (unAckedNode.isEmpty) eventDone.countDown() } def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) }
AddPartitionEvent
class AddPartitionEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.AddPartition) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
TopicChangeEvent
class TopicChangeEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.TopicChange) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
DeleteTopicEvent
class DeleteTopicEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.DeleteTopic) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
BrokerChangeEvent
class BrokerChangeEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.BrokerChange) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
PreferredReplicaElectionEvent
class PreferredReplicaElectionEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.PreferredReplicaElection) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
PartitionReassignedEvent
class PartitionReassignedEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.PartitionReassigned) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
ReassignedPartitionIsrChangeEvent
class ReassignedPartitionIsrChangeEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.ReassignedPartitionIsrChange) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
ControlledShutdown
class ControlledShutdownEvent extends KafkaControllerEvent(ControllerEventType.ControlledShutdown) { override def makeStatesChange(): Map[Int, ClientRequest] = { // make state change and generate requests to each broker } override def handleBrokerResponse(response: ClientResponse) { // If necessary, do something when response is received } }
Event Handling Process
The general event handling process would be something like this:
while(!shutdown){ Event event = eventQueue.pollFirst() // Make state change try { val brokerRequests = event.makeStateChange(partitionStateMachine) brokerRequests.map { case (broker, request) => networkClient.send(request) event.unAckedNode.add(broker) } while (!event.unAckedNode.isEmpty) { try { networkClient.poll(timeout) } catch { case KafkaApiException => // Do something case Exception => // Error handling } checkNodeLivenessAndIgnoreDeadNode() } } catch { case StateChangeException => // handle illegal state change } }
Long Running Process Handling
Currently replica reassigment is a really long running process. In new controller, we want to support abort/cancellation of the long running process when some event that affects the partition reassignment occurs after the long running process starts. In new controller, we will let later events overrides the state change of previous events based on the principle of avoiding under replicated partition (URP).
For example, partition reassignment consists of several events:
1 PartitionReassignedEvent + N * ReassignedPartitionIsrChangeEvent.
Time | Broker 0 | Broker 1 | Broker 2 | Event |
---|---|---|---|---|
0 - Initial State | {t1p1, replica:{0,1}, leader:0, isr:{0,1}} | {t1p1, replica:{0,1}, leader:0, isr:{0,1}} | ||
1 - Reassign t1p1 to broker 1 and broker 2 | PartitionReassignedEvent | |||
{t1p1, replica:{0,1,2}, leader:1, isr:{0,1}} | {t1p1, replica:{0,1,2}, leader:1, isr:{0,1}} | {t1p1, replica:{0,1,2}, leader:1, isr:{0,1}} | ||
2.A - Broker 2 down (Scenario 1) | BrokerChangeEvent | |||
| {t1p1, replica:{0,1,2}, leader:0, isr:{0,1}} | {t1p1, replica:{0,1,2}, leader:0, isr:{0,1}} | ||
2.B - Broker 1 down (Scenario 2) | {t1p1, replica:{0,1,2}, leader:0, isr:{0,1}} | |||
3 - Another partition reassignment | PartitionReassignedEvent |
In scenario 2.A, we may choose to remove broker 2 from replica list or we can just stop listening to ISR change and let a later partition reassignment take care of this.
In scenario 2.B, we are better off to keep broker 2 in the replica list, and not remove broker 0 from isr after broker 2 enters isr so we do not expose to under replicated partition.
In step 3, when another partition reassignment comes, if the reassigned topic partition in step 1 and step 3 are the same, the second partition assignment will overrides the first one. It should:
- clean up the listeners of the previous partition reassignment on the overridden partitions,
- start the normal partition reassignment process.
Discussion Required
- As stated in KAFKA-2029, current state change propagation has an issue that in an unbalanced cluster. State change on a heavily loaded broker will be much slower than a lightly loaded broker. This is because of the following two reasons:
- Controller traffic is not prioritized on broker side. So controller messages needs to wait until some clients requests are handled which takes much longer on a heavily loaded broker.
- Heavily loaded broker needs to take state change for more partitions while same amount state changes are distributed among several brokers as followers.
- Ideally, we should try to let the brokers in consistent state if possible. That indicates that we should put synchronization barriers between two events. Which means we do not execute the next event until:
- Callback has been fired on each broker, or
- A broker is down and we will just skip waiting for its callback and move on.
- We actually have two ways to determine if a broker is alive or not: from Zookeeper or from NetworkClient. Currently we take zookeeper as source of truth, but when we send messages, NetworkClient connectivity is the one actually matters. Because Zookeeper timeout could take a while, so what should we do if Zookeeper says a broker is alive but NetworkClient shows it is disconnected. Should we block the current event processing? If there is a long GC, is it possible that NetworkClient says broker is connected but Zookeeper says it's dead? Back to question 2, it is about when we consider "a broker is down".
2 Comments
Neha Narkhede
Thanks for starting this discussion, Jiangjie Qin. The controller has gotten much more complex since the first design iteration, so some of my questions may be redundant. Few comments
The state change listeners all wait on the controllerLock, so they are slow, but the synchronization is the simplest possible. Are you referring to something else here? Can you elaborate on #2 above, what is an example and why is state propagation not synchronized? Same for #3 above.
The problems you've stated are more effects of some flaws in the design evolution of the controller. It will be great to list what those design flaws are first. For example -
Jiangjie Qin
Neha Narkhede, thanks for the review and comments.
Very helpful comments for the flaw examples. I'll incorporate them into the wiki. Really sorry for missing a lot of details in the wiki... I haven't got time to fully flesh the event handling details yet, I'll do that this week. Some quick thoughts on the issues you listed.
To clarify my statements:
Yes, you are right, we essentially only have one controller lock. But I am a little bit worried because we are not really grabbing the lock on per event basis. For example, during broker shutdown, we have something like
{code}
allPartitionsAndReplicationFactorOnBroker.foreach {
inLock(ControllerContext.controllerLock) {
}
}
{code}
So if some one do a replica reassignment or scheduled preferred leader election, although per/partition state change probably is still atomic, but we might end up having two or three events (broker down, preferred leader election, replica reassignment) going on at the same time.
For example, suppose controller sends message M to both Broker A and Broker B. In controller messages queue, if broker A has 100 messages, and broker B has 10 messages, that means broker A will likely process message M later than Broker B does. So the state propagation from controller to Broker A and Broker B at different times, during gap of state changes on Broker A and Broker B, we could potentially lose data, unnecessarily. This is what KAFKA-2139 and KAFKA-2029 wanted to mitigate although we cannot eliminate it completely.
Suppose broker A wants to shutdown. Currently controller channel manager has a connection_1 to broker A. The way controlled shutdown works is that
In practice, we saw many times the controlled shutdown response reaches broker A from connection_2 before all the state change messages reaches Broker A on connection_1 and we are depending on a bunch of swallowErrors() to make sure the shutdown does not complain.