When does AkkaHttp backpressure kick in? - http

.. when the http response entity is not consumed, or the client tcp buffer becomes full, or when the rate of client taking from its tcp buffer is lower then the rate of server pushing data to it?
I am looking for a way for to achieve the following:
Let's assume that there is a backpressure-able source of data on the server, such as an Apache Kafka topic.
If I consume this source from a remote location it may be possible that the rate at which that remote location can consume is lower - this is solved if Kafka client or consumer is used.
However let's assume that the client is a browser and that exposing direct Kafka protocol / connectivity is not a possibility.
Further, let's assume that there is a possibility of getting all the value even if jumping over some messages.
For instance in case of compacted topics, getting only the latest values for each key is enough for a client, no need to go through intermediate values.
This would be equivalent to Flowable.onBackpressureLatest() or AkkaStreams.aggregateOnBackpressure or onBackpressureAggregate.
Would it be a way to expose the topic over HTTP REST (e.g. Server Side Events / chunked transfer-encoding) or over web-sockets, that would achieve this effect of skipping over intermediate values for each key?
Please advise, thanks

Akka http supports back pressure based on TCP protocol very well and you can read about using it in combination with streaming here
Kafka consumption and exposure via http with back pressure can be easily achieved in combination of akka-http, akka-stream and alpakka-kafka.
Kafka consumers need to do polling and alpakka covers back pressure with reduction of polling requests.
I don't see the necessity of skipping over the messages when back pressure is fully supported. Kafka will keep track of the offset consumed by a consumer group (the one you pick for your service or http connection) and this will guarantee eventual consumption of all messages. Of course, if you produce messages way faster in a topic, the consumer will never catch up. Let me know if this is your case.
As a final note, you may check out Confluent REST Proxy API, which allows you to read Kafka messages in a restful manner.

Related

What message persistence guarantee NATS streaming provides in cluster and FT modes?

I'm looking for a streaming server with the message persistence guarantee, i.e. where the messages published by producers are guaranteed to be durably stored before the server acknowledges publishing to the producer.
My use case requires that we reduce the possibility of losing any produced messages. Producers are able to replay messages if required but they need to be sure that the ACKed message is durably persisted and will be delivered by the streaming server to the consumers.
NATS Streaming server seems to do something along those lines, but the docs for clustering and fault tolerance don't make it very clear what persistence guarantee is provided in each case. The doc on producer integration confirms that the server will actively ACK the published messages, either synchronously or via callback, but it does not make it clear if the ACK means that the message was durably stored at this point or not yet.
The doc on store configuration, specifically SQL options briefly mentions that the ACK from the server means a durable storage guarantee, but it's not clear still how exactly that applies in cases of Clustering and Fault Tolerance and different persistence backends (files or SQL).
NATS Streaming will have persisted the message before sending the publisher ACK back. The store implementations (filestore/SQL) may use some caching, but regardless, the writes are sync'ed (unless disabled) before the ACK is sent back.
However, in cluster mode, the filestore sync'ing is disabled because we rely on the fact that the data is replicated to each node of the cluster and so you would need multiple failures at once to lose the message. (note that there is an option for file store implementation to perform auto-sync at regular interval: see auto_sync here

Isn't http keep alive feature against three rule of thumbs: assyncronous, reactive programing and scalability

I know in HTTP 1.1, keep-alive is the default behavior, unless the client explicitly asks the server to close the connection by including a Connection: close header in its request, or the server decides to includes a Connection: close header in its response. I am wondering if this isn't kind of an obstacle in scalability when growning servers horizontaly.
My scenario: we are developing all new services following microservices patterns either in Java or Phyton. It is desarible we can design and implement such way we can increase horizontally. For isntance, I can use docker in order to easily scale up or use Spring Boot Cloud Config. Whatever the phisical host implementation the basic idea is favour scalability.
My understanding: I must keep server and client as musch agnostic as possible and when I set up HTTP Keep Alive I understand there will be advantage while taking use of same http connection (and save some cpu process) but I guess I am forcing the client (eg. another service) to keep using same connection which may downgrade the advantage of several docker instances of same service since I will promote the client to keep consuming the same initial connection.
Assuming my understanding is correct, I assume it is not a good idea since we develop the service providing response that can be reuseable from different consumers with different approaches: some consumers can consume assyncronously or following reactive design paradigms which make me wondering if keeping alive same connection. Let's say in practical terms: the connection used should be free soon as possible in order to really balance the demand over all providers.
***edited after first comment
Let´s assume I have multiple diferent consumer services (CS1, CS2 ... CSn) connecting to a single Load Balance instance (LB) which will forward the request to multiple Dockers with same provider service (D1, D2 ... Dn). Since keep alive is the default behaviour in http 1+, we have keep "alive = true" in all connection (either between Cx and LB or LB and Dx). As far as I know the only advantage to keep alive is save cpu process while opening/closing a connection. If I send Connection:close after each request there is no advantage at all to use keep alive. If I have some logic to send "connection: close" it means I promote LB to keep connected to a specific Dx using exactly the same connection for while, right? (I choose here the word promote because I iguess force might not be the appropriate one since there is time out in keep alive and then LB migh route to another Dx anyway). So I have in some moment C1 -> LB -> D1 alive persisted for while, right? Comming back to my original question, isn't that against the idea of assyncronous/paralelal/reactive paradigm? For instance, I have some scenario where a single consumer service will call another service few times before returning a single answer to a page. Today we are doing it sequentially but if we decide to call in paralalel and depending on first answer therer will be already a answer to a page or we decide to compouse an answer to the page but I don't care the order. The caller service will wait every answers before returning to a ccontroller and the order doesn't matter. Ins't strange I have keep alive = true?
I am forcing the client (eg. another service) to keep using same connection
You are not forcing. The client can easily avoid persistent connections by sending HTTP/1.0 and/or Connection: close. There are many practical HTTP applications that work just like that.
keep using same connection which may downgrade the advantage of several docker instances of same service since I will promote the client to keep consuming the same initial connection
Assuming your load balancer works well, it will usually distribute connections evenly across your instances. Of course, this may not work when you only have a few connections altogether, but a few connections can hardly pose a scalability or performance problem.

Akka Camel netty4 query based communication - one to many

I want to connect to a tcp server with proprietary protocol which provides data upon queries.
The tcp data is successfully decoded using Netty4 ServerClientHandler.
Camel consumer(client mode) is used for connecting to the server.
I can send first query through ServerClientHandler on activation.
Requirement
Query for 2000 messages.
After processing 1000 messages ask for another 1000(total 3000) messages.
Repeat
Problem is after processing 1000 messages there is no way to request another 1000 messages.
I have tried to use Netty4 sync option. But what I need is multiple responses for one request.
I was thinking of using netty4 producer. Is there any way to send one request and receive multiple responses using camel netty4 producer. If it is possible I can route responses through camel actors.
I am going through camel netty source code with no success. If you can provide any starting point it will be really helpful.

How to cluster multiple HTTP Clients?

I have a use case which involves pulling/streaming data from numerous HTTP endpoints, in excess of over 100.
I have a standalone java app that can manage up to 30+ client requests using ning async client http library but was looking for some ideas on how I could scale this up to handle much more.
The use case is to pull the data from the end points and push them into a kafka queue (similar to jms queue) for processing by a storm topology. The bit I'm stuck on is how to best efficiently get the http end point data into the Kafka queues in the first place.
thanks

implementing a background process responding to the client in an atmosphere+netty/jetty application

We have a requirement to to support 10k+ users, where every user initiate a request and waits for a response from the server (the response can take as long as 20-30 seconds to arrive). it is only one request from the client, and after a long processing by the server, a response will be transmitted and then the connection will disconnect.
in the background, the server will do some DB search and wait for other background processes to notify on completion before responding to the client.
after doing some research i figured out we will need to use something like the atmosphere framework to support websockets/sse event/long polling along with an asynchronous server like netty (=> nettosphere) or jetty.
As for my experience - mostly Java EE world and Tomcat server.
my questions are:
what will be easier to implement in regard to my experience and our requirement: atmosphere + netty or atmoshphere+jetty? which one can scale better, has an easier learning curve and easier to implement other java technologies?
how do u implement in atmosphere a response that is sent only to the originating client and not broadcast to the rest of the clients? (all the examples i found are broadcast).
how can i implement in netty (or jetty) when using the atmosphere framework our response? i.e., the client send a request, after it is received in the server some background processes are run, and when they finish i need to locate the connection and transmit the response. is that achievable?
Some thoughts:
At 10k+ users, with 20-30 second response latency, you likely hit file descriptor limits if using just 1 network interface. Consider a solution that uses multiple network interfaces.
Your description of your request/response can be handled entirely with standard Servlet 3.0, standard HTTP/1.1, Async request handling, and large timeouts.
If your clients are web browsers, and you don't start sending a response from the server until the 20-30 second window, you might hit browser idle timeouts.
Atmosphere and Cometd do the same things, supporting long duration connections, with connection technique fallbacks, and with logical channel APIs.
I believe the AKKA framework will handle this sort of need. I am looking at using it to handle scaling issues possibly with a RabbitMQ to help off load work to potentially other servers that may be added later to scale as needed.

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