Best way to have perpetually running DAG in Airflow - airflow

I have a DAG that persistently monitors a filesystem and executes when new files are present. I want one copy of this dag to be running perpetually and I'm wondering the best way to accomplish this?
E.g. as soon as one dag run finishes another begins.
I could accomplish this by scheduling DAGs every few minutes, and then limiting concurrent dags to 1, but I'm guessing there is a more systematic way to accomplish this.

Related

Airflow dag dependencies

I have a airflow dag-1 that runs approximately for week and dag-2 that runs every day for few hours. When the dag-1 is running i cannot have the dag-2 running due to API limit rate (also dag-2 is supposed to run once dag-1 is finished).
Suppose the dag-1 is running already, then dag-2 that is supposed to run everyday fails, is there a way i can schedule the dag dependencies in a right way?
Is it possible to stop dag-1 temporarily(while running) when dag-2 is supposed to start and then run dag-1 again without manual interruption?
One of the best way is to use the defined pool ..
Lets say if you have a pool named: "specefic_pool" and allocate only one slot for it.
Specify the pool name in your dag bash command (instead of default pool, please use newly created pool) By that way you may over come of running both the dags parallel .
This helps whenever Dag1 is running Dag2 will never be triggered until pool is free or if the dag2 picked the pool until dag2 is completed dag1 is not going to get triggered.

Sharing large intermediate state between Airflow tasks

We have an Airflow deployment with Celery executors.
Many of our DAGs require a local processing step of some file in a BashOperator or PythonOperator.
However, in our understanding the tasks of a given DAG may not always be scheduled on the same machine.
The options for state sharing between tasks I've gathered so far:
Use Local Executors - this may suffice for one team, depending on the load, but may not scale to the wider company
Use XCom - does this have a size limit? Probably unsuitable for large files
Write custom Operators for every combination of tasks that need local processing in between. This approach reduces modularity of tasks and requires replicating existing operators' code.
Use Celery queues to route DAGs to the same worker (docs) - This option seems attractive at first, but what would be an appropriate way to set it up in order to avoid routing everything to one executor, or crafting a million queues?
Use a shared network storage in all machines that run executors - Seems like an additional infrastructure burden, but is a possibility.
What is the recommended way to do sharing of large intermediate state, such as files, between tasks in Airflow?
To clarify something: No matter how you setup airflow, there will only be one executor running.
The executor runs on the same machine as the scheduler.
Currently (current is airflow 1.9.0 at time of writing) there is no safe way to run multiple schedulers, so there will only ever be one executor running.
Local executor executes the task on the same machine as the scheduler.
Celery Executor just puts tasks in a queue to be worked on the celery workers.
However, the question you are asking does apply to Celery workers. If you use Celery Executor you will probably have multiple celery workers.
Using network shared storage solves multiple problems:
Each worker machine sees the same dags because they have the same dags folder
Results of operators can be stored on a shared file system
The scheduler and webserver can also share the dags folder and run on different machines
I would use network storage, and write the output file name to xcom. Then when you need to input the output from a previous task, you would read the file name from that task's Xcom and process that file.
Change datatype of column key in xcom table of airflow metastore.
Default datatype of key is: blob.
Change it to LONGBLOB. It will help you to store upto 4GB in between intermediate tasks.

How to increase tasks queued per second?

I am trying to diagnose an under-performing airflow pipeline and am wondering what kind of performance I should expect out of the airflow scheduler in terms similar to "tasks scheduled per second".
I have few queued jobs and many of my tasks finish in seconds so I suspect the scheduler is the limiting component and it is my fault for having many quick tasks. Still, I would rather not rewrite my DAGs if it can be avoided.
What can I do to increase the rate at which the scheduler queues tasks?
Pipeline Details
Here is what my current airflow.cfg looks like.
I only have two dags running. One is scheduled every 5 min and the other is rarely triggered by the first. I am currently trying to backfill several years at this frequency, but may need to change my approach:
As for worker nodes: I currently have 4 fairly powerful servers running at less than 10% resource usage in disk, network, cpu, RAM, swap. Toggling 3 of the workers off has no impact on my task throughput and the server left on barely even registers the change in workload.
There are a number of config values in your airflow.cfg that could be related to this.
Under [core]:
parallelism: Total number of task instances that can run at once.
dag_concurrency: Limit of task instances that can run per DAG run, may need to bump if you have many parallel tasks. Can override when defining a DAG.
non_pooled_task_slot_count: Limit of tasks without a pool configured that can run at once.
max_active_runs_per_dag: The maximum number of active DAG runs per DAG. If you're triggering runs manually or there's a backup of DAG runs scheduled with a short interval. Can override when defining a DAG.
Under [scheduler]:
schedule_heartbeat_sec: Defines how often the scheduler runs, try it out with lower values.
min_file_process_interval: Process each file at most once every N seconds. Set to 0 to never limit how often you process a file.
Under [worker]:
celeryd_concurrency: Number of workers celery will run with, so essentially number of task instances a worker can take at once. Matching the number of CPUs is a popular starting point, but can definitely go higher.
Last one is only if you're using the CeleryExecutor, which I'd definitely recommend if you're looking to increase your task throughput.

How to implement polling in Airflow?

I want to use Airflow to implement data flows that periodically poll external systems (ftp servers, etc), check for new files matching certain conditions, and then run a bunch of tasks for those files. Now, I'm a newbie to Airflow and read that Sensors are something you would use for this kind of a case, and I actually managed to write a sensor that works ok when I run "airflow test" for it. But I'm a bit confused regarding the relation of poke_interval for the sensor and the DAG scheduling. How should I define those settings for my use case? Or should I use some other approach? I just want Airflow to run the tasks when those files become available, and not flood the dashboard with failures when no new files were available for a while.
Your understanding is correct, using a sensor is the way to go when you want to poll, either by using an existing sensor or by implementing your own.
They are, however, always part of a DAG and they do not execute outside of its boundaries. DAG execution depends on the start_date and schedule_interval, but you can leverage this and a sensor to implement some sort of DAG depending on the status of an external server: one possible approach would be starting the whole DAG with a sensor which checks for a condition to occur and decide to skip the whole DAG if the condition is not met (you can make sure that sensors mark downstream tasks as skipped and not failed by setting their soft_fail parameter to True). You can have a polling interval of one minute by using the most frequent scheduling option (* * * * *). If you really need a shortest polling time you can tweak the sensor's poke_interval and timeout parameters.
Keep in mind, however, that execution times are not probably guaranteed by Airflow itself, so for very short polling times you may want to investigate alternatives (or at least consider different approaches to the one I've just shared).

How do I kill running map tasks on Amazon EMR?

I have a job running using Hadoop 0.20 on 32 spot instances. It has been running for 9 hours with no errors. It has processed 3800 tasks during that time, but I have noticed that just two tasks appear to be stuck and have been running alone for a couple of hours (apparently responding because they don't time out). The tasks don't typically take more than 15 minutes. I don't want to lose all the work that's already been done, because it costs me a lot of money. I would really just like to kill those two tasks and have Hadoop either reassign them or just count them as failed. Until they stop, I cannot get the reduce results from the other 3798 maps!
But I can't figure out how to do that. I have considered trying to figure out which instances are running the tasks and then terminate those instances, but
I don't know how to figure out which instances are the culprits
I am afraid it will have unintended effects.
How do I just kill individual map tasks?
Generally, on a Hadoop cluster you can kill a particular task by issuing:
hadoop job -kill-task [attempt_id]
This will kill the given map task and re-submits it on an different
node with a new id.
To get the attemp_id navigate on the Jobtracker's web UI to the map task
in question, click on it and note it's id (e.g: attempt_201210111830_0012_m_000000_0)
ssh to the master node as mentioned by Lorand, and execute:
bin/hadoop job -list
bin/hadoop job –kill <JobID>

Resources