Hey Bob, thanks for your detailed response. I have added comments inline.
On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Bello, Bob <bob.be...@dish.com> wrote: > Perhaps as you consider the size of your cluster, a few questions about > the kind of messaging you are looking at? I can use an example of what we > do in our production environment while not going into specifics. These are > just observations from an OPS perspective. (sorry for the wall of text.) > > * Size of messages (<100 bytes, <1kB, <10kB, <100kB, <1MB, <10MB, etc). > (we run messages size between a few byes to over 100KB with a few at over > 1MB). > BERT> We have several uses cases we are looking at kafka for. Today we are just using the file system to buffer data between our systems. We are looking at uses cases that have varying message sizes of 200, 300, 1000, 2200 bytes > > * Volume of messages per second (we produce over 15k per second and can > consume over 100K per second when we are processing though some lag) > BERT> The use case we are looking at currently has hourly peaks of about 450K messages per second. For sizing we want to make sure we can support 900K . Our larger feed in terms of size peaks at 450MBsec so we want to make sure the cluster we build can support 900MBsec > > * # of Producer clients (a few, a lot) (we have over 300 app servers the > produce messages to the Kafka cluster) > ** Not only does this affect Kafka broker performance but it can use a lot > of TCP connections specially if you run a large Kafka cluster > BERT> our producer count will be low ...maybe 8-16 hosts. > > * # of Consumer clients (a few, a lot) (we have less than 50 app servers > that consume at this time) > ** This also affects the # of TCP connections to Kafka brokers. (We have > over 2400+ TCP connections to our cluster) > BERT> This will be much higher but not sure yet. We are also looking at replacing some legacy technology with storm so this is a bit up in the air right now. > > * Will you compress your message before sending them to Kafka? (we have a > mix of snappy, gzip and non-compressed messages depending on the > application). This can affect your disk usage > BERT> We will use whatever performs best ;) My gut is that we will be using snappy > > * Planned retention period. Longer retention period = more storage > required. (we have varied retention periods per topic, between 10 days and > 30 days). > > * The number of topics per cluster. I believe Kafka scales well with the > number of topics, however you have to worry about a few things: > ** More topics, means slower migration/failover when Kafka brokers are > shutdown or fail. This has caused us time out issues. Planned shutdown of a > Kafka broker can take over 30 seconds to over 3 minutes. (We have over >10 > and <50 topics. We are growing topics rapidly.) > BERT> Are you implying that the number of topics has direct correlation to the fail-over time? I think I might test this by creating one topic loading 500 million rows and test failover adn compare to 500 topics with 1 million rows each. Not sure if data in the Q impacts the failover so figured I would test that also. > > * The number of partitions per topic. More partitions per topic = more > open file handles, (2 per log file, one for data and one more the index). > We run average of 130 partitions. You have to consider your cardinality for > your messages if order is important. Can you use a key that allows a good > distribution across partitions while maintaining order? If all your message > end up in just a few partitions within the topic then it's harder scale the > consumption. This all depends on your use case. > BERT> We are lucky that order is not critical for our large feeds. > > It might sound like good rationale to scale the # of partitions for a > topic to a huge number (for just in case). I think it all depends. > > * How many consumer threads can consume a single topic? You can't go wider > than the # of partitions however Kafka clients easily work with a large # > of partitions with a few consumer threads. > > * Producer vs. Consumer size. Is your messaging flow Producer or Consumer > heavy. Kafka is awesome and sending data to consumers that use "recent" > data. Since Kafka uses memory mapped files, any data from Kafka that is in > RAM will be very fast. (Our servers have 256GB of ram on them). > BERT> Our default config config has a 256GB of memory also. One thing I do want to test is impact on cluster of reading data not in memory. Have you done any testing like this? > > * Size of your cluster vs. the # of replicas. Larger # of Kafka brokers > means more chance of failure within the cluster. Same kind of reason why > you generally won't see a large RAID5 array. You get one failure before you > lose data. If you decide to run a large cluster and # of replicas will be > important. How much risk are you willing to take? (We run a 6 node cluster > with a replica factor of 3. We can lose a total of two nodes before losing > data). > BERT> Thanks for the datapoint. We were also planning to go with replication factor of 3 > > * Are you running on native iron or virtualized? VM is generally lower > performance but can generally spin up new instances faster upon failure. We > run on native iron so we get excellent performance at the cost of longer > lead times to provision new Kafka brokers. > BERT> We are big fans of vms...however kafka will be on physical > > * Networking. Are you are running 100mbit, 1gig or 10gib? You can only > produce and consume so much data. Larger clusters let you run a total > aggregate bandwidth. Don't forget about replication! Topic/partition > leaders must replicate to all replica Kafkabrokers (hub/spoke). How long > can you wait for replication to occur after a planned or un-planned outage? > (We run >1Gig). > BERT> 10gb....so cheap now. I did cost analysis and found that a single 10gb port costs about the same as 2 x 1gig. Five times the bandwidth and less latency makes it no brainer. If your kafka hosts have multiple nics make sure they are using the right port. This one bit me for a little. (hostname config in the broker config) > > * Monitoring. Large # of Kafka brokers means more to monitor. Do you have > a centralized monitoring app? Kafka provides a lot (huge!) JMX information. > Making sense of it all can take some time. > BERT> We have not determined what to use just yet for monitoring. What are you guys using? > * Disk I/O. JBOD vs. RAID. How much are you willing to tolerate failures? > Do you have provisioned IO? (We run native iron and local disk in a RAID > configuration. It was easier for us to manage a single mount point than a > bunch in a JBOD configuration. We rely of local RAID and Kafka replication > to keep enough copies of our data. We have a large amount of disk capacity. > We can tolerate large re-replication events due to broker failure without > affecting producer or consumer performance.) > BERT> Can you share more about your config? Are you using RAID10 or RAID5? What size and speed of drives? Have you needed to do a RAID rebuild and if so did it negatively impact the cluster. The standard server I was given has 12 x 4TB 7.2K drives. I will either run in JBOD or as RAID10. Parity based RAID with 4TB drives makes me nervous. I am not worried about performance when things are working as designed...we need to plan for edge cases when consumer is reading old data or the system needs to play catch up on a big backlog. > > * Disk capacity / Kafka Broker capacity. Depending on your volume, message > size and retention period, how much disk space will you need? (Using our > "crystal ball tech(tm)" we decided over 20TB per Kafka broker would meet > our needs. We will probably add Kafka brokers over adding disk as we > outgrow this.) > BERT> I need a crystal ball ;) > > * Separate clusters to keep information separated? Do you have a use case > for keeping customer data separate? Compliance use cases such as PCI or > SOX? This may be a good reason to keep separate Kafka clusters. I assume > that you already will keep separate clusters for DEV/QA/PROD. > BERT> yes DEV/QA/PROD completely separate > > * Zookeeper performance - 3 node, 5 node or 7 node. Less nodes, better > performance. More nodes, better failure tolerance. We run 5 nodes with the > transaction logs on SSD. Our ZK update performance is very good. > BERT> Need to spend some time on zookeeper. I have not looked at zookeeper performance to see if its negatively impacting the performance tests I am doing. We haven't spent any time looking at zookeeper. Did you find that the SSD helped improve kafka performance? > > # of partitions per Topic debate: > Personally, I'm a proponent of larger # of partitions per topic without > going way large. You can add Kafka Brokers to increase capacity and get > more performance. However though it's possible to add partitions after a > topic is created, it can cause issues with your key hashing depending on > your message architecture. > > * Increasing # of brokers = easy > * Increasing the # of partitions in a topic with data in it = hard > > For us, we will be adding more topics and as we add additional messaging > functionality. > > Example: > > 130 partitions per topic / 6 brokers = 5 leader partitions per broker per > topic. If you replicate 3 the you will end up with 3x active partitions per > broker. > > 1024 partitions per topic / 24 brokers =~ 43 leader partitions per broker > per topic. > BERT> Thanks for the example. Good to see others are using larger partition counts. > > > Final thoughts: > > There's no magical formula for this as already stated in the wiki. It is a > lot of trial and error. I will say that we went from a few 100 messages per > second volume to over 40k per second by adding one application and our > Kafka cluster didn't even blink. > > Kafka is awesome. > > Btw, we're running 0.8.0. > > > > - Bob > > -----Original Message----- > From: bertc...@gmail.com [mailto:bertc...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Bert > Corderman > Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 11:58 AM > To: users@kafka.apache.org > Subject: Cluster design distribution and JBOD vs RAID > > I am wondering what others are doing in terms of cluster separation. (if at > all) For example let’s say I need 24 nodes to support a given workload. > What are the tradeoffs between a single 24 node cluster vs 2 x 12 node > clusters for example. The application I support can support separation of > data fairly easily as the data is all processed in the same way but can be > sharded isolated based on customers. I understand the standard tradeoffs, > for example putting all your eggs in one basket but curious as if there are > any details specific to Kafka in terms of cluster scale out. > > > > Somewhat related is the use of RAID vs JBOD, I have reviewed the documents > on the Kafka site and understand the tradeoff between space as well as > sequential IO vs random and the fact a RAID rebuild might kill the system. > I am specifically asking the question as it relates to larger cluster and > the impact on the number of partitions a topic might need. > > > > Take an example of a 24 node cluster with 12 drives each the cluster would > have 288 drives. To ensure a topic is distributed across all drives a > topic would require 288 partitions. I am planning to test some of this but > wanted to know if there was a rule of thumb. The following link > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/FAQ#FAQ-HowdoIchoosethenumberofpartitionsforatopic > ? > Talks about supporting up to 10K partitions but its not clear if this is > for a cluster as a whole vs topic based > > > Those of you running larger clusters what are you doing? > > > Bert >
