High data usage with AWS IOT Core - amazon-web-services

I have developed an application that does simple publish-subscrible messages with AWS IOT Core service.
As per the requirement of AWS IoT SDK, I need to call aws_iot_mqtt_yield() frequently.
Following is description of function aws_iot_mqtt_yield
Called to yield the current thread to the underlying MQTT client. This
time is used by the MQTT client to manage PING requests to monitor the
health of the TCP connection as well as periodically check the socket
receive buffer for subscribe messages. Yield() must be called at a
rate faster than the keepalive interval. It must also be called at a
rate faster than the incoming message rate as this is the only way the
client receives processing time to manage incoming messages. This is
the outer function which does the validations and calls the internal
yield above to perform the actual operation. It is also responsible
for client state changes
I am calling this function at a period of 1 second.
As it is sending PING on tcp connection, it creates too much internet data usage in long run when system is IDLE for most of the time.
My system works on LTE as well and paying more money for IDLE time is not acceptable for us.
I tried to extend period from 1 second to 30 seconds to limit our data usage but it adds 30 seconds latency in receiving messages from cloud.
My requirement is to achieve fast connectivity with low additional data usage in maintaining connection with AWS.

Related

How to implement resiliency (retry) in a nested service call chain

We have a webpage that queries an item from an API gateway which in turn calls a service that calls another service and so on.
Webpage --> API Gateway --> service#1 --> service#2 --> data store (RDMS, S3, Azure blob)
We want to make the operation resilient so we added a retry mechanism at every layer.
Webpage --retry--> API Gateway --retry--> service#1 --retry--> service#2 --retry--> data store.
This however could case a cascading failure because if the data store doesn't response on time, it will cause every layer to timeout and retry. In other words, if each layer has the same connection timeout and is configured to retry 3 times, then there will be a total of 81 retries to the data store (which is called a retry storm).
One way to fix this is to increase the timeout at each layer in order to give the layer below time to retry.
Webpage --5m timeout--> API Gateway --2m timeout--> service#1
This however is unacceptable because the timeout at the webpage will be too long.
How should I address this problem?
Should there only be one layer that retries? Which layer? And how can the layer know if the error is transient?
A couple possible solutions (and you can/should use both) would be to retry on different conditions and implement rate limiters/circuit breakers.
Retry On is a technique where you don't retry on every condition, but only specific conditions. This could be a specific error code or a specific header value. E.g. in your current situation, DO NOT retry on timeouts; only retry on server failures. In addition, you could have each layer retry on different conditions
Rate limiting would be to stick either a local or global rate limiter service inline to the connections. This would just help to short-circuit the thundering herd in the case that it starts up. E.g. rate limit the data layer to X req/s (insert real values here) and the gateway to Y req/s and then even if a service attempts lots of retries it won't pass too far down the chain. Similarly to this is circuit breaking, where each layer only permits X active connections to any downstream, so just another way to slow those retry storms.

How to do "live request batching" in gcloud

Here is my situation:
I have a rather slow tensorflow model that runs on GPU (2 to 3 seconds per prediction)
A prediction for a single 'entity' vs a prediction for 8 'entities' takes about the same time
This means I could be 8 times as efficient by simply combining multiple predictions in the same request
I have a service on AI platform serving requests to that model
The service works for slow request rates but has trouble scaling up (anything over 4 QPS is too much to handle)
My question then is:
Is there a standard way / best practice for batching live client requests:
When receiving a request, wait a little bit for other requests
After a while, or when the number of requests reaches a set number, forward the requests in a single "batch" to another service.
If traffic is low, the delay will expire before the batch is full, but since traffic is low, that's not an issue
If traffic is high, the batch will be full before the delay, and the client will have to wait less
I have an almost-working solution with app-engine + firebase (for hosting the shared 'queue') but implementing the delay is giving me trouble (app engine doesn't seem to like python's threading.Timer
I'd appreciate something that could work with app engine, but at this point I'm open to any suggestions (as long as it is applicable on google cloud).
Thanks!
The perfect (but not the cheapest) is to use Dataflow.
When a prediction request comes in, publish it in PubSub
Deploy a dataflow in streaming mode, with fixed windows of X minutes, and another trigger, not accumulated, after Y event in the window.
When a window trigger is performed (either on the number of messages or on the timer) do the batch processing
You can imagine other designs, simpler/cheaper.
Still publish the prediction requests in PubSub
You can schedule a Cloud Functions, or a Cloud Run every X minutes to pull the pubsub subscription and then to trigger the batch job. But, it's a fixed time.
When you publish the message in PubSub, you can also store, in firestore for example, and increase a counter and the date of the 1st message published in PubSub.
If the number of message is above your threshold, perform a request to your other process that pull the PubSub subscription and run the batch processing (as before #1). Reset the counter value and the message date value
Set up a cloud scheduler which check, every minute, the value of the 1st message date in Firestore. If it's above your time limit, perform a request to your other process that pull the PubSub subscription and run the batch processing (as before #1). Reset the counter value and the message date value
The #2 will generate a lot of Firestore read/write, but will be cheaper than dataflow.

How to fix aws lambda timeouts on synchronous invokes with C++ SDK?

When I invoke my lambda function it takes between 1 and 15 seconds to execute. If I invoke the function via the C++ SKD, I get timeouts. These timeouts seem to occur after a few seconds (this is human-judgment only, I did not actually time it).
Question: How do I tell the SDK to wait for slow lambdas to return and not to timeout?
Things that did not work:
In the JS SDK you can change this in the HTTP settings. This is is no such option in the C++ SDK HTTPOptions.
It does not help to give the lambda client a config with a larger connectionTimeoutMS (socket timeout). Also, the httpRequestTimeoutMs of the client is set to 0 by default, meaning it will wait forever.
I am using synchronous requests, which do not seem to have an extra option for timeouts.
Additional information:
I am using a single client to run multiple requests in parallel.
Error also happens if I am using async requests.
Related:
How do I troubleshoot retry and timeout issues when invoking a Lambda function using an AWS SDK?
Same thing gave me hard time once. You may have got the solution but for others, here is what I did. There is client configuration which can edit default connection time. Default connection time for sending request is 1 sec and for receiving it is 3 sec, if you get the request done in this time period than it is good otherwise a retry according to lambda setting will be invoked. The behavior of these two is well explained in their respective header file.
you can also play with memory size of lambda higher the memory of lambda lower the response time for the same.
Aws::Client::ClientConfiguration m_ClientConfig;
m_ClientConfig.requestTimeoutMs = 300000; // i.e. 300 seconds
m_ClientConfig.connectTimeoutMs = 300000;
/**
* Socket read timeouts for HTTP clients on Windows. Default 3000 ms. This should be more than adequate for most services. However, if you are transfering large amounts of data
* or are worried about higher latencies, you should set to something that makes more sense for your use case.
* For Curl, it's the low speed time, which contains the time in number milliseconds that transfer speed should be below "lowSpeedLimit" for the library to consider it too slow and abort.
*/
long requestTimeoutMs;
/**
* Socket connect timeout. Default 1000 ms. Unless you are very far away from your the data center you are talking to. 1000ms is more than sufficient.
*/
long connectTimeoutMs;

Occasional high latency in qpid application

I'm hoping someone can help me with an issue I'm seeing with a Qpid C++ application I'm using. Essentially, we have one application publishing a status to a last_value_queue at about a 10Hz rate and a couple other applications continuously processing this status. The receivers also use the status as a kind of heartbeat and will complain if the status message isn't updated for a certain amount of time (500ms, to be exact.)
This works fine for about a day, after which we start seeing issues. Every couple hours, a single fetch call by a receiver will block for over 500ms (sometimes for up to 900ms.) This behavior will continue until we restart the broker.
I'm no expert, but I don't think I'm doing anything particularly dumb. I've been able to repeat this behavior with a pair of small applications that connect to the broker. Every 100ms the sender sends a std::chrono::time_point object set to the current time. The receiver fetches the message and calculates the delay to the millisecond. The delay is always 0ms or 1ms, except for the single spikes every hour or so after the initial day of everything being happy. The connection is created like so:
qpid::messaging::Connection c("host1:5672","{ reconnect: true}");
and the sender and receiver are both created with the string
"testQueue; { mode: browse, create: always, node: { type: queue, x-declare:{ arguments:{'qpid.last_value_queue_key':'key','qpid.replicate':'none'}}}}"
High availability replication is enabled on the broker, but I have it explicitly disabled for everything for the purpose of my testing. I see no difference in behavior when the broker and apps are running on the same host or different hosts on the LAN. Using qpid-stat, I can see that the broker replication queue is still transmitting quite a bit of data, but its message count is always at 0 so I don't think it's sending more than it can handle. Can anyone think of anything I might be missing that could cause this behavior? We're using the Qpid 0.26 and the C++ broker.

Subscribing to AWS SQS Messages

I have large number of messages in AWS SQS Queue. These messages will be pushed to it constantly by other source. There are no proper dynamic on how often those messages will be pushed to queue. Currently, I keep polling SQS every second and checking if there are any messages available in there. Is there any better way of handling this, like receiving notification from SQS or SNS that some messages are available so that I only request SQS when I needed instead of constant polling?
The way to do what you want is to use long polling - rather than constantly poll every second, you open a request that stays open until it either times out or a message comes into the queue. Take a look at the documentation for ReceiveMessageRequest
ReceiveMessageRequest req = new ReceiveMessageRequest()
.withWaitTimeSeconds(Integer.valueOf(20)); // set long poll timeout to 20 sec
// set other properties on the request as well
ReceiveMessageResult result = amazonSQS.receiveMessage(req);
A common usage pattern for this is to have a background thread running the long poll and pushing the results into an internal queue (such as LinkedBlockingQueue or an ExecutorService) for a worker thread to read from.
PS. Don't forget to call deleteMessage once you're done processing the result so you don't end up receiving it again.
You can also use the worker functionality in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It allows you to build a worker to process each message, and when you use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy it to an EC2 instance, you can define it as subscribed to a specific queue. Then each message will be POST to the worker, without your need to call receive-message on it from the queue.
It makes your system wiring much easier, as you can also have auto scaling rules that will allow you to spawn multiple workers to handle more messages in time of peak load, and scale down back to a single worker, when the load is low. It will also delete the message automatically, if you respond with OK from your worker.
See more information about it here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features-managing-env-tiers.html
You could also have a look at Shoryuken and the property delay:
delay: 25 # The delay in seconds to pause a queue when it's empty
But being honest we use delay: 0 here, the cost of SQS is inexpensive:
First 1 million Amazon SQS Requests per month are free
$0.50 per 1 million Amazon SQS Requests per month thereafter ($0.00000050 per SQS Request)
A single request can have from 1 to 10 messages, up to a maximum total payload of 256KB.
Each 64KB ‘chunk’ of payload is billed as 1 request. For example, a single API call with a 256KB payload will be billed as four requests.
You will probably spend less than 10 dollars monthly polling messages every second 24x7 in a single host.
One of the advantages of Shoryuken is that it fetches in batch, so it saves some money compared with a fetch per message solutions.