Rate limit GCP Cloud Function triggers from pub/sub topic - google-cloud-platform

I have a Cloud Function that is being triggered from a Pub/Sub topic.
I want to rate limit my Cloud Function, so I set the max instances to 5. In my case, there will be a lot more produced messages than Cloud Functions (and I want to limit the number of running Cloud Functions).
I expected this process to behave like Kafka/queue - the topic messages will be accumulated, and the Cloud Function will slowly consume messages until the topic will be empty.
But it seems that all the messages that did not trigger cloud function (ack), simply sent a UNACK - and left behind. My subscription details:
The ack deadline max value is too low for me (it may take a few hours until the Cloud Function will get to messages due to the rate-limiting).
Anything I can change in the Pub/Sub to fit my needs? Or I'll need to add a queue? (Pub/Sub to send to a Task Queue, and Cloud Function consumes the Task Queue?).
BTW, The pub/sub data is actually GCS events.
If this was AWS, I would simply send S3 file-created events to SQS and have Lambdas on the other side of the queue to consume.
Any help would be appreciated.

The ideal solution is simply to change the retrying policy.
When using "Retry after exponential backoff delay", the Pub/Sub will keep retrying even after the maximum exponential delay (600 seconds).
This way, you can have a lot of messages in the Pub/Sub, and take care of them slowly with a few Cloud Functions - which fits our need of rate-limiting.
Basically, everything is the same but this configuration changed, and the result is:
Which is exactly what I was looking for :)

You cannot compare to kafka because your kafka consumer is pulling messages at its convenience, while Cloud Function(CF) creates a push subscription that is pushing messages to your CF.
So some alternatives:
Create a HTTP CF triggered by cloud scheduler that will pull messages from your PULL subscription. Max retention of unack messages are 7 days (hope it's enough)
Use Cloud for which you increase max concurrency (max concurrent request), with proper sizing for CPU and RAM. Of course your can control the max number of cloud run instances (different from max concurrency). And Use PUSH subscription pushing to cloud run. But here Also you will be limited by 10 minutes ack deadline.

Related

long running cloud run process and pubsub message retry

I have a cloud run service which will run upto 60 minutes.The pubsub is the trigger point for execution of cloud run service.
pubsub configuration for Retry policy is set to max (600s).
Now when a message is published from pubsub, cloud run starts executing, as the complete execution takes around 60 minutes to complete, but the pubsub message after 600s starts to retry again as it doesn't received any acknowledge from cloud run and again causing cloud run service executing again and again.
How to handle the pubsub retry here so that cloud run will not execute again and again because of retrying.
I was thinking to use Cloud Tasks, or Cloud Workflows as a proxy for your long running Cloud Run. Unfortunately both services have max timeout of 1800s (30minutes). By the way upcoming callback feature of Cloud Workflows will have 12h timeout. In the meantime I would create a proxy as Cloud Function triggered by PubSub message that will be immediately acknowledged, and the function will call your Cloud Run in async with the PubSub message and return right away.
With push subscriptions, such as what you'd use with a Cloud Run service, the maximum ack deadline for a message is indeed 600s. If using pull, one can call ModifyAckDeadline to extend the deadline for a message. In fact, the client libraries for Cloud Pub/Sub do this automatically for up to a configured amount of time (default is 60m).
There is not going to be a way to extend the deadline if using a push subscription. Therefore, your options are:
Switch to a pull subscription. You could potentially do this via Cloud Run, though it would not be the best fit. More likely, you want to spin up a job in an environment that can keep it running without any kind of trigger, e.g., GKE. If you switch to pull, you can extend the ack deadline, though note that duplicates are still possible, even if the ack deadline has not expired or the message has already been acknowledged. They should be rare, but you still have to account for it.
When you receive the message, persist it somewhere, either on disk or in a database, and then acknowledge the message once persisted. Once you are actually done processing the message an hour later, you remove it from this persistent storage. Of course, you could just persist the message instead of publishing it via Pub/Sub and rely on the persistence layer's notifications mechanisms to learn of the new message. For example, if you write to GCS, you could use Cloud Storage notifications via Pub/Sub. In this case, you probably want to have some periodic read from your storage to see if there are any messages that have not been processed for some period of time and if so, reprocess them. For example, if you write with the message the time at which processing started and if more than some amount of time has passed since then and the message is still present, you could start the processing over again.

Any way to disable GCP pub/sub retries?

I currently have a pub/sub push subscription that pushes to a http endpoint. This endpoint then triggers my cloud function. I am running into an issue where the same events that have already been sent to my cloud function are being resent by the pub/sub subscription. I increased my subscription's ack deadline to 3 minutes but after about a minute into my cloud functions execution, it will resend the same event that has already been processed. This leads to multiple invocations of my cloud function and further issues. I haven't seen any way to disable pub/sub retries but wondering if there are any suggestions as to a root cause of this or any work arounds?
Current set-up:
cloud function timeout limit: 120seconds
pub/sub subscription ack deadline: 180seconds
dead-lettering after 5 retries
You will need to consider idempotency and flag any recent retries to prevent them from firing again. This could be a timestamp stored in a database and filter based on time and any metadata you contain. Another important thing is to return a successful result.
Doug covers this concept in a video, while it doesn't reference pubsub, it is still just as valid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwsy8XR7HNE

Autoscale AWS Lambda concurrency based off throttling errors

I have a AWS Lambda function using an AWS SQS trigger to pull messages, process them with an AWS Comprehend endpoint, and put the output in AWS S3. The AWS Comprehend endpoint has a rate limit which goes up and down throughout the day based off something I can control. The fastest way to process my data, which also optimizes the costs I am paying for the AWS Comprehend endpoint to be up, is to set concurrency high enough that I get throttling errors returned from the api. This however comes with the caveat, that I am paying for more AWS Lambda invocations, the flip side being, that to optimize the costs I am paying for AWS Lambda, I want 0 throttling errors.
Is it possible to set up autoscaling for the concurrency limit of the lambda such that it will increase if it isn't getting any throttling errors, but decrease if it is getting too many?
Very interesting use case.
Let me start by pointing out something that I found out the hard way in an almost 4 hour long call with AWS Tech Support after being puzzled for a couple days.
With SQS acting as a trigger for AWS Lambda, the concurrency cannot go beyond 1K. Even if the concurrency of Lambda is set at a higher limit.
There is now a detailed post on this over at Knowledge Center.
With that out of the way and assuming you are under 1K limit at any given point in time and so only have to use one SQS queue, here is what I feel can be explored:
Either use an existing cloudwatch metric (via Comprehend) or publish a new metric that is indicative of the load that you can handle at any given point in time. you can then use this to set an appropriate concurrency limit for the lambda function. This would ensure that even if you have SQS queue flooded with messages to be processed, lambda picks them up at the rate at which it can actually be processed.
Please Note: This comes out of my own philosophy of being proactive vs being reactive. I would not wait for something to fail to trigger other processes eg invocation errors in this case to adjust concurrency. System failures should be rare and actually raise alarm (if not panic!) rather than being normal that occurs a couple of times a day !
To build up on that, if possible I would suggest that you approach this the other way around i.e. scale Comprehend processing limit and AWS Lambda concurrency based on the messages in the SQS queue (backlog) or a combination of this backlog and the time of the day etc. This way, if every part of your pipeline is a function of the amount of backlog in the Queue, you can be rest assured that you are not spending more than you have at any given point in time.
More importantly, you always have capacity in place should the need arise or something out of normal happens.

Visibility Timeout in Cloud Pub/Sub

I'm developing a message retry mechanism using Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Function with Pub/Sub trigger. I would like to know if I can set a visibility timeout(Just like in RabbitMQ) on a message in Cloud Pub/Sub so that it will be visible to my Cloud Function only after a certain time and gets processed? If not, What is the workaround?
Yes, Cloud Pub/Sub has a feature called acknowledgement deadline which works similarly to visibility timeout.
According to the documentation comparing Pub/Sub to Amazon SQS:
Similarly, Pub/Sub has an acknowledgement deadline. By default, this deadline is 10 seconds, but it can be extended up to 10 minutes. For a pull subscription, subscribers can also modify the deadline on the fly on a per-message basis to allow for shorter or longer time to process a given message.

AWS Lambda Polling from SQS: in-flight messages count

I have 20K message in SQS queue. I also have a lambda will process the SQS messages, and put data into ElasticSearch server.
I have configured SQS as the lambda's trigger, and limited the Lambda's SQS batch size to be 10. I also limited the only one instance of the lambda can be run at a giving time.
However, sometime I see over 10K in-flight messages from the AWS console. Should it be max at 10 in-flight messages?
Because of this, the lambdas will only able to process 9K of the SQS message properly.
Below is a screen capture to show that I have limited the lambda to have only 1 instance running at a giving time.
I've been doing some testings and contacting AWS tech support at the same time.
What I do believe at the moment is that:
Amazon Simple Queue Service supports an initial burst of 5 concurrent function invocations and increases concurrency by 60 concurrent invocations per minute. Doc
1/ The thing that does that polling, is a separate entity. It is most likely to be a lambda function that will long-poll the SQS and then, invoke our lambda functions.
2/ That polling Lambda does not take into account any of our Receiver-Lambda at all. It does not care whether the function is running at max capacity or not, or how many max concurrency is available for the Receiver-Lambda
3/ Due to that combination. The behavior is not what we expected from the Lambda-SQS integration. And worse, If you have suddenly, millions of message burst in your queue. The Receiver-Lambda concurrency can never catch up with the amount of messages that the polling Lambda is sending, result in loss of work
The test:
Create one Lambda function that takes 30 seconds to return true;
Set that function's concurrency to 50;
Push 300 messages into the queue ( Visibility timeout : 10 Minutes, batch message count: 1, no re-drive )
The result:
Amount of messages available just increase gradually
At first, there are few enough messages to be processed by Receiver-Lambda
After half a minute, there are more messages available than what Receiver-Lambda can handle
These message would be discarded to dead queue. Due to polling Lambda unable to invoke Receiver-Lambda
I will update this answer as soon as I got the confirmation from AWS support
Support answer. As of Q1 2019, TL;DR version
1/ The assumption was correct, there was a "Poller"
2/ That Poller do not take into consideration of reserved concurrency
as part of its algorithm
3/ That poller have hard limit of 1000
Q2-2019 :
The above information need to be updated. Support said that the poller correctly consider reserved concurrency but it should be at least 5. The SQS-Lambda integration is still being updated and this answer will not. So please consult AWS if you get into some weird issues

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