Multi destinations for Kinesis stream at same time - amazon-web-services

Can we have multiple destinations from single Kinesis Streams?
I am getting output in Splunk but now I also want to add an S3 bucket as the destination.
If I add another Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, will it affect the performance of Splunk reading? Splunk pulls directly from Kinesis. If I add another destination will it affect Will it affects our current read and writes?

One of the benefits of using Kinesis is that you can do exactly this behaviour.
Each consumer application becomes responsible for which events it has read from the shard. There is no concept of an entry being processed already between 2 seperate applications.
One recommendation from AWS to bare in mind for high throughput for multiple consumers is to use enhanced fanout.
Each consumer registered to use enhanced fan-out receives its own read throughput per shard, up to 2 MB/sec, independently of other consumers.

Related

Firehose datapipeline limitations

My use-case is as follows:
I have JSON data coming in which needs to be stored in S3 in parquet format. So far so good, I can create a schema in Glue and attach a "DataFormatConversionConfiguration" to my firehose stream. BUT the data is coming from different "topics". Each topic has a particular "schema". From my understanding I will have to create multiple firehose streams, as one stream can only have one schema. But I have thousands of such topics with very high volume high throughput data incoming. It does not look feasible to create so many firehose resources (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/firehose/latest/dev/limits.html)
How should I go about building my pipeline.
IMO you can:
ask for upgrade of your Firehose limit and do everything with 1 Firehose/stream + add Lambda transformation to convert the data into a common schema - IMO not cost-efficient but you should see with your load.
create a Lambda for each Kinesis data stream, convert each event to the schema managed by a single Firehose and at the end can send the events directly to your Firehose stream with Firehose API https://docs.aws.amazon.com/firehose/latest/APIReference/API_PutRecord.html (see "Q: How do I add data to my Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream?" here https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-firehose/faqs/) - but also, check the costs before because even though your Lambdas are invoked "on demand", you may have a lot of them invoked during long period of time.
use one of data processing frameworks (Apache Spark, Apache Flink, ...) and read your data from Kinesis in batches of 1 hour, starting every time when you terminated last time --> use available sinks to convert the data and write it in Parquet format. The frameworks use the notion of checkpointing and store the last processed offset in an external storage. Now, if you restart them every hour, they will start to read the data directly from the last seen entry. - It may be cost-efficient, especially if you consider using spot instances. On the other side, it requires more coding that 2 previous solutions and obviously may have higher latency.
Hope that helps. You could please give a feedback about chosen solution ?

SQS or Kinesis which one is good for queuing?

I have a server which can only process 20 request at a time. When lots of request coming, I want to store the request data, in some queues. and read a set of request (i.e 20) and process them by batch. What would be the ideal way to that ? Using SQS, or kinesis. I'm totally confused.
SQS = Simple Queue Service is for queuing messages in a 1:1 (once the message is consumed, it is removed from the queue)
Kinesis = low latency, high volumetry data streaming ... typically for 1:N (many consumers of messages)
As Kinesis is also storing the data for a period of time, both are often confused, but their architectural patterns are totally different.
Queue => SQS.
Data Streams => Kinesis.
Taken from https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-streams/faqs/ :
Q: How does Amazon Kinesis Data Streams differ from Amazon SQS?
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enables real-time processing of streaming
big data. It provides ordering of records, as well as the ability to
read and/or replay records in the same order to multiple Amazon
Kinesis Applications. The Amazon Kinesis Client Library (KCL) delivers
all records for a given partition key to the same record processor,
making it easier to build multiple applications reading from the same
Amazon Kinesis data stream (for example, to perform counting,
aggregation, and filtering).
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly
scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between
computers. Amazon SQS lets you easily move data between distributed
application components and helps you build applications in which
messages are processed independently (with message-level ack/fail
semantics), such as automated workflows.
Q: When should I use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, and when should I
use Amazon SQS?
We recommend Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for use cases with
requirements that are similar to the following:
Routing related records to the same record processor (as in streaming MapReduce). For example, counting and aggregation are
simpler when all records for a given key are routed to the same record
processor.
Ordering of records. For example, you want to transfer log data from the application host to the processing/archival host while maintaining
the order of log statements.
Ability for multiple applications to consume the same stream concurrently. For example, you have one application that updates a
real-time dashboard and another that archives data to Amazon Redshift.
You want both applications to consume data from the same stream
concurrently and independently.
Ability to consume records in the same order a few hours later. For example, you have a billing application and an audit application that
runs a few hours behind the billing application. Because Amazon
Kinesis Data Streams stores data for up to 7 days, you can run the
audit application up to 7 days behind the billing application.
We recommend Amazon SQS for use cases with requirements that are
similar to the following:
Messaging semantics (such as message-level ack/fail) and visibility timeout. For example, you have a queue of work items and want to track
the successful completion of each item independently. Amazon SQS
tracks the ack/fail, so the application does not have to maintain a
persistent checkpoint/cursor. Amazon SQS will delete acked messages
and redeliver failed messages after a configured visibility timeout.
Individual message delay. For example, you have a job queue and need to schedule individual jobs with a delay. With Amazon SQS, you can
configure individual messages to have a delay of up to 15 minutes.
Dynamically increasing concurrency/throughput at read time. For example, you have a work queue and want to add more readers until the
backlog is cleared. With Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, you can scale up
to a sufficient number of shards (note, however, that you'll need to
provision enough shards ahead of time).
Leveraging Amazon SQS’s ability to scale transparently. For example, you buffer requests and the load changes as a result of occasional
load spikes or the natural growth of your business. Because each
buffered request can be processed independently, Amazon SQS can scale
transparently to handle the load without any provisioning instructions
from you.

Kinesis Analytics Destination Guidance: Lambda vs Kinesis Stream to Lambda

After Kinesis Analytics does it's job, the next step is to send that information off to a destination. AWS currently offers 3 destination choices:
Kinesis stream
Kinesis Firehose delivery stream
AWS Lambda function
For my use case, Kinesis Firehose delivery stream is not what I want so I am left with:
Kinesis stream
AWS Lambda function
If I set the destination to a Kinesis Stream, I would then attach a Lambda to that stream to process the records.
AWS also offers the ability to set the destination to a Lambda, bypassing the Kinesis Stream step of this process. In doing some digging for docs I found this:
Using a Lambda Function as Output
Specifically in those docs under Lambda Output Invocation Frequency it says:
If records are emitted to the destination in-application stream within the data analytics application as a continuous query or a sliding window, the AWS Lambda destination function is invoked approximately once per second.
My Kinesis Analytics output qualifies under this scenario. So I can assume that my Lambda will be invoked, "approximately once per second".
I'm trying to understand the difference between using these 2 destinations as it pertains to using a Lambda.
Using AWS Lambda with Kinesis states that:
You can subscribe Lambda functions to automatically read batches of records off your Kinesis stream and process them if records are detected on the stream. AWS Lambda then polls the stream periodically (once per second) for new records.
So it sounds like the the invocation interval is the same in either case; approximately 1 second.
So I think the guidence is:
If the next stage in the pipeline only needs one consumer, then use the AWS Lambda function destination. If however, you need to use multiple different consumers to do different things for the same data sent to the destination, the a Kinesis Stream is more appropriate.
Is this a correct assumption on how to choose a destination? Again, for my use case I am excluding the Kinesis Firehose delivery stream.
If the next stage in the pipeline only needs one consumer, then use the AWS Lambda function destination. If however, you need to use multiple different consumers to do different things for the same data sent to the destination, the a Kinesis Stream is more appropriate.
• I would always use Kinesis Stream with one shard and batch size = 1 (for example) if I wanted the items to be consumed one by one with no concurrency.
If there are multiple consumers, increase the number of shards, one lambda is launched in parallel for each shard when there are items to process. If it makes sense, also increase the batch size.
But read again at the highlighted phrase below:
If however, you need to use multiple different consumers to do different things for the same data sent to the destination, the a Kinesis Stream is more appropriate.
If you have one or more producers and many consumers of the exactly same item, I guess you need to use SNS. The producer writes the item on one topic, then all the lambdas listening to the topic will process that item.
If this does not answer your question, please clarify it. There is a little ambiguity.

Kafka like offset on Kinesis Stream?

I have worked a bit with Kafka in the past and lately there is a requirement to port part of the data pipeline on AWS Kinesis Stream. Now I have read that Kinesis is effectively a fork of Kafka and share many similarities.
However I have failed to see how can we have multiple consumers reading from the same stream, each with their corresponding offset. There is a sequence number given to each data record, but I couldn't find anything specific to consumer(Kafka group Id?).
Is it really possible to have different consumers with different ingestion rate over same AWS Kinesis Stream?
Yes.
You can have multiple Kinesis Consumer Applications. Let's say you have 2.
First consumer application (I think it is "consumer group" in Kafka?) can be "first-app" and store it's positions in the DynamoDB "first-app-table". It can have as many nodes (ec2 instances) as you want.
Second consumer application can also work on the same stream, and store it's positions on another DynamoDB table let's say "second-app-table".
Each table will contain "what is the last processed position on shard X for app Y" information. So the 2 applications store checkpoints for the same shards in a different place, which makes them independent.
About the ingestion rate, there is a "idleTimeBetweenReadsInMillis" value in consumer applications using KCL, that is the polling interval for Amazon Kinesis API for Get operations. For example first application can have "2000" poll interval, so it will poll stream's shards every 2 seconds to see if any new record came.
I don't know Kafka well but as far as I remember; Kafka "partition" is "shard" in Kinesis, likewise Kafka "offset" is "sequence number" in Kinesis. Kinesis Consumer Library uses the term "checkpoint" for the stored sequences. Like you said, the concepts are similar.

Multiple AWS Lambda functions on a Single DynamoDB Stream

I have a Lambda function to which multiple DynamoDB streams are configured as event sources and this is a part of a bigger pipeline. While doing my checks, I found some missing data in one of the downstream components. I want to write a simpler Lambda function which is configured as an event source to one of the earlier mentioned DynamoDB streams. This would cause one of my DynamoDB streams to have two Lambda functions reading from it. I was wondering if this is OK? Are both Lamdba functions guaranteed to receive all records placed in the stream and are there any resource (Read/Write throughput) limits I need to be aware of. Couldn't find any relevant documentation for this on the AWS website, but I did find this regarding processing of shards
To access a stream and process the stream records within, you must do
the following:
Determine the unique Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the stream that you want to access.
Determine which shard(s) in the stream contain the stream records that you are interested in.
Access the shard(s) and retrieve the stream records that you want.
Note No more than 2 processes at most should be reading from the same
Streams shard at the same time. Having more than 2 readers per shard
may result in throttling.
Not sure how the above relates to cases where Streams are configured as Event sources to Lambdas as opposed to manually reading from a Stream using the API.
You can have multiple Lambdas using the same stream as an event source. They will not interfere with each other. But as the documentation says: "Note No more than 2 processes at most should be reading from the same Streams shard at the same time. Having more than 2 readers per shard may result in throttling."
So if you heavily utilize your streams you should not have more than two Lambdas connected to them.
This AWS Blog post https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/database/how-to-perform-ordered-data-replication-between-applications-by-using-amazon-dynamodb-streams/ suggest that you attach only one Lambda to the DDB stream and use a fan out pattern for parallel processing. This will help you processing the DDB items in order.