Extend aws firehose stream buffering period - amazon-web-services

Can I somehow extend the duration of the firehose stream buffering interval to be more than 900 seconds? I'm working with small files sized ~100kb after 15 min of streaming to s3. I need extended buffering interval or another way to merge 4 files every hour and what is the best way to do that?
I don't want to download these files and then do merging because of many firehose streams, so only direct solution on AWS would be considered.
I've read so many things linked to this problem, and I couldn't find any useful answer.

Unfortunately 900s (15 minutes) is a hard limit on the amount of time Kinesis will wait to buffer.
However, if your data is moving this slowly then you can handle your hourly merge yourself.
An approach to this would to be to use a lambda function that was scheduled to invoke every hour, listed the files in the target bucket(s), read them, merged them, wrote them into a "merged" bucket/prefix and then deleted the merged files.
Alternatively you could have a lambda trigger on the S3 fire-hose bucket invoked whenever a file is written. This trigger would read all the files in that bucket, and merge them. It has the advantage that you merge your buckets in parallel and will not have to wait an hour for your file to be combined.
(You should note that S3 is not consistent at fast write speeds or when listing large numbers of files, so this is not a good solution if your data speed increases to the point where you're writing multiple files a minute.)

Related

Compose Google Storage Objects without headers via CLI

I was wondering if it would be possible to compose Google Storage Objects (specifically csv files) without headers (i.e. without the row with column names) while using gsutil.
Currently, I can do the following:
gsutil compose gs://bucket/test_file_1.csv gs://bucket/test_file_2.csv gs://bucket/test-composition-files.csv
However, I will be unable to ingest test-composition-files.csv into Google BigQuery because compose blindly appended the files (including the column names).
One possible solution would be to download the file locally and process it with pandas, but this is not ideal for large files.
Is there any way to do this via the CLI? I could not find anything in the docs.
By reading the comment, I think you are spending effort in the wrong way. I understood that you wanted to load your files into big query, but the large number of file prevented you to do this (too many API calls). And dataflow is too slow.
Maybe you can think differently. I have 2 solutions to propose
If you need "near real time" ingestion, and if file size is bellow 1.5Gb, the best way is to build a function which read the file and perform a stream write to BigQuery. This function is triggered by a Cloud Storage event. If there is several file in the same time, several functions will be spawn. Be careful, stream write to BigQuery is not free
If you can wait up to 2 minutes when a file arrive, I recommend you to build a Cloud Functions, triggered every 2 minutes. This function read the file name in a bucket, move them to a sub directory and perform a load job of all the files in the sub directory. You are limited to 1000 load jobs per day (and per table), a day contains 1440 minutes. Batch every 2 minutes you are OK. The load job are free.
Is it acceptable alternatives?

Storing many small files (on S3)?

I have 2 million zipped HTML files (100-150KB) being added each day that I need to store for a long time.
Hot data (70-150 million) is accessed semi regularly, anything older than that is barely ever accessed.
This means each day I'm storing an additional 200-300GB worth of files.
Now, Standard storage costs $0.023 per GB and $0.004 for Glacier.
While Glacier is cheap, the problem with it is that it has additional costs, so it would be a bad idea to dump 2 million files into Glacier:
PUT requests to Glacier $0.05 per 1,000 requests
Lifecycle Transition Requests into Glacier $0.05 per 1,000 requests
Is there a way of gluing the files together, but keeping them accessible individually?
An important point, that if you need to provide quick access to these files, then Glacier can give you access to the file in up to 12 hours. So the best you can do is to use S3 Standard – Infrequent Access (0,0125 USD per GB with millisecond access) instead of S3 Standard. And maybe for some really not using data Glacier. But it still depends on how fast do you need that data.
Having that I'd suggest following:
as html (text) files have a good level of compression, you can compress historical data in big zip files (daily, weekly or monthly) as together they can have even better compression;
make some index file or database to know where each html-file is stored;
read only desired html-files from archives without unpacking whole zip-file. See example in python how to implement that.
Glacier would be extremely cost sensitive when it comes to the number of files. The best method would be to create a Lambda function that handles zip, unzip operations for you.
Consider this approach:
Lambda creates archive_date_hour.zip of the 2 Million files from that day by hour, this solves the "per object" cost problem by creating 24 giant archival files.
Set a policy on the s3 bucket to move expired objects to glacier over 1 day old.
Use an unzipping Lambda function to fetch and extract potential hot items from the glacier bucket from within the zip files.
Keep the main s3 bucket for hot files with high frequent access, as a working directory for the zip/unzip operations, and for collecting new files daily
Your files are just too small. You will need to combine them probably in an ETL pipeline such as glue. You can also use the Range header i.e. -range bytes=1000-2000 to download part of an object on S3.
If you do that you'll need to figure out the best way to track the bytes ranges, such as after combining the files recording the range for each one, and changing the clients to use the range as well.
The right approach though depends on how this data is accessed and figuring out the patterns. If somebody who looks at TinyFileA also looks at TinyFileB you could combine them together and just send them both along with other files they are likely to use. I would be figuring out logical groupings of files which make sense to consumers and will reduce the number of requests they need, without sending too much irrelevant data.

Spark Streaming with S3 vs Kinesis

I'm writing a Spark Streaming application where the input data is put into an S3 bucket in small batches (using Database Migration Service - DMS). The Spark application is the only consumer. I'm considering two possible architectures:
Have Spark Streaming watch an S3 prefix and pick up new objects as they
come in
Stream data from S3 to a Kinesis stream (through a Lambda function triggered as new S3 objects are created by DMS) and use the stream as input for the Spark application.
While the second solution will work, the first solution is simpler. But are there any pitfalls? Looking at this guide, I'm concerned about two specific points:
The more files under a directory, the longer it will take to scan for changes — even if no files have been modified.
We will be keeping the S3 data indefinitely. So the number of objects under the prefix being monitored is going to increase very quickly.
“Full” Filesystems such as HDFS tend to set the modification time on their files as soon as the output stream is created. When a file is opened, even before data has been completely written, it may be included in the DStream - after which updates to the file within the same window will be ignored. That is: changes may be missed, and data omitted from the stream.
I'm not sure if this applies to S3, since to my understanding objects are created atomically and cannot be updated afterwards as is the case with ordinary files.
I posted this to Spark mailing list and got a good answer from Steve Loughran.
Theres a slightly-more-optimised streaming source for cloud streams
here
https://github.com/hortonworks-spark/cloud-integration/blob/master/spark-cloud-integration/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/hortonworks/CloudInputDStream.scala
Even so, the cost of scanning S3 is one LIST request per 5000 objects;
I'll leave it to you to work out how many there will be in your
application —and how much it will cost. And of course, the more LIST
calls tehre are, the longer things take, the bigger your window needs
to be.
“Full” Filesystems such as HDFS tend to set the modification time on their files as soon as the output stream is created. When a file is
opened, even before data has been completely written, it may be
included in the DStream - after which updates to the file within the
same window will be ignored. That is: changes may be missed, and data
omitted from the stream.
Objects written to S3 are't visible until the upload completes, in an
atomic operation. You can write in place and not worry.
The timestamp on S3 artifacts comes from the PUT tim. On multipart
uploads of many MB/many GB uploads, thats when the first post to
initiate the MPU is kicked off. So if the upload starts in time window
t1 and completed in window t2, the object won't be visible until t2,
but the timestamp will be of t1. Bear that in mind.
The lambda callback probably does have better scalability and
resilience; not tried it myself.
Since the number of objects in my scenario is going to be much larger than 5000 and will continue to grow very quickly, S3 to Spark doesn't seem to be a feasible option. I did consider moving/renaming processed objects in Spark Streaming, but the Spark Streaming application code seems to only receive DStreams and no information about which S3 object the data is coming from. So I'm going to go with the Lambda and Kinesis option.

"Realtime" syncing of large numbers of log files to S3

I have a large number of logfiles from a service that I need to regularly run analysis on via EMR/Hive. There are thousands of new files per day, and they can technically come out of order relative to the file name (e.g. a batch of files comes a week after the date in the file name).
I did an initial load of the files via Snowball, then set up a script that syncs the entire directory tree once per day using the 'aws s3 sync' cli command. This is good enough for now, but I will need a more realtime solution in the near future. The issue with this approach is that it takes a very long time, on the order of 30 minutes per day. And using a ton of bandwidth all at once! I assume this is because it needs to scan the entire directory tree to determine what files are new, then sends them all at once.
A realtime solution would be beneficial in 2 ways. One, I can get the analysis I need without waiting up to a day. Two, the network use would be lower and more spread out, instead of spiking once a day.
It's clear that 'aws s3 sync' isn't the right tool here. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation?
One potential solution could be:
Set up a service on the log-file side that continuously syncs (or aws s3 cp) new files based on the modified date. But wouldn't that need to scan the whole directory tree on the log server as well?
For reference, the log-file directory structure is like:
/var/log/files/done/{year}/{month}/{day}/{source}-{hour}.txt
There is also a /var/log/files/processing/ directory for files being written to.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
You could have a Lambda function triggered automatically as a new object is saved on your S3 bucket. Check Using AWS Lambda with Amazon S3 for details. The event passed to the Lambda function will contain the file name, allowing you to target only the new files in the syncing process.
If you'd like wait until you have, say 1,000 files, in order to sync in batch, you could use AWS SQS and the following workflow (using 2 Lambda functions, 1 CloudWatch rule and 1 SQS queue):
S3 invokes Lambda whenever there's a new file to sync
Lambda stores the filename in SQS
CloudWatch triggers another Lambda function every X minutes/hours to check how many files are there in SQS for syncing. Once there's 1,000 or more, it retrieves those filenames and run the syncing process.
Keep in mind that Lambda has a hard timeout of 5 minutes. If you sync job takes too long, you'll need to break it in smaller chunks.
You could set the bucket up to log HTTP requests to a separate bucket, then parse the log to look for newly created files and their paths. One troublespot, as well as PUT requests, you have to look for the multipart upload ops which are a sequence of POSTs. Best to log for a few days to see what gets created before putting any effort in to this approach

AWS S3 Write At Offset

is there any possibility to write at some offset inside S3 stored file? We really really don't want to download it for read-modify-write all the time because files are rather big (few GBs each).
There is no way to append data in S3.
One possible workaround could be to create new files every time (possibly using Kinesis Firehose) and run EMR jobs (possibly using Data Pipeline) to merge these small files at hourly or daily cadence as needed.