Should I have concern about datastoreRpcErrors? - google-cloud-platform

When I run dataflow jobs that writes to google cloud datastore, sometime I see the metrics show that I had one or two datastoreRpcErrors:
Since these datastore writes usually contain a batch of keys, I am wondering in the situation of RpcError, if some retry will happen automatically. If not, what would be a good way to handle these cases?

tl;dr: By default datastoreRpcErrors will use 5 retries automatically.
I dig into the code of datastoreio in beam python sdk. It looks like the final entity mutations are flushed in batch via DatastoreWriteFn().
# Flush the current batch of mutations to Cloud Datastore.
_, latency_ms = helper.write_mutations(
self._datastore, self._project, self._mutations,
self._throttler, self._update_rpc_stats,
throttle_delay=_Mutate._WRITE_BATCH_TARGET_LATENCY_MS/1000)
The RPCError is caught by this block of code in write_mutations in the helper; and there is a decorator #retry.with_exponential_backoff for commit method; and the default number of retry is set to 5; retry_on_rpc_error defines the concrete RPCError and SocketError reasons to trigger retry.
for mutation in mutations:
commit_request.mutations.add().CopyFrom(mutation)
#retry.with_exponential_backoff(num_retries=5,
retry_filter=retry_on_rpc_error)
def commit(request):
# Client-side throttling.
while throttler.throttle_request(time.time()*1000):
try:
response = datastore.commit(request)
...
except (RPCError, SocketError):
if rpc_stats_callback:
rpc_stats_callback(errors=1)
raise
...

I think you should first of all determine which kind of error occurred in order to see what are your options.
However, in the official Datastore documentation, there is a list of all the possible errors and their error codes . Fortunately, they come with recommended actions for each.
My advice is that your implement their recommendations and see for alternatives if they are not effective for you

Related

Stage level data is not coming for bigquery running jobs through java bigquery libraries

I am using com.google.cloud.bigquery library for fetching the job level details. We have the following code snippets
Job job = getBigQuery(projectId, location).getJob(JobId.newBuilder().setJob("myJobId").
setLocation(location).setProject(projectId).build());
private BigQuery getBigQuery(String projectId, String location) throws IOException {
// path to your credentials file
String credentialsPath = "my private key crdentials file";
BigQuery bigQuery;
bigQuery = BigQueryOptions.newBuilder().setProjectId(projectId).setLocation(location)
.setCredentials(GoogleCredentials.fromStream(new FileInputStream(credentialsPath))).build()
.getService();
return bigQuery;
}
My Dependency
<dependency>
<groupId>com.google.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>google-cloud-bigquery</artifactId>
<version>2.10.0</version>
</dependency>
Now for completed jobs, I have no issue, but for some jobs which are in a running state like having a duration of more than 1 minute, we are getting the incomplete query plan data which is ultimately giving the null pointer exception.
If we observe the picture, for the job, there is jobStatistics part, there it is giving the warning like it will throw java.lang.NullPointerException .
Now the main issue is, in our processing, when we check the queryPlan field, it is not null and it is showing the size of some number. When I try to process that in any loop, iterator, stream it is throwing the NullPointerException.
When I try to fetch the data for the same running job using API, it is giving complete details.
Ultimately the conclusion is why the bigquery is giving different results for the java library and API, why there is incompleteness in the java library side(I have tried by updating the dependency version also). What is the solution for me, how can I prevent my code from going into the NullPointerException.
Ultimately the library is also using the same API, but somehow in the internal processing the query plan data is not getting generated properly when the job is in running state.
I was able to test the behaviour of the code as well as the API. When the query is running, most of the API response fields under queryPlan are 0, therefore not complete. Only when the query has completed its execution, the queryPlan field shows the complete information.
Also, as per this client library documentation, the queryPlan is available only once the query has completed its execution. So, the NullPointerException is the expected behaviour when the query is still running (tested this as well).
To prevent the NullPointerException, you might have to access the queryPlan when the state of the query is DONE.

Processing AWS Lambda messages in Batches

I am wondering something, and I really can't find information about it. Maybe it is not the way to go but, I would just like to know.
It is about Lambda working in batches. I know I can set up Lambda to consume batch messages. In my Lambda function I iterate each message, and if one fails, Lambda exits. And the cycle starts again.
I am wondering about slightly different approach
Let's assume I have three messages: A, B and C. I also take them in batches. Now if the message B fails (e.g. API call failed), I return message B to SQS and keep processing the message C.
Is it possible? If it is, is it a good approach? Because I see that I need to implement some extra complexity in Lambda and what not.
Thanks
There's an excellent article here. The relevant parts for you are...
Using a batchSize of 1, so that messages succeed or fail on their own.
Making sure your processing is idempotent, so reprocessing a message isn't harmful, outside of the extra processing cost.
Handle errors within your function code, perhaps by catching them and sending the message to a dead letter queue for further processing.
Calling the DeleteMessage API manually within your function after successfully processing a message.
The last bullet point is how I've managed to deal with the same problem. Instead of returning errors immediately, store them or note that an error has occurred, but then continue to handle the rest of the messages in the batch. At the end of processing, return or raise an error so that the SQS -> lambda trigger knows not to delete the failed messages. All successful messages will have already been deleted by your lambda handler.
sqs = boto3.client('sqs')
def handler(event, context):
failed = False
for msg in event['Records']:
try:
# Do something with the message.
handle_message(msg)
except Exception:
# Ok it failed, but allow the loop to finish.
logger.exception('Failed to handle message')
failed = True
else:
# The message was handled successfully. We can delete it now.
sqs.delete_message(
QueueUrl=<queue_url>,
ReceiptHandle=msg['receiptHandle'],
)
# It doesn't matter what the error is. You just want to raise here
# to ensure the trigger doesn't delete any of the failed messages.
if failed:
raise RuntimeError('Failed to process one or more messages')
def handle_msg(msg):
...
For Node.js, check out https://www.npmjs.com/package/#middy/sqs-partial-batch-failure.
const middy = require('#middy/core')
const sqsBatch = require('#middy/sqs-partial-batch-failure')
const originalHandler = (event, context, cb) => {
const recordPromises = event.Records.map(async (record, index) => { /* Custom message processing logic */ })
return Promise.allSettled(recordPromises)
}
const handler = middy(originalHandler)
.use(sqsBatch())
Check out https://medium.com/#brettandrews/handling-sqs-partial-batch-failures-in-aws-lambda-d9d6940a17aa for more details.
As of Nov 2019, AWS has introduced the concept of Bisect On Function Error, along with Maximum retries. If your function is idempotent this can be used.
In this approach you should throw an error from the function even if one item in the batch is failing. AWS with split the batch into two and retry. Now one half of the batch should pass successfully. For the other half the process is continued till the bad record is isolated.
Like all architecture decisions, it depends on your goal and what you are willing to trade for more complexity. Using SQS will allow you to process messages out of order so that retries don't block other messages. Whether or not that is worth the complexity depends on why you are worried about messages getting blocked.
I suggest reading about Lambda retry behavior and Dead Letter Queues.
If you want to retry only the failed messages out of a batch of messages it is totally doable, but does add slight complexity.
A possible approach to achieve this is iterating through a list of your events (ex [eventA, eventB, eventC]), and for each execution, append to a list of failed events if the event failed. Then, have an end case that checks to see if the list of failed events has anything in it, and if it does, manually send the messages back to SQS (using SQS sendMessageBatch).
However, you should note that this puts the events to the end of the queue, since you are manually inserting them back.
Anything can be a "good approach" if it solves a problem you are having without much complexity, and in this case, the issue of having to re-execute successful events is definitely a problem that you can solve in this manner.
SQS/Lambda supports reporting batch failures. How it works is within each batch iteration, you catch all exceptions, and if that iteration fails add that messageId to an SQSBatchResponse. At the end when all SQS messages have been processed, you return the batch response.
Here is the relevant docs section: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-sqs.html#services-sqs-batchfailurereporting
To use this feature, your function must gracefully handle errors. Have your function logic catch all exceptions and report the messages that result in failure in batchItemFailures in your function response. If your function throws an exception, the entire batch is considered a complete failure.
To add to the answer by David:
SQS/Lambda supports reporting batch failures. How it works is within each batch iteration, you catch all exceptions, and if that iteration fails add that messageId to an SQSBatchResponse. At the end when all SQS messages have been processed, you return the batch response.
Here is the relevant docs section: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-sqs.html#services-sqs-batchfailurereporting
I implemented this, but a batch of A, B and C, with B failing, would still mark all three as complete. It turns out you need to explicitly define the lambda event source mapping to expect a batch failure to be returned. It can be done by adding the key of FunctionResponseTypes with the value of a list containing ReportBatchItemFailures. Here is the relevant docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-sqs.html#services-sqs-batchfailurereporting
My sam template looks like this after adding this:
Type: SQS
Properties:
Queue: my-queue-arn
BatchSize: 10
Enabled: true
FunctionResponseTypes:
- ReportBatchItemFailures

Can Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) be made to work with jRuby?

For uninteresting reasons, I have to use jRuby on a particular project where we also want to use Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF). I don't have a choice in the jRuby department, so please don't say "use MRI".
The first problem I ran into is that jRuby doesn't support forking and SWF activity workers love to fork. After hacking through the SWF ruby libraries, I was able to figure out how to attach a logger and also figure out how to prevent forking, which was tremendously helpful:
AWS::Flow::ActivityWorker.new(
swf.client, domain,"my_tasklist", MyActivities
) do |options|
options.logger= Logger.new("logs/swf_logger.log")
options.use_forking = false
end
This prevented forking, but now I'm hitting more exceptions deep in the SWF source code having to do with Fibers and the context not existing:
Error in the poller, exception:
AWS::Flow::Core::NoContextException: AWS::Flow::Core::NoContextException stacktrace:
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/flow/implementation.rb:38:in 'task'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/task_poller.rb:292:in 'respond_activity_task_failed'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/task_poller.rb:204:in 'respond_activity_task_failed_with_retry'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/task_poller.rb:335:in 'process_single_task'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/task_poller.rb:388:in 'poll_and_process_single_task'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/worker.rb:447:in 'run_once'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/worker.rb:419:in 'start'",
"org/jruby/RubyKernel.java:1501:in `loop'",
"aws-flow-2.4.0/lib/aws/decider/worker.rb:417:in 'start'",
"/Users/trcull/dev/etl/flow/etl_runner.rb:28:in 'start_workers'"
This is the SWF code at that line:
# #param [Future] future
# Unused; defaults to **nil**.
#
# #param block
# The block of code to be executed when the task is run.
#
# #raise [NoContextException]
# If the current fiber does not respond to `Fiber.__context__`.
#
# #return [Future]
# The tasks result, which is a {Future}.
#
def task(future = nil, &block)
fiber = ::Fiber.current
raise NoContextException unless fiber.respond_to? :__context__
context = fiber.__context__
t = Task.new(nil, &block)
task_context = TaskContext.new(:parent => context.get_closest_containing_scope, :task => t)
context << t
t.result
end
I fear this is another flavor of the same forking problem and also fear that I'm facing a long road of slogging through SWF source code and working around problems until I finally hit a wall I can't work around.
So, my question is, has anyone actually gotten jRuby and SWF to work together? If so, is there a list of steps and workarounds somewhere I can be pointed to? Googling for "SWF and jRuby" hasn't turned up anything so far and I'm already 1 1/2 days into this task.
I think the issue might be that aws-flow-ruby doesn't support Ruby 2.0. I found this PDF dated Jan 22, 2015.
1.2.1
Tested Ruby Runtimes The AWS Flow Framework for Ruby has been tested
with the official Ruby 1.9 runtime, also known as YARV. Other versions
of the Ruby runtime may work, but are unsupported.
I have a partial answer to my own question. The answer to "Can SWF be made to work on jRuby" is "Yes...ish."
I was, indeed, able to get a workflow working end-to-end (and even make calls to a database via JDBC, the original reason I had to do this). So, that's the "yes" part of the answer. Yes, SWF can be made to work on jRuby.
Here's the "ish" part of the answer.
The stack trace I posted above is the result of SWF trying to raise an ActivityTaskFailedException due to a problem in some of my activity code. That part is my fault. What's not my fault is that the superclass of ActivityTaskFailedException has this code in it:
def initialize(reason = "Something went wrong in Flow",
details = "But this indicates that it got corrupted getting out")
super(reason)
#reason = reason
#details = details
details = details.message if details.is_a? Exception
self.set_backtrace(details)
end
When your activity throws an exception, the "details" variable you see above is filled with a String. MRI is perfectly happy to take a String as an argument to set_backtrace(), but jRuby is not, and jRuby throws an exception saying that "details" must be an Array of Strings. This exception blows through all the nice error catching logic of the SWF library and into this code that's trying to do incompatible things with the Fiber library. That code then throws a follow-on exception and kills the activity worker thread entirely.
So, you can run SWF on jRuby as long as your activity and workflow code never, ever throws exceptions because otherwise those exceptions will kill your worker threads (which is not the intended behavior of SWF workers). What they are designed to do instead is communicate the exception back to SWF in a nice, trackable, recoverable fashion. But, the SWF code that does the communicating back to SWF has, itself, code that's incompatible with jRuby.
To get past this problem, I monkey-patched AWS::Flow::FlowException like so:
def initialize(reason = "Something went wrong in Flow",
details = "But this indicates that it got corrupted getting out")
super(reason)
#reason = reason
#details = details
details = details.message if details.is_a? Exception
details = [details] if details.is_a? String
self.set_backtrace(details)
end
Hope that helps someone in the same situation as me.
I'm using JFlow, it lets you start SWF flow activity workers with JRuby.

How to increase deploy timeout limit at AWS Opsworks?

I would like to increase the deploy time, in a stack layer that hosts many apps (AWS Opsworks).
Currenlty I get the following error:
Eror
[2014-05-05T22:27:51+00:00] ERROR: Running exception handlers
[2014-05-05T22:27:51+00:00] ERROR: Exception handlers complete
[2014-05-05T22:27:51+00:00] FATAL: Stacktrace dumped to /var/lib/aws/opsworks/cache/chef-stacktrace.out
[2014-05-05T22:27:51+00:00] ERROR: deploy[/srv/www/lakers_test] (opsworks_delayed_job::deploy line 65) had an error: Mixlib::ShellOut::CommandTimeout: Command timed out after 600s:
Thanks in advance.
First of all, as mentioned in this ticket reporting a similar issue, the Opsworks guys recommend trying to speed up the call first (there's always room for optimization).
If that doesn't work, we can go down the rabbit hole: this gets called, which in turn calls Mixlib::ShellOut.new, which happens to have a timeout option that you can pass in the initializer!
Now you can use an Opsworks custom cookbook to overwrite the initial method, and pass the corresponding timeout option. Opsworks merges the contents of its base cookbooks with the contents of your custom cookbook - therefore you only need to add & edit one single file to your custom cookbook: opsworks_commons/libraries/shellout.rb:
module OpsWorks
module ShellOut
extend self
# This would be your new default timeout.
DEFAULT_OPTIONS = { timeout: 900 }
def shellout(command, options = {})
cmd = Mixlib::ShellOut.new(command, DEFAULT_OPTIONS.merge(options))
cmd.run_command
cmd.error!
[cmd.stderr, cmd.stdout].join("\n")
end
end
end
Notice how the only additions are just DEFAULT_OPTIONS and merging these options in the Mixlib::ShellOut.new call.
An improvement to this method would be changing this timeout option via a chef attribute, that you could in turn update via your custom JSON in the Opsworks interface. This means passing the timeout attribute in the initial Opsworks::ShellOut.shellout call - not in the method definition. But this depends on how the shellout method actually gets called...

Celery Storing unrecoverable task failures for later resubmission

I'm using the djkombu transport for my local development, but I will probably be using amqp (rabbit) in production.
I'd like to be able to iterate over failures of a particular type and resubmit. This would be in the case of something failing on a server or some edge case bug triggered by some new variation in data.
So I could be resubmitting jobs up to 12 hours later after some bug is fixed or a third party site is back up.
My question is: Is there a way to access old failed jobs via the result backend and simply resubmit them with the same params etc?
You can probably access old jobs using:
CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = "database"
and in your code:
from djcelery.models import TaskMeta
task = TaskMeta.objects.filter(task_id='af3185c9-4174-4bca-0101-860ce6621234')[0]
but I'm not sure you can find the arguments that the task is being started with ... Maybe something with TaskState...
I've never used it this way. But you might want to consider the task.retry feature?
An example from celery docs:
#task()
def task(*args):
try:
some_work()
except SomeException, exc:
# Retry in 24 hours.
raise task.retry(*args, countdown=60 * 60 * 24, exc=exc)
From IRC
<asksol> dpn`: task args and kwargs are not stored with the result
<asksol> dpn`: but you can create your own model and store it there
(for example using the task_sent signal)
<asksol> we don't store anything when the task is sent, only send a
message. but it's very easy to do yourself
This was what I was expecting, but hoped to avoid.
At least I have an answer now :)