Amazon Kinesis ingestion

When you enable the Kinesis indexing service, you can configure supervisors on the Overlord to manage the creation and lifetime of Kinesis indexing tasks. Kinesis indexing tasks read events using the Kinesis shard and sequence number mechanism to guarantee exactly-once ingestion. The supervisor oversees the state of the indexing tasks to coordinate handoffs, manage failures, and ensure that scalability and replication requirements are maintained.

This topic contains configuration information for the Kinesis indexing service supervisor for Apache Druid.

Setup

To use the Kinesis indexing service, you must first load the druid-kinesis-indexing-service core extension on both the Overlord and the Middle Manager. See Loading extensions for more information.

Review Known issues before deploying the druid-kinesis-indexing-service extension to production.

Supervisor spec configuration

This section outlines the configuration properties that are specific to the Amazon Kinesis streaming ingestion method. For configuration properties shared across all streaming ingestion methods supported by Druid, see Supervisor spec.

The following example shows a supervisor spec for a stream with the name KinesisStream:

Click to view the example

{
  "type": "kinesis",
  "spec": {
    "ioConfig": {
      "type": "kinesis",
      "stream": "KinesisStream",
      "inputFormat": {
        "type": "json"
      },
      "useEarliestSequenceNumber": true
    },
    "tuningConfig": {
      "type": "kinesis"
    },
    "dataSchema": {
      "dataSource": "KinesisStream",
      "timestampSpec": {
        "column": "timestamp",
        "format": "iso"
      },
      "dimensionsSpec": {
        "dimensions": [
          "isRobot",
          "channel",
          "flags",
          "isUnpatrolled",
          "page",
          "diffUrl",
          {
            "type": "long",
            "name": "added"
          },
          "comment",
          {
            "type": "long",
            "name": "commentLength"
          },
          "isNew",
          "isMinor",
          {
            "type": "long",
            "name": "delta"
          },
          "isAnonymous",
          "user",
          {
            "type": "long",
            "name": "deltaBucket"
          },
          {
            "type": "long",
            "name": "deleted"
          },
          "namespace",
          "cityName",
          "countryName",
          "regionIsoCode",
          "metroCode",
          "countryIsoCode",
          "regionName"
        ]
      },
      "granularitySpec": {
        "queryGranularity": "none",
        "rollup": false,
        "segmentGranularity": "hour"
      }
    }
  }
}

I/O configuration

The following table outlines the ioConfig configuration properties specific to Kinesis. For configuration properties shared across all streaming ingestion methods, refer to Supervisor I/O configuration.

Property	Type	Description	Required	Default
stream	String	The Kinesis stream to read.	Yes
endpoint	String	The AWS Kinesis stream endpoint for a region. You can find a list of endpoints in the AWS service endpoints document.	No	kinesis.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
useEarliestSequenceNumber	Boolean	If a supervisor is managing a datasource for the first time, it obtains a set of starting sequence numbers from Kinesis. This flag determines whether a supervisor retrieves the earliest or latest sequence numbers in Kinesis. Under normal circumstances, subsequent tasks start from where the previous segments ended so this flag is only used on the first run.	No	false
fetchDelayMillis	Integer	Time in milliseconds to wait between subsequent calls to fetch records from Kinesis. See Determine fetch settings.	No	0
awsAssumedRoleArn	String	The AWS assumed role to use for additional permissions.	No
awsExternalId	String	The AWS external ID to use for additional permissions.	No

Data format

The Kinesis indexing service supports both inputFormat and parser to specify the data format. Use the inputFormat to specify the data format for the Kinesis indexing service unless you need a format only supported by the legacy parser. For more information, see Source input formats.

The Kinesis indexing service supports the following values for inputFormat:

• kinesis
• csv
• tvs
• json
• avro_stream
• protobuf

You can use parser to read thrift formats.

Tuning configuration

The following table outlines the tuningConfig configuration properties specific to Kinesis. For configuration properties shared across all streaming ingestion methods, refer to Supervisor tuning configuration.

Property	Type	Description	Required	Default
skipSequenceNumberAvailabilityCheck	Boolean	Whether to enable checking if the current sequence number is still available in a particular Kinesis shard. If false, the indexing task attempts to reset the current sequence number, depending on the value of resetOffsetAutomatically.	No	false
recordBufferSizeBytes	Integer	The size of the buffer (heap memory bytes) Druid uses between the Kinesis fetch threads and the main ingestion thread.	No	See Determine fetch settings for defaults.
recordBufferOfferTimeout	Integer	The number of milliseconds to wait for space to become available in the buffer before timing out.	No	5000
recordBufferFullWait	Integer	The number of milliseconds to wait for the buffer to drain before Druid attempts to fetch records from Kinesis again.	No	5000
fetchThreads	Integer	The size of the pool of threads fetching data from Kinesis. There is no benefit in having more threads than Kinesis shards.	No	procs * 2, where procs is the number of processors available to the task.
maxBytesPerPoll	Integer	The maximum number of bytes to be fetched from buffer per poll. At least one record is polled from the buffer regardless of this config.	No	1000000 bytes
repartitionTransitionDuration	ISO 8601 period	When shards are split or merged, the supervisor recomputes shard to task group mappings. The supervisor also signals any running tasks created under the old mappings to stop early at current time + repartitionTransitionDuration. Stopping the tasks early allows Druid to begin reading from the new shards more quickly. The repartition transition wait time controlled by this property gives the stream additional time to write records to the new shards after the split or merge, which helps avoid issues with empty shard handling.	No	PT2M
useListShards	Boolean	Indicates if listShards API of AWS Kinesis SDK can be used to prevent LimitExceededException during ingestion. You must set the necessary IAM permissions.	No	false

AWS authentication

Druid uses AWS access and secret keys to authenticate Kinesis API requests. There are a few ways to provide this information to Druid:

1. Using roles or short-term credentials:

   Druid looks for credentials set in environment variables, via Web Identity Token, in the default profile configuration file, and from the EC2 instance profile provider (in this order).

2. Using long-term security credentials:

   You can directly provide your AWS access key and AWS secret key in the common.runtime.properties file as shown in the example below:

   druid.kinesis.accessKey=AKIAWxxxxxxxxxx4NCKS
   druid.kinesis.secretKey=Jbytxxxxxxxxxxx2+555

info

AWS does not recommend providing long-term security credentials in configuration files since it might pose a security risk. If you use this approach, it takes precedence over all other methods of providing credentials.

To ingest data from Kinesis, ensure that the policy attached to your IAM role contains the necessary permissions. The required permissions depend on the value of useListShards.

If the useListShards flag is set to true, you need following permissions:

• ListStreams to list your data streams.
• Get* required for GetShardIterator.
• GetRecords to get data records from a data stream's shard.
• ListShards to get the shards for a stream of interest.

The following is an example policy:

[
  {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": ["kinesis:List*"],
    "Resource": ["*"]
  },
  {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": ["kinesis:Get*"],
    "Resource": [<ARN for shards to be ingested>]
  }
]

If the useListShards flag is set to false, you need following permissions:

• ListStreams to list your data streams.
• Get* required for GetShardIterator.
• GetRecords to get data records from a data stream's shard.
• DescribeStream to describe the specified data stream.

The following is an example policy:

[
  {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": ["kinesis:ListStreams"],
    "Resource": ["*"]
  },
  {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": ["kinesis:DescribeStream"],
    "Resource": ["*"]
  },
  {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": ["kinesis:Get*"],
    "Resource": [<ARN for shards to be ingested>]
  }
]

Shards and segment handoff

Each Kinesis indexing task writes the events it consumes from Kinesis shards into a single segment for the segment granularity interval until it reaches one of the following limits: maxRowsPerSegment, maxTotalRows, or intermediateHandoffPeriod. At this point, the task creates a new shard for this segment granularity to contain subsequent events.

The Kinesis indexing task also performs incremental hand-offs so that the segments created by the task are not held up until the task duration is over. When the task reaches one of the maxRowsPerSegment, maxTotalRows, or intermediateHandoffPeriod limits, it hands off all the segments and creates a new set of segments for further events. This allows the task to run for longer durations without accumulating old segments locally on Middle Manager services.

The Kinesis indexing service may still produce some small segments. For example, consider the following scenario:

• Task duration is 4 hours
• Segment granularity is set to an HOUR
• The supervisor was started at 9:10

After 4 hours at 13:10, Druid starts a new set of tasks. The events for the interval 13:00 - 14:00 may be split across existing tasks and the new set of tasks which could result in small segments. To merge them together into new segments of an ideal size (in the range of ~500-700 MB per segment), you can schedule re-indexing tasks, optionally with a different segment granularity.

For information on how to optimize the segment size, see Segment size optimization.

Determine fetch settings

Kinesis indexing tasks fetch records using fetchThreads threads. If fetchThreads is higher than the number of Kinesis shards, the excess threads are unused. Each fetch thread fetches up to 10 MB of records at once from a Kinesis shard, with a delay between fetches of fetchDelayMillis. The records fetched by each thread are pushed into a shared queue of size recordBufferSizeBytes.

The default values for these parameters are:

• fetchThreads: Twice the number of processors available to the task. The number of processors available to the task is the total number of processors on the server, divided by druid.worker.capacity (the number of task slots on that particular server). This value is further limited so that the total data record data fetched at a given time does not exceed 5% of the max heap configured, assuming that each thread fetches 10 MB of records at once. If the value specified for this configuration is higher than this limit, no failure occurs, but a warning is logged, and the value is implicitly lowered to the max allowed by this constraint.
• fetchDelayMillis: 0 (no delay between fetches).
• recordBufferSizeBytes: 100 MB or an estimated 10% of available heap, whichever is smaller.
• maxBytesPerPoll: 1000000.

Kinesis places the following restrictions on calls to fetch records:

• Each data record can be up to 1 MB in size.
• Each shard can support up to 5 transactions per second for reads.
• Each shard can read up to 2 MB per second.
• The maximum size of data that GetRecords can return is 10 MB.

If the above limits are exceeded, Kinesis throws ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors. If this happens, Druid Kinesis tasks pause by fetchDelayMillis or 3 seconds, whichever is larger, and then attempt the call again.

In most cases, the default settings for fetch parameters are sufficient to achieve good performance without excessive memory usage. However, in some cases, you may need to adjust these parameters to control fetch rate and memory usage more finely. Optimal values depend on the average size of a record and the number of consumers you have reading from a given shard, which will be replicas unless you have other consumers also reading from this Kinesis stream.

Deaggregation

The Kinesis indexing service supports de-aggregation of multiple rows stored within a single Kinesis Data Streams record for more efficient data transfer.

Resharding

Resharding is an advanced operation that lets you adjust the number of shards in a stream to adapt to changes in the rate of data flowing through a stream.

When changing the shard count for a Kinesis stream, there is a window of time around the resharding operation with early shutdown of Kinesis ingestion tasks and possible task failures.

The early shutdowns and task failures are expected. They occur because the supervisor updates the shard to task group mappings as shards are closed and fully read. This ensures that tasks are not running with an assignment of closed shards that have been fully read and balances distribution of active shards across tasks.

This window with early task shutdowns and possible task failures concludes when:

• All closed shards have been fully read and the Kinesis ingestion tasks have published the data from those shards, committing the "closed" state to metadata storage.
• Any remaining tasks that had inactive shards in the assignment have been shut down. These tasks would have been created before the closed shards were completely drained.

Note that when the supervisor is running and detects new partitions, tasks read new partitions from the earliest offsets, irrespective of the useEarliestSequence setting. This is because these new shards were immediately discovered and are therefore unlikely to experience a lag.

If resharding occurs when the supervisor is suspended and useEarliestSequence is set to false, resuming the supervisor causes tasks to read the new shards from the latest sequence. This is by design so that the consumer can catch up quickly with any lag accumulated while the supervisor was suspended.

Known issues

Before you deploy the druid-kinesis-indexing-service extension to production, consider the following known issues:

• Kinesis imposes a read throughput limit per shard. If you have multiple supervisors reading from the same Kinesis stream, consider adding more shards to ensure sufficient read throughput for all supervisors.
• A Kinesis supervisor can sometimes compare the checkpoint offset to retention window of the stream to see if it has fallen behind. These checks fetch the earliest sequence number for Kinesis which can result in IteratorAgeMilliseconds becoming very high in AWS CloudWatch.

Learn more

See the following topics for more information:

• Supervisor API for how to manage and monitor supervisors using the API.
• Supervisor for supervisor status and capacity planning.