Is there a way to allocate different instances of the same process to different camunda instances(workstations)?
Since there will be more requests for my camunda process, than my pc can handle, I'm looking for a way to allocate some of those requests to another camunda instance, once mine can't handle any more.
CAMUNDA nodes do not keep state (apart from user session info). In a cluster they synchronize via the database. To distribute the load you can simply start additional environments, which connect to the same database.
Please also see: https://docs.camunda.org/manual/latest/introduction/architecture/
You can configure a homogeneous cluster, where all nodes are the same, or a heterogeneous cluster, where the deployment on different nodes differs. Different node types can be deployment-aware (true), which means they can be configured to only handle workloads intended for them and for which they have the necessary deployment (classes, libs, etc) and system resources.
Homogeneous Setup
Heterogeneous Setup
The job executor is key here. Please see: https://docs.camunda.org/manual/latest/user-guide/process-engine/the-job-executor/
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I have a fairly simple Akka.NET system that tracks in-memory state, but contains only derived data. So any actor can on startup load its up-to-date state from a backend database and then start receiving messages and keep their state from there. So I can just let actors fail and restart the process whenever I want. It will rebuild itself.
But... I would like to run across multiple nodes (mostly for the memory requirements) and I'd like to increase/decrease the number of nodes according to demand. Also for releasing a new version without downtime.
What would be the most lightweight (in terms of Persistence) setup of clustering to achieve this? Can you run Clustering without Persistence?
This not a single question, so let me answer them one by one:
So I can just let actors fail and restart the process whenever I want - yes, but keep in mind, that hard reset of the process is a lot more expensive than graceful shutdown. In distributed systems if your node is going down, it's better for it to communicate that to the rest of the nodes before, than requiring them to detect the dead one - this is a part of node failure detection and can take some time (even sub minute).
I'd like to increase/decrease the number of nodes according to demand - this is a standard behavior of the cluster. In case of Akka.NET depending on which feature set are you going to use, you may sometimes need to specify an upper bound of the cluster size.
Also for releasing a new version without downtime. - most of the cluster features can be scoped to a set of particular nodes using so called roles. Each node can have it's set of roles, that can be used what services it provides and detect if other nodes have required capabilities. For that reason you can use roles for things like versioning.
Can you run Clustering without Persistence? - yes, and this is a default configuration (in Akka, cluster nodes don't need to use any form of persistent backend to work).
In Distributed Tensorflow, we could run multiple clients working with workers in Parameter-Server architecture, which is known as "Between-Graph Replication". According to the documentation,
Between-graph replication. In this approach, there is a separate
client for each /job:worker task, typically in the same process as the
worker task.
it says the client and worker typically are in the same process. However, if they are not in the same process, can number of clients are not equal to the number of workers? Also, can multiple clients share and run on the same CPU core?
Clients are the python programs that define a graph and initialize a session in order to run computation. If you start these programs, the created processes represent the servers in the distributed architecture.
Now it is possible to write programs that do not create a graph and do not run session, but rather just call the server.join() method with the appropriate job name and task index. This way you could theoretically have a single client defining the whole graph and start a session with its corresponding server.target; then within this session, parts of the graph are automatically going to be sent to the other processes/servers and they will do the computations (as long as you have set which server/task is going to do what). This setup describes the in-graph replication architecture.
So, it is basically possible to start several servers/processes on the same machine, that has only a single CPU, but you are not going to gain much parallelism, because context switching between multiple running processes is going to slow you down. So unless the servers are doing some unrelated work, you should rather avoid this kind of setup.
Between-graph just means that every worker is going to have its own client and run its own session respectively.
I've found different zookeeper definitions across multiple resources. Maybe some of them are taken out of context, but look at them pls:
A canonical example of Zookeeper usage is distributed-memory computation...
ZooKeeper is an open source Apache™ project that provides a centralized infrastructure and services that enable synchronization across a cluster.
Apache ZooKeeper is an open source file application program interface (API) that allows distributed processes in large systems to synchronize with each other so that all clients making requests receive consistent data.
I've worked with Redis and Hazelcast, that would be easier for me to understand Zookeeper by comparing it with them.
Could you please compare Zookeeper with in-memory-data-grids and Redis?
If distributed-memory computation, how does zookeeper differ from in-memory-data-grids?
If synchronization across cluster, than how does it differs from all other in-memory storages? The same in-memory-data-grids also provide cluster-wide locks. Redis also has some kind of transactions.
If it's only about in-memory consistent data, than there are other alternatives. Imdg allow you to achieve the same, don't they?
https://zookeeper.apache.org/doc/current/zookeeperOver.html
By default, Zookeeper replicates all your data to every node and lets clients watch the data for changes. Changes are sent very quickly (within a bounded amount of time) to clients. You can also create "ephemeral nodes", which are deleted within a specified time if a client disconnects. ZooKeeper is highly optimized for reads, while writes are very slow (since they generally are sent to every client as soon as the write takes place). Finally, the maximum size of a "file" (znode) in Zookeeper is 1MB, but typically they'll be single strings.
Taken together, this means that zookeeper is not meant to store for much data, and definitely not a cache. Instead, it's for managing heartbeats/knowing what servers are online, storing/updating configuration, and possibly message passing (though if you have large #s of messages or high throughput demands, something like RabbitMQ will be much better for this task).
Basically, ZooKeeper (and Curator, which is built on it) helps in handling the mechanics of clustering -- heartbeats, distributing updates/configuration, distributed locks, etc.
It's not really comparable to Redis, but for the specific questions...
It doesn't support any computation and for most data sets, won't be able to store the data with any performance.
It's replicated to all nodes in the cluster (there's nothing like Redis clustering where the data can be distributed). All messages are processed atomically in full and are sequenced, so there's no real transactions. It can be USED to implement cluster-wide locks for your services (it's very good at that in fact), and tehre are a lot of locking primitives on the znodes themselves to control which nodes access them.
Sure, but ZooKeeper fills a niche. It's a tool for making a distributed applications play nice with multiple instances, not for storing/sharing large amounts of data. Compared to using an IMDG for this purpose, Zookeeper will be faster, manages heartbeats and synchronization in a predictable way (with a lot of APIs for making this part easy), and has a "push" paradigm instead of "pull" so nodes are notified very quickly of changes.
The quotation from the linked question...
A canonical example of Zookeeper usage is distributed-memory computation
... is, IMO, a bit misleading. You would use it to orchestrate the computation, not provide the data. For example, let's say you had to process rows 1-100 of a table. You might put 10 ZK nodes up, with names like "1-10", "11-20", "21-30", etc. Client applications would be notified of this change automatically by ZK, and the first one would grab "1-10" and set an ephemeral node clients/192.168.77.66/processing/rows_1_10
The next application would see this and go for the next group to process. The actual data to compute would be stored elsewhere (ie Redis, SQL database, etc). If the node failed partway through the computation, another node could see this (after 30-60 seconds) and pick up the job again.
I'd say the canonical example of ZooKeeper is leader election, though. Let's say you have 3 nodes -- one is master and the other 2 are slaves. If the master goes down, a slave node must become the new leader. This type of thing is perfect for ZK.
Consistency Guarantees
ZooKeeper is a high performance, scalable service. Both reads and write operations are designed to be fast, though reads are faster than writes. The reason for this is that in the case of reads, ZooKeeper can serve older data, which in turn is due to ZooKeeper's consistency guarantees:
Sequential Consistency
Updates from a client will be applied in the order that they were sent.
Atomicity
Updates either succeed or fail -- there are no partial results.
Single System Image
A client will see the same view of the service regardless of the server that it connects to.
Reliability
Once an update has been applied, it will persist from that time forward until a client overwrites the update. This guarantee has two corollaries:
If a client gets a successful return code, the update will have been applied. On some failures (communication errors, timeouts, etc) the client will not know if the update has applied or not. We take steps to minimize the failures, but the only guarantee is only present with successful return codes. (This is called the monotonicity condition in Paxos.)
Any updates that are seen by the client, through a read request or successful update, will never be rolled back when recovering from server failures.
Timeliness
The clients view of the system is guaranteed to be up-to-date within a certain time bound. (On the order of tens of seconds.) Either system changes will be seen by a client within this bound, or the client will detect a service outage.
Mirroring is replicating data between Kafka cluster, while Replication is for replicating nodes within a Kafka cluster.
Is there any specific use of Replication, if Mirroring has already been setup?
They are used for different use cases. Let's try to clarify.
As described in the documentation,
The purpose of adding replication in Kafka is for stronger durability and higher availability. We want to guarantee that any successfully published message will not be lost and can be consumed, even when there are server failures. Such failures can be caused by machine error, program error, or more commonly, software upgrades. We have the following high-level goals:
Inside a cluster there might be network partitions (a single server fails, and so forth), therefore we want to provide replication between the nodes. Given a setup of three nodes and one cluster, if server1 fails, there are two replicas Kafka can choose from. Same cluster implies same response times (ok, it also depends on how these servers are configured, sure, but in a normal scenario they should not differ so much).
Mirroring, on the other hand, seems to be very valuable, for example, when you are migrating a data center, or when you have multiple data centers (e.g., AWS in the US and AWS in Ireland). Of course, these are just a couple of use cases. So what you do here is to give applications belonging to the same data center a faster and better way to access data - data locality in some contexts is everything.
If you have one node in each cluster, in case of failure, you might have way higher response times to go, let's say, from AWS located in Ireland to AWS in the US.
You might claim that in order to achieve data locality (services in cluster one read from kafka in cluster one) one still needs to copy the data from one cluster to the other. That's definitely true, but the advantages you might get with mirroring could be higher than those you would get by reading directly (via an SSH tunnel?) from Kafka located in another data center, for example single connections down, clients connection/session times longer (depending on the location of the data center), legislation (some data can be collected in a country while some other data shouldn't).
Replication is the basis of higher availability. You shouldn't use Mirroring to handle high availability in a context where data locality matters. At the same time, you should not use just Replication where you need to duplicate data across data centers (I don't even know if you can without Mirroring/an ssh tunnel).
I'm reading about production topology for the Analytics part of Worklight 6.2.
https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/api/content/SSZH4A_6.2.0/com.ibm.worklight.monitor.doc/monitor/t_setting_up_production_cluster.html
It explains that nodes can act both as Master Node or as Data Node or only as one of them.
My question is why we should configure dedicated nodes, Master OR Data instead of configuring all the nodes for both Master AND Data.
I assume the the node (only one) acting as master will provide worst performance in its Data role but on the other hand the configuration will be simpler and the high availability will be higher.
Thank you.
Your assumption is correct.
A master node is responsible for handling communication between the data nodes. The data nodes will be responsible for indexing data. Having dedicated master and data nodes will allow them to focus their processing time and memory on their specific tasks. However, as you mentioned, in some cases its not worth doing this to complicate the configuration.
Another reason is that its not necessary to put a master node on a high performing machine. You can reserve the better machines for the data nodes.
The analytics console uses Elasticsearch under the covers. It would be worth looking up the benefits and drawbacks of choosing master and data nodes in Elasticsearch since it is an open source library and there are several resources available for it.
Edit:
As you can imagine, there is no one size fits all configuration. The configuration depends on several factors such as:
How long you wish to keep data stored
How many machines you have to dedicate to analytics
How verbose your client logs have been set
Your preferences between availability and performance
In my personal tests, I typically keep each node as a data and master node. Its possible that in the future we will document how the different configurations affect performance.