Hi Rajini, I think my original response to your point 15 was not accurate. The regular definition of durability is that data once committed would never be lost. So it is not enough for only the control messages to be flushed before being acknowledged -- all the messages (and offset commits) which are part of the transaction would need to be flushed before being acknowledged as well.
Otherwise, it is possible that if all replicas of a topic partition crash before the transactional messages are flushed, those messages will be lost even if the commit marker exists in the log. In this case, the transaction would be 'committed' with incomplete data. Right now, there isn't any config which will ensure that the flush to disk happens before the acknowledgement. We could add it in the future, and get durability guarantees for kafka transactions. I hope this clarifies the situation. The present KIP does not intend to add the aforementioned config, so even the control messages are susceptible to being lost if there is a simultaneous crash across all replicas. So transactions are only as durable as existing Kafka messages. We don't strengthen any durability guarantees as part of this KIP. Thanks, Apurva On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 1:52 AM, Rajini Sivaram <rsiva...@pivotal.io> wrote: > Hi Apurva, > > Thank you for the answers. Just one follow-on. > > 15. Let me rephrase my original question. If all control messages (messages > to transaction logs and markers on user logs) were acknowledged only after > flushing the log segment, will transactions become durable in the > traditional sense (i.e. not restricted to min.insync.replicas failures) ? > This is not a suggestion to update the KIP. It seems to me that the design > enables full durability if required in the future with a rather > non-intrusive change. I just wanted to make sure I haven't missed anything > fundamental that prevents Kafka from doing this. > > > > On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 5:30 AM, Ben Kirwin <b...@kirw.in> wrote: > > > Hi Apurva, > > > > Thanks for the detailed answers... and sorry for the late reply! > > > > It does sound like, if the input-partitions-to-app-id mapping never > > changes, the existing fencing mechanisms should prevent duplicates. > Great! > > I'm a bit concerned the proposed API will be delicate to program against > > successfully -- even in the simple case, we need to create a new producer > > instance per input partition, and anything fancier is going to need its > own > > implementation of the Streams/Samza-style 'task' idea -- but that may be > > fine for this sort of advanced feature. > > > > For the second question, I notice that Jason also elaborated on this > > downthread: > > > > > We also looked at removing the producer ID. > > > This was discussed somewhere above, but basically the idea is to store > > the > > > AppID in the message set header directly and avoid the mapping to > > producer > > > ID altogether. As long as batching isn't too bad, the impact on total > > size > > > may not be too bad, but we were ultimately more comfortable with a > fixed > > > size ID. > > > > ...which suggests that the distinction is useful for performance, but not > > necessary for correctness, which makes good sense to me. (Would a 128-bid > > ID be a reasonable compromise? That's enough room for a UUID, or a > > reasonable hash of an arbitrary string, and has only a marginal increase > on > > the message size.) > > > > On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 11:44 PM, Apurva Mehta <apu...@confluent.io> > wrote: > > > > > Hi Ben, > > > > > > Now, on to your first question of how deal with consumer rebalances. > The > > > short answer is that the application needs to ensure that the the > > > assignment of input partitions to appId is consistent across > rebalances. > > > > > > For Kafka streams, they already ensure that the mapping of input > > partitions > > > to task Id is invariant across rebalances by implementing a custom > sticky > > > assignor. Other non-streams apps can trivially have one producer per > > input > > > partition and have the appId be the same as the partition number to > > achieve > > > the same effect. > > > > > > With this precondition in place, we can maintain transactions across > > > rebalances. > > > > > > Hope this answers your question. > > > > > > Thanks, > > > Apurva > > > > > > On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 3:22 PM, Ben Kirwin <b...@kirw.in> wrote: > > > > > > > Thanks for this! I'm looking forward to going through the full > proposal > > > in > > > > detail soon; a few early questions: > > > > > > > > First: what happens when a consumer rebalances in the middle of a > > > > transaction? The full documentation suggests that such a transaction > > > ought > > > > to be rejected: > > > > > > > > > [...] if a rebalance has happened and this consumer > > > > > instance becomes a zombie, even if this offset message is appended > in > > > the > > > > > offset topic, the transaction will be rejected later on when it > tries > > > to > > > > > commit the transaction via the EndTxnRequest. > > > > > > > > ...but it's unclear to me how we ensure that a transaction can't > > complete > > > > if a rebalance has happened. (It's quite possible I'm missing > something > > > > obvious!) > > > > > > > > As a concrete example: suppose a process with PID 1 adds offsets for > > some > > > > partition to a transaction; a consumer rebalance happens that assigns > > the > > > > partition to a process with PID 2, which adds some offsets to its > > current > > > > transaction; both processes try and commit. Allowing both commits > would > > > > cause the messages to be processed twice -- how is that avoided? > > > > > > > > Second: App IDs normally map to a single PID. It seems like one could > > do > > > > away with the PID concept entirely, and just use App IDs in most > places > > > > that require a PID. This feels like it would be significantly > simpler, > > > > though it does increase the message size. Are there other reasons why > > the > > > > App ID / PID split is necessary? > > > > > > > > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 2:19 PM, Guozhang Wang <wangg...@gmail.com> > > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > Hi all, > > > > > > > > > > I have just created KIP-98 to enhance Kafka with exactly once > > delivery > > > > > semantics: > > > > > > > > > > *https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP- > > > > > 98+-+Exactly+Once+Delivery+and+Transactional+Messaging > > > > > <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP- > > > > > 98+-+Exactly+Once+Delivery+and+Transactional+Messaging>* > > > > > > > > > > This KIP adds a transactional messaging mechanism along with an > > > > idempotent > > > > > producer implementation to make sure that 1) duplicated messages > sent > > > > from > > > > > the same identified producer can be detected on the broker side, > and > > > 2) a > > > > > group of messages sent within a transaction will atomically be > either > > > > > reflected and fetchable to consumers or not as a whole. > > > > > > > > > > The above wiki page provides a high-level view of the proposed > > changes > > > as > > > > > well as summarized guarantees. Initial draft of the detailed > > > > implementation > > > > > design is described in this Google doc: > > > > > > > > > > https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Jqy_ > > > GjUGtdXJK94XGsEIK7CP1SnQGdp2eF > > > > > 0wSw9ra8 > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > We would love to hear your comments and suggestions. > > > > > > > > > > Thanks, > > > > > > > > > > -- Guozhang > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >