Hey there, I need to start a new thread on KIP-455. I think there might be an issue with the mailing server. For some reason, my replies to the previous discussion thread could not be seen by others. After numerous attempts, Colin suggested I start a new thread.
Original Discussion Thread: https://sematext.com/opensee/m/Kafka/uyzND1Yl7Er128CQu1?subj=+DISCUSS+KIP+455+Create+an+Administrative+API+for+Replica+Reassignment KIP: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-455%3A+Create+an+Administrative+API+for+Replica+Reassignment Last Reply of Previous Thread: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/kafka-dev/201906.mbox/%3C679a4c5b-3da6-4556-bb89-e680d8cbb705%40www.fastmail.com%3E The following is my reply: ---- Hi again, This has been a great discussion on a tricky KIP. I appreciate everybody's involvement in improving this crucial API. That being said, I wanted to apologize for my first comment, it was a bit rushed and not thought out. I've got a few questions now that I dove into this better: 1. Does it make sense to have an easy way to cancel all ongoing reassignments? To cancel all ongoing reassignments, users had the crude option of deleting the znode, bouncing the controller and running the rollback JSON assignment that kafka-reassign-partitions.sh gave them (KAFKA-6304). Now that we support multiple reassignment requests, users may add execute them incrementally. Suppose something goes horribly wrong and they want to revert as quickly as possible - they would need to run the tool with multiple rollback JSONs. I think that it would be useful to have an easy way to stop all ongoing reassignments for emergency situations. --------- 2. Our kafka-reassign-partitions.sh tool doesn't seem to currently let you figure out the ongoing assignments - I guess we expect people to use kafka-topics.sh for that. I am not sure how well that would continue to work now that we update the replica set only after the new replica joins the ISR. Do you think it makes sense to add an option for listing the current reassignments to the reassign tool as part of this KIP? We might want to think whether we want to show the TargetReplicas information in the kafka-topics command for completeness as well. That might involve the need to update the DescribeTopicsResponse. Personally I can't see a downside but I haven't given it too much thought. I fully agree that we don't want to add the target replicas to the full replica set and nothing useful comes out of telling users they have a replica that might not have copied a single byte. Yet, telling them that we have the intention of copying bytes sounds useful so maybe having a separate column in kafka-topics.sh would provide better clarity? --------- 3. What happens if we do another reassignment to a partition while one is in progress? Do we overwrite the TargetReplicas? In the example sequence you gave: R: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], I: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], T: [4, 5, 6] What would the behavior be if a new reassign request came with TargetReplicas of [7, 8, 9] for that partition? To avoid complexity and potential race conditions, would it make sense to reject a reassign request once one is in progress for the specific partition, essentially forcing the user to cancel it first? Forcing the user to cancel has the benefit of being explicit and guarding against human mistakes. The downside I can think of is that in some scenarios it might be inefficient, e.g R: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], I: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], T: [4, 5, 6] Cancel request sent out. Followed by a new reassign request with TargetReplicas of [5, 6, 7] (note that 5 and 6 already fully copied the partition). Becomes a bit of a race condition of whether we deleted the partitions in between requests or not - I assume in practice this won't be an issue. I still feel like I prefer the explicit cancellation step --------- 4. My biggest concern - I want to better touch on the interaction between the new API and the current admin/reassign_partitions znode, the compatibility and our strategy there. The KIP says: > For compatibility purposes, we will continue to allow assignments to be > submitted through the /admin/reassign_partitions node. Just as with the > current code, this will only be possible if there are no current > assignments. In other words, the znode has two states: empty and waiting > for a write, and non-empty because there are assignments in progress. Once > the znode is non-empty, further writes to it will be ignored. Given the current proposal, I can think of 4 scenarios I want to get a better understanding of: *(i, ii, iii, iiii talk about the reassignment of the same one partition only - partitionA)* i. znode is empty, new reassignment triggered via API, znode is updated When the new reassignment is triggered via the API, do we create the znode or do we allow a separate tool to trigger another reassignment through it? ii. (assuming we allow creating the znode as with scenario "i"): znode is empty, new reassignment triggered via API, znode is updated, znode is DELETED My understand is that deleting the znode does not do anything until the Controller is bounced - is that correct? If so, this means that nothing will happen. If the Controller is bounced, the reassignment state will still be live in the [partitionId]/state znode iii. znode is updated, new reassignment triggered via API We override the reassignment for partitionA. The reassign_partitions znode is showing stale data, correct? iiii. znode is updated, new reassignment triggered via API, controller failover What does the controller believe - the [partitionId]/state znode or the /reassign_partitions ? I would assume the [partitionId]/state znode since in this case we want the reassignment API call to be the correct one. I think that opens up the possibility of missing a freshly-set /reassign_partitions though (e.g if it was empty and was set right during controller failover) iiiii. znode is updated to move partitionA, new reassignment triggered via API for partitionB, partitionA move finishes At this point, do we delete the znode or do we wait until the partitionB move finishes as well? >From the discussion here: > There's no guarantee that what is in the znode reflects the current > reassignments that are going on. The only thing you can know is that if > the znode exists, there is at least one reassignment going on. This is changing the expected behavior of a tool that obeys Kafka's current behavior though. It is true that updating the znode while a reassignment is in progress has no effect but make ZK misleading but tools might have grown to follow that rule and only update the znode once it is empty. I think we might want to be more explicit when making such changes - I had seen discontentment in the community from the fact that we had changed the znode updating behavior in a MINOR pull request. I feel it is complex to support both APIs and make sure we don't have unhandled edge cases. I liked Bob's suggestion on potentially allowing only one via a feature flag: > Could we temporarily support > both, with a config enabling the new behavior to prevent users from trying > to use both mechanisms (if the config is true, the old znode is ignored; if > the config is false, the Admin Client API returns an error indicating that > it is not enabled)? Perhaps it makes sense to discuss that possibility a bit more? --------- 5. ListPartitionReassignments filtering I guess the thought process here is that most reassignment tools want to > know about all the reassignments that are going on. If you don't know all > the pending reassignments, then it's hard to say whether adding a new one > is a good idea, or cancelling an existing one. So I guess I can't think of > a case where a reassignment tool would want a partial set rather than the > full one. I agree with Jason about the UIs having "drill into" options. I believe we should support some sort of ongoing reassignment filtering at the topic level (that's the administrative concept people care about). An example of a tool that might leverage it is our own kafka-reassign-partitions.sh. You can ask that tool to generate a reassignment for you from a given list of topics. It currently uses `KafkaZkClient#getReplicaAssignmentForTopics()` to get the current assignment for the given topics. It would be better if it could use the new ListPartitionsReassignments API to both figure out the current replica assignments and whether or not those topics are being reassigned (it could log a warning that a reassignment is in progress for those topics). --------- and a small nit: We also need to update the ListPartitionReassignmentsResponse with the decided current/targetReplicas naming Thanks, Stanislav
