Ewen,

Thanks for the explanation.

We have control over the logs format coming to HAProxy. Right now, these are 
plain JSON logs (just like syslog messages with few additional meta 
information) sent to HAProxy from remote clients using HTTPs. No serialization 
is used.

Currently, we have one log each of the HTTP request. I understood that every 
request is produced individually without batching.

Will this work with REST proxy, without using schema registry ?

--regards
Hemanth

-----Original Message-----
From: Ewen Cheslack-Postava [mailto:e...@confluent.io] 
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 9:14 AM
To: users@kafka.apache.org
Subject: Re: Http Kafka producer

Hemanth,

Can you be a bit more specific about your setup? Do you have control over the 
format of the request bodies that reach HAProxy or not? If you do, Confluent's 
REST proxy should work fine and does not require the Schema Registry. It 
supports both binary (encoded as base64 so it can be passed via the JSON 
request body) and Avro. With Avro it uses the schema registry, but the binary 
mode doesn't require it.

If you don't have control over the format, then the REST proxy is not currently 
designed to support that use case. I don't think HAProxy can rewrite request 
bodies (beyond per-line regexes, which would be hard to make work), so that's 
not an option either. It would certainly be possible to make a small addition 
to the REST proxy to allow binary request bodies to be produced directly to a 
topic specified in the URL, though you'd be paying pretty high overhead per 
message -- without the ability to batch, you're doing one HTTP request per 
messages. This might not be bad if your messages are large enough? (Then again, 
the same issue applies regardless of what solution you end up with if each of 
the requests to HAProxy only contains one message).

-Ewen



On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Hemanth Abbina <heman...@eiqnetworks.com>
wrote:

> Marc,
>
> Thanks for your response.  Let's have more details on the problem.
>
> As I already mentioned in the previous post, here is our expected data
> flow:  logs -> HAProxy -> {new layer } -> Kafka Cluster
>
> The 'new layer' should receive logs as HTTP requests from HAproxy and 
> produce the same logs to Kafka without loss.
>
> Options that seems to be available, are 1. Flume: It has a HTTP source 
> & Kafka sink, but the documentation says HTTP source is not for 
> production use.
> 2. Kafka Rest Proxy: Though this seems to be fine, adding another 
> dependency of Schema Registry servers to validate the schema, which 
> should be again used by the consumers.
> 3. Custom plugin to handle this functionality: Though the 
> functionality seems to be simple - scalability, reliability aspects 
> and maintenance would be more.
>
> Thanks
> Hemanth
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marc Bollinger [mailto:m...@lumoslabs.com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 4:39 AM
> To: users@kafka.apache.org
> Cc: dev-subscr...@kafka.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Http Kafka producer
>
> I'm actually also really interested in this...I had a chat about this 
> on the distributed systems slack's <http://dist-sys.slack.com> Kafka 
> channel a few days ago, but we're not much further than griping about the 
> problem.
> We're basically migrating an existing event system, one which packed 
> messages into files, waited for a time-or-space threshold to be 
> crossed, then dealt with distribution in terms of files. Basically, 
> we'd like to keep a lot of those semantics: we can acknowledge success 
> on the app server as soon as we've flushed to disk, and rely on the 
> filesystem for durability, and total order across the system doesn't 
> matter, as the HTTP PUTs sending the messages are load balanced across 
> many app servers. We also can tolerate [very] long downstream event 
> system outages, because...we're ultimately just writing sequentially 
> to disk, per process (I should mention that this part is in Rails, 
> which means we're dealing largely in terms of processes, not threads).
>
> RocksDB was mentioned in the discussion, but spending exactly 5 
> minutes researching that solution, it seems like the dead simplest 
> solution on an app server in terms of moving parts (multiple processes 
> writing, one process reading/forwarding to Kafka) wouldn't work well with 
> RocksDB.
> Although now that I'm looking at it more, it looks like they're 
> working on a MySQL storage engine?
>
> Anyway yeah, I'd love some discussion on this, or war stories of 
> migration to Kafka from other event systems (F/OSS or...bespoke).
>
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 3:45 PM, Hemanth Abbina 
> <heman...@eiqnetworks.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Our application receives events through a HAProxy server on HTTPs, 
> > which should be forwarded and stored to Kafka cluster.
> >
> > What should be the best option for this ?
> > This layer should receive events from HAProxy & produce them to 
> > Kafka cluster, in a reliable and efficient way (and should scale 
> > horizontally).
> >
> > Please suggest.
> >
> > --regards
> > Hemanth
> >
>



--
Thanks,
Ewen

Reply via email to