Nakadion

A client for the Nakadi Event Broker.

Summary

Nakadion is client that connects to the Nakadi Subscription API. It does all the cursor management so that users can concentrate on implementing their logic for processing events. The code implemented to process events by a user does not get in touch with the internals of Nakadi.

Nakadion processes batches of events from Nakadi on a worker per partition basis. A worker new is spawned for each new partion discovered. These workers are guaranteed to be run ona single thread at a time. To process batches of events a handler factory has to be implemented which is creates handlers that are executed by the workers.

Nakadion is almost completely configurable with environment variables.

Please have a look at the documentation of Nakadi first to become comfortable with the concepts of Nakadi.

How to use

1. Do some imports

use nakadion::*;
use nakadion::auth::*;

2. Implement a BatchHandler that contains all your batch processing logic

// Use a struct to maintain state
struct MyHandler {
    pub count: i32,
}

// Implement the processing logic by implementing `BatchHandler`
// Keep in mind that there is also `TypedBatchHandler` which can
// deserialize the events.
impl BatchHandler for MyHandler {
    fn handle(&mut self, _event_type: EventType, _events: &[u8]) -> ProcessingStatus {
        self.count += 1;
        ProcessingStatus::processed_no_hint()
    }
}

3. Implement a HandlerFactory that creates handlers for the workers.

// You could also maintain shared state in the `HandlerFactory`
struct MyHandlerFactory;

// Now we implement the trait `HandlerFactory` to control how
// our `BatchHandler`s are created
impl HandlerFactory for MyHandlerFactory {
    type Handler = MyHandler;
    fn create_handler(&self, _partition: &PartitionId)
    -> Result<Self::Handler, CreateHandlerError> {
        Ok(MyHandler{ count: 0 })
    }
}

let handler_factory = MyHandlerFactory;

4. Configure Nakadion and the access token provider

// You only need this if you do not want to
// create this from the environment
use nakadion::api::SubscriptionRequest;

// This can be configured via environment variables
let subscription_discovery = SubscriptionDiscovery::Application(
    SubscriptionRequest {
        owning_application : "my_app".to_string(),
        event_types: vec!["my_event_type".to_string()],
        read_from: None,
    }
);

// Create a builder and configure it
let builder = NakadionBuilder::default()
    .nakadi_host("https://my.nakadi.net")
    .subscription_discovery(subscription_discovery);

// We also need to tell Nakadion how to get tokens
let token_provider = NoAuthAccessTokenProvider;

5. Start Nakadion

// Start Nakadion
let nakadion = builder.build_and_start(handler_factory, token_provider).unwrap();

// Nakadion will stop once the binding `nakadion` runs out of scope.
// Nakadion can be cloned and also be stopped it manually
// You can also let Nakadion block the current thread until it stops.
nakadion.block_until_stopped();

How Nakadion works

Load balancing

A started instance connects to the Nakadi Event Broker with one active connection. Due to Nakadi`s capability of automatically distributing partitions among clients Nakadion does not need to track concurrently consuming clients. In most use cases it does not make any sense to have more clients running than the number partitions assigned to an event type.

Consuming events

Nakadi delivers events in batches. Each batch contains the events of a single partition along with a cursor that is used for reporting progress to Nakadi.

To consume events with Nakadion one has to implement a BatchHandler. This BatchHandler provides the processing logic and is passed the bytes containing the events of a batch.

Nakadion itself does not do any deserialization of events. The BatchHandler is responsible for deserializing events. Nevertheless there is a TypedBatchHandler for convinience that does the deserialization of events using serde.

When Nakadion receives a batch it just extract the necessary data from the bytes received over the network and then delagates the batch to a dispatcher which spawns workers that are then passed the batch.

This means Nakadion itself does not have any knowledge of the events contained in a batch.

Buffering batches and maximizing throughput

Nakadion has an unbounded buffer for events. When looking at how Nakadi works it turns out that a bounded buffer is not necessary.

Nakadi has a timeout for committing the cursors of batches. This tiemout is 60 seconds. Furthermore Nakadi has a configuration parameter called max_uncommitted_events. With this paramteter which can be configured for Nakadion one can steer how many events can be at most in Nakadions buffers. In conjunction with a CommitStrategy one can optimize for maximum throughput and keep the amount of buffered events under control.

Logging

Nakadion does verbose logging when connecting to a stream and when a stream is closed. The reason is that this information can be quite important when probles arise. A reconnect happens roughly every full hour unless configured otherwise on Nakadi's side.

Nakadion also logs a message each time a new worker is created and each time a worker is shut down.

Otherwise Nakadion only logs problems and errors.

So in the end your log files will not be flodded with messages from Nakadion.

Metrics

Nakadion provides an interface for attaching metrics libraries. Metrics are especially useful when optimizing for maximum throughput since one can see what effect (especially on cursors) the different possible settings have.

Performance

Nakadion is not meant to be used in a high performance scenario. It uses synchronous IO. Nevertheless it is easily possible to consume tens of thousands events per second depending on the complexity of your processing logic.

Recent Changes

• 0.11.2 more logging on workers
• 0.11.0 use reqwest 0.9
• 0.10.2
  • update crate uuid to 0.7
• 0.10.1
  • Event types must be an optional vec in the incoming metadata
• 0.10.0
  • Improved typed TypedHandler to handle deserialization failures on individual events
  • Updated metrix to 0.8
• 0.9.0
  • Updated metrix to 0.7

License

Nakadion is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0).

See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.

License: Apache-2.0/MIT