I came across the link below, and have questions:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable/durable-functions-checkpointing-and-replay
1 When an OrchestrationTrigger Durable Function is invoked, and crashes for some reasons (e.g. after max timeout duration of 10 mins), will the inputs, names, below be read from table storage or queue automatically.
[FunctionName("E1_HelloSequence")]
public static async Task<List<string>> Run(
[OrchestrationTrigger] DurableOrchestrationContext context)
{
var names= ctx.GetInput<List<string>>();
var outputs = new List<string>();
outputs.Add(await context.CallActivityAsync<string>("E1_SayHello", names[0]));
outputs.Add(await context.CallActivityAsync<string>("E1_SayHello", names[1]));
// returns ["Hello Tokyo!", "Hello Seattle!"]
return outputs;
}
2 After it crashes, will it re-start automatically.
3 At each await, the function transits into wait status, does the wait period contribute to part of max timeout duration?
Hi as Chris from Function Product Group is already involved with you on GitHub Thread.
Posting it here so that it is beneficial for other members as well.
1) Yes, the results of any executed activity function will be read from table storage.
2) Yes, the function will retry automatically. An existing queue message ensures this.
3) No, time spent awaiting does not count against your max function timeout. Nor are you
billed for time spent awaiting.
Related
I am creating an architecture to process our orders from an ecommerce website who gets 10,000 orders or more every hour. We are using an external third party order fulfillment service and they have about 5 Steps/APIs that we have to run which are dependent upon each other.
I was thinking of using Fan in/Fan Out approach where we can use durable functions.
My plan
Once the order is created on our end, we store in a table with a flag of Order completed.
Run a time trigger azure function that runs the durable function orchestrator which calls the activity functions for each step
Now if it fails, timer will pick up the order again until it is completed. But my question is should we put this order in service bus and pick it up from there instead of time trigger.
Because there can be more than 10,000 records each hour so we have to run a query in the time trigger function and find orders that are not completed and run the durable orchestrator 10,000 times in a loop. My first question - Can I run the durable function parallelly for 10,000 records?
If I use service bus trigger to trigger durable orchestrator, it will automatically run azure function and durable 10,000 times parallelly right? But in this instance, I will have to build a dead letter queue function/process so if it fails, we are able to move it to active topic
Questions:
Is durable function correct approach or is there a better and easier approach?
If yes, Is time trigger better or Service bus trigger to start the orchestrator function?
Can I run the durable function orchestrator parallelly through time trigger azure function. I am not talking about calling activity functions because those cannot be run parallelly because we need output of one to be input of the next
This usecase fits function chaining. This can be done by
Have the ordering system put a message on a queue (storage or servicebus)
Create an azure function with storage queue trigger or service bus trigger. This would also be the client function that triggers the orchestration function
Create an orchestration function that invokes the 5 step APIs, one activity function for each (similar to as given in function chaining example.
Create five activity function, one f for each API
Ordering system
var clientOptions = new ServiceBusClientOptions
{
TransportType = ServiceBusTransportType.AmqpWebSockets
};
//TODO: Replace the "<NAMESPACE-NAME>" and "<QUEUE-NAME>" placeholders.
client = new ServiceBusClient(
"<NAMESPACE-NAME>.servicebus.windows.net",
new DefaultAzureCredential(),
clientOptions);
sender = client.CreateSender("<QUEUE-NAME>");
var message = new ServiceBusMessage($"{orderId}");
await sender.SendMessageAsync(message);
Client function
public static class OrderFulfilment
{
[Function("OrderFulfilment")]
public static string Run([ServiceBusTrigger("<QUEUE-NAME>", Connection = "ServiceBusConnection")] string orderId,
[DurableClient] IDurableOrchestrationClient starter)
{
var logger = context.GetLogger("OrderFulfilment");
logger.LogInformation(orderId);
return starter.StartNewAsync("ChainedApiCalls", orderId);
}
}
Orchestration function
[FunctionName("ChainedApiCalls")]
public static async Task<object> Run([OrchestrationTrigger] IDurableOrchestrationContext fulfillmentContext)
{
try
{
// .... get order with orderId
var a = await context.CallActivityAsync<object>("ApiCaller1", null);
var b = await context.CallActivityAsync<object>("ApiCaller2", a);
var c = await context.CallActivityAsync<object>("ApiCaller3", b);
var d = await context.CallActivityAsync<object>("ApiCaller4", c);
return await context.CallActivityAsync<object>("ApiCaller5", d);
}
catch (Exception)
{
// Error handling or compensation goes here.
}
}
Activity functions
[FunctionName("ApiCaller1")]
public static string ApiCaller1([ActivityTrigger] IDurableActivityContext fulfillmentApiContext)
{
string input = fulfillmentApiContext.GetInput<string>();
return $"API1 result";
}
[FunctionName("ApiCaller2")]
public static string ApiCaller2([ActivityTrigger] IDurableActivityContext fulfillmentApiContext)
{
string input = fulfillmentApiContext.GetInput<string>();
return $"API2 result";
}
// Repeat 3 more times...
I am running on an Azure Consumption Plan. And notice high CPU usage with what I understand as a simple task. I would like to know if my approach is correct. At times CPU was above 80%
I have created a scheduler function, which executes once a minute and checks a SQL db for IoT devices that needs to control at specific times. If the device needs to be controlled, and durable function is executed. This durable function simply sends the device a message and wait for the reply before sending another request.
What I am doing is simply polling the durable function and then sleeping or delaying the function for x seconds as shown below:
[FunctionName("Irrimer_HttpStart")]
public static async Task<HttpResponseMessage> HttpStart(
[HttpTrigger(AuthorizationLevel.Anonymous, "get", "post")]HttpRequestMessage req,
[OrchestrationClient]DurableOrchestrationClient starter,
ILogger log)
{
// Function input comes from the request content.
log.LogInformation($"Started Timmer Irr");
dynamic eventData = await req.Content.ReadAsAsync<object>();
string ZoneNumber = eventData.ZoneNumber;
string instanceId = await starter.StartNewAsync("Irrtimer", ZoneNumber);
return starter.CreateCheckStatusResponse(req, instanceId);
}
public static async Task<List<string>> RunOrchestrator(
[OrchestrationTrigger] DurableOrchestrationContext context, ILogger log)
{
log.LogInformation($"Time Control Started--->");
Iot_data_state iotstatedata = new Iot_data_state();
iotstatedata.NextState = "int_zone";
var outputs = new List<string>();
outputs.Add("Stating Durable");
iotstatedata.zonenumber = context.GetInput<string>();
iotstatedata.termination_counter = 0;
while (iotstatedata.NextState != "finished")
{
iotstatedata = await context.CallActivityAsync<Iot_data_state>("timer_irr_process", iotstatedata);
outputs.Add(iotstatedata.NextState + " " + iotstatedata.now_time);
if (iotstatedata.sleepduration > 0)
{
DateTime deadline = context.CurrentUtcDateTime.Add(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(iotstatedata.sleepduration));
await context.CreateTimer(deadline, CancellationToken.None);
}
}
return outputs;
}
I have another function "timer_irr_process", which is simply a case statement, which performs and queries as required. Then sets the delay in seconds before it needs to be invoked again. When it gets to the case "Finish", this means the durable function is no longer needed and it exists.
The kind of tasks i am trying to create efficiently is sending a message to IoT device to switch On, observe it performance incase its been controlled manually or various other things. If it malfunctions send a message to a user, if it preforms correctly and task is finished , close the durable function.
Is the any efficient away to doing this?
We are using queue trigger based function app on premium plan where messages contains some details like azure subscriptions name. Based on which for each subscription we do many api calls specially to azure storage accounts(around 400 to 500). Since 'list' api call to storage account is limited to 100 call/5min, we get 429 response error on 101th call. To mitigate this we have applied exponential retry logic(tried both our own or polly library) which call after certain delay of time. This works for some subscription but fails for many where the retry logic does not try after first trying(we kept 3 retries with 60 sec delay). Even while monitoring the function app through live metrics we observed that sometimes cpu usage of some function instance goes to zero(although we do some operation like logging or use for loop in delay operation so that the function can be alive) which leads to killing of that particular function instance and pushing the message back to queue and start the process again with a fresh instance.
Note that since many subscription are processed in parallel, function app automatically scale up as required. Also since we are using premium plan one VM is always on state. So killing of any instance(which call around 400 to 500 storage api call for any particular subscription) is weird since in our delay the thread sleep time is only 10 sec for around 6,12,18(Time_delay) iteration. The below delay function is used in our retry logic code.
private void Delay(int Time_delay, string requestUri, int retryCount)
{
for (int i = 0; i < Time_delay; i++)
{
_logger.LogWarning($"Sleep initiated for id: {requestUri.ToString()}, RetryCount: {retryCount} CurrentTimeDelay: {Time_delay}");
Thread.Sleep(10000);
_logger.LogWarning($"Sleep completed for id: {requestUri.ToString()}, RetryCount: {retryCount} CurrentTimeDelay: {Time_delay}");
}
}
Note** Function app is not throwing any other exception other than dependency of 429 error response.
Would it be possible for you to requeue instead of using Thread.Sleep? You can use initial visibility delay when requeuing:
public class Function1
{
[FunctionName(nameof(TryDoWork))]
public static async Task TryDoWork(
[QueueTrigger("some-queue")] SomeItem item,
[Queue("some-queue")] CloudQueue queue)
{
var result = _SomeService.SomeWork(item);
if (result == 429)
{
item.Retries++;
var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(item);
var message = new CloudQueueMessage(json);
var delay = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(item.Retries);
await queue.AddMessageAsync(message, null, delay, null, null);
}
}
}
It might be that the sleeping is causing some wonky function app behavior. I think I remember reading some issues pertaining to the usage of Thread.Sleep, but I can't find it right now.
Also, you might want to add some sort of handling of messages that end up retrying more than 3 times (or however many you think is reasonable).
I have an EventHub configured in Azure, also a consumer group for reading the data. It was working fine for some days. Suddenly, I see there is a delay in incoming data(around 3 days). I use Windows Service to consume data in my server. I have around 500 incoming messages per minute. Can anyone help me out to figure this out ?
It might be that you are processing them items too slow. Therefore the work to be done grows and you will lag behind.
To get some insight in where you are in the event stream you can use code like this:
private void LogProgressRecord(PartitionContext context)
{
if (namespaceManager == null)
return;
var currentSeqNo = context.Lease.SequenceNumber;
var lastSeqNo = namespaceManager.GetEventHubPartition(context.EventHubPath, context.ConsumerGroupName, context.Lease.PartitionId).EndSequenceNumber;
var delta = lastSeqNo - currentSeqNo;
logWriter.Write(
$"Last processed seqnr for partition {context.Lease.PartitionId}: {currentSeqNo} of {lastSeqNo} in consumergroup '{context.ConsumerGroupName}' (lag: {delta})",
EventLevel.Informational);
}
the namespaceManager is build like this:
namespaceManager = NamespaceManager.CreateFromConnectionString("Endpoint=sb://xxx.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=yyy;SharedAccessKey=zzz");
I call this logging method in the CloseAsync method:
public Task CloseAsync(PartitionContext context, CloseReason reason)
{
LogProgressRecord(context);
return Task.CompletedTask;
}
logWriter is just some logging class I have used to write info to blob storage.
It now outputs messages like
Last processed seqnr for partition 3: 32780931 of 32823804 in consumergroup 'telemetry' (lag: 42873)
so when the lag is very high you could be processing events that have occurred a long time ago. In that case you need to scale up/out your processor.
If you notice a lag you should measure how long it takes to process a given number of item. You can then try to optimize performance and see whether it improves. We did it like:
public async Task ProcessEventsAsync(PartitionContext context, IEnumerable<EventData> events)
{
try
{
stopwatch.Restart();
// process items here
stopwatch.Stop();
await CheckPointAsync(context);
logWriter.Write(
$"Processed {events.Count()} events in {stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds}ms using partition {context.Lease.PartitionId} in consumergroup {context.ConsumerGroupName}.",
EventLevel.Informational);
}
}
I have an async method that gets api data from a server. When I run this code on my local machine, in a console app, it performs at high speed, pushing through a few hundred http calls in the async function per minute. When I put the same code to be triggered from an Azure WebJob queue message however, it seems to operate synchronously and my numbers crawl - I'm sure I am missing something simple in my approach - any assistance appreciated.
(1) .. WebJob function that listens for a message on queue and kicks off the api get process on message received:
public class Functions
{
// This function will get triggered/executed when a new message is written
// on an Azure Queue called queue.
public static async Task ProcessQueueMessage ([QueueTrigger("myqueue")] string message, TextWriter log)
{
var getAPIData = new GetData();
getAPIData.DoIt(message).Wait();
log.WriteLine("*** done: " + message);
}
}
(2) the class that outside azure works in async mode at speed...
class GetData
{
// wrapper that is called by the message function trigger
public async Task DoIt(string MessageFile)
{
await CallAPI(MessageFile);
}
public async Task<string> CallAPI(string MessageFile)
{
/// create a list of sample APIs to call...
var apiCallList = new List<string>();
apiCallList.Add("localhost/?q=1");
apiCallList.Add("localhost/?q=2");
apiCallList.Add("localhost/?q=3");
apiCallList.Add("localhost/?q=4");
apiCallList.Add("localhost/?q=5");
// setup httpclient
HttpClient client =
new HttpClient() { MaxResponseContentBufferSize = 10000000 };
var timeout = new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0); // 5 min timeout
client.Timeout = timeout;
// create a list of http api get Task...
IEnumerable<Task<string>> allResults = apiCallList.Select(str => ProcessURLPageAsync(str, client));
// wait for them all to complete, then move on...
await Task.WhenAll(allResults);
return allResults.ToString();
}
async Task<string> ProcessURLPageAsync(string APIAddressString, HttpClient client)
{
string page = "";
HttpResponseMessage resX;
try
{
// set the address to call
Uri URL = new Uri(APIAddressString);
// execute the call
resX = await client.GetAsync(URL);
page = await resX.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
string rslt = page;
// do something with the api response data
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
// log error
}
return page;
}
}
First because your triggered function is async, you should use await rather than .Wait(). Wait will block the current thread.
public static async Task ProcessQueueMessage([QueueTrigger("myqueue")] string message, TextWriter log)
{
var getAPIData = new GetData();
await getAPIData.DoIt(message);
log.WriteLine("*** done: " + message);
}
Anyway you'll be able to find usefull information from the documentation
Parallel execution
If you have multiple functions listening on different queues, the SDK will call them in parallel when messages are received simultaneously.
The same is true when multiple messages are received for a single queue. By default, the SDK gets a batch of 16 queue messages at a time and executes the function that processes them in parallel. The batch size is configurable. When the number being processed gets down to half of the batch size, the SDK gets another batch and starts processing those messages. Therefore the maximum number of concurrent messages being processed per function is one and a half times the batch size. This limit applies separately to each function that has a QueueTrigger attribute.
Here is a sample code to configure the batch size:
var config = new JobHostConfiguration();
config.Queues.BatchSize = 50;
var host = new JobHost(config);
host.RunAndBlock();
However, it is not always a good option to have too many threads running at the same time and could lead to bad performance.
Another option is to scale out your webjob:
Multiple instances
if your web app runs on multiple instances, a continuous WebJob runs on each machine, and each machine will wait for triggers and attempt to run functions. The WebJobs SDK queue trigger automatically prevents a function from processing a queue message multiple times; functions do not have to be written to be idempotent. However, if you want to ensure that only one instance of a function runs even when there are multiple instances of the host web app, you can use the Singleton attribute.
Have a read of this Webjobs SDK documentation - the behaviour you should expect is that your process will run and process one message at a time, but will scale up if more instances are created (of your app service). If you had multiple queues, they will trigger in parallel.
In order to improve the performance, see the configurations settings section in the link I sent you, which refers to the number of messages that can be triggered in a batch.
If you want to process multiple messages in parallel though, and don't want to rely on instance scaling, then you need to use threading instead (async isn't about multi-threaded parallelism, but making more efficient use of the thread you're using). So your queue trigger function should read the message from the queue, the create a thread and "fire and forget" that thread, and then return from the trigger function. This will mark the message as processed, and allow the next message on the queue to be processed, even though in theory you're still processing the earlier one. Note you will need to include your own logic for error handling and ensuring that the data wont get lost if your thread throws an exception or can't process the message (eg. put it on a poison queue).
The other option is to not use the [queuetrigger] attribute, and use the Azure storage queues sdk API functions directly to connect and process the messages per your requirements.