What is the difference between FAILED AND ERROR in spark application states - apache-spark

I am trying to create a state diagram of a submitted spark application. I and kind of lost on when then an application is considered FAILED.
States are from here: https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/d6dc12ef0146ae409834c78737c116050961f350/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/deploy/master/DriverState.scala

This stage is very important, since when it comes to Big Data, Spark is awesome, but let's face it, we haven't solve the problem yet!
When a task/job fails, Spark restarts it (recall that the RDD, the main abstraction Spark provides, is a Resilient Distributed Dataset, which is not what we are looking for here, but it would give the intuition).
I use Spark 1.6.2 and my cluster restarts the job/task 3 times, when it is marked as FAILED.
For example, one of my recent jobs had to restart a whole stage:
In the cluster/app, one can see the attempt IDs, here the application is in its 3rd and final attempt:
If that attempt is marked as FAILED (for whatever reason, e.g. out-of-memory, bad DNS, GC allocation memory, disk failed, node didn't respond to the 4 heartbeats (probably is down), etc.), then Spark relaunches the job.

Related

What will happen if my driver or executor is lost in Spark while running an spark-application?

Three questions of similarity:
what will happen if one my one executor is lost.
what will happen if my driver is lost.
What will happen in case of stage failure.
In all the above cases, are they recoverable? If yes, how to recover. Is there any option in "SparkConf", setting which these can be prevented from?
Thanks.
Spark use job scheduling. DAGScheduler is implemented by cluster managers (Standalone, YARN, Mesos), and your cluster manager can re-schedule the failed task.
For example, if you use YARN, try tweaking spark.yarn.maxAppAttempts and yarn.resourcemanager.am.max-attempts. Also, you can try to manually track jobs using the HTTP API: https://community.hortonworks.com/articles/28070/starting-spark-jobs-directly-via-yarn-rest-api.html
If you want to recover from logical errors, you can try checkpointing (saving records to HDFS for later use): https://mallikarjuna_g.gitbooks.io/spark/content/spark-streaming/spark-streaming-checkpointing.html. (For really long and important pipelines I recommend saving your data in normal files instead of checkpoints!).
Configuring high-available clusters is a more complex task than tweaking 1 setting in SparkConf. You can try to implement different scenarios and return with more detailed questions. As a first step, you can try to run everything on YARN.

How is abnormal Driver termination handled for a Spark App in Yarn cluster mode

We're using AWS EMR for our spark jobs. All our jobs are submitted in yarn cluster mode, so the driver will run in one of the cluster nodes. We use on-demand node for master, and spot-instances for the core nodes. Now, although we almost always choose instances with < 5% interruption rate, sometimes it so happens that a significant fraction of our cluster nodes get terminated prematurely (probably because of higher demands).
So, I was wondering, in the above situation, what happens if a node containing the driver process goes down? Is there any chance of recovery for the spark job in that case? Or is the job gone forever?
The Spark driver is a single point of failure because it holds all cluster state for the running App.
In practice non-ephemeral storage can be used for check-pointing batch Apps after expensive expensive transformations. That said, trying to re-start after such a situation can be done, but when I looked into it, it is quite difficult to say the least. I asked such a question under my name some time ago, you can find it. I am quite technical but felt: gosh what a lot of hard work.
So, the recovery means rolling your own stuff, or accepting a re-run. Since I last evaluated EMR I see that the driver can run on the Master and that can be failed-over, but that is not the same thing as far as I can see, nor what you wish.
EMR has node leveling for CORE nodes in Yarn. Your spark driver/ Application master only gets created in CORE nodes. And HDFS also resides in CORE nodes only.
So to handle your situation in a best way, you may consider to use both CORE and TASK group.
What you can do to tackle this -
MASTER: On-demand
CORE: On-demand. Minimum no of Instances can be 1.
TASK: Spot with autoscaling with minimal EBS volume. Minimum no of Instances can be 0 this case.
This will reduce your cost also ensure that node containing the driver process never goes down.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-master-core-task-nodes.html

How to ensure that DAG is not recomputed after the driver is restarted?

How can I ensure that an entire DAG of spark is highly available i.e. not recomputed from scratch when the driver is restarted (default HA in yarn cluster mode).
Currently, I use spark to orchestrate multiple smaller jobs i.e.
read table1
hash some columns
write to HDFS
this is performed for multiple tables.
Now when the driver is restarted i.e. when working on the second table the first one is reprocessed - though it already would have been stored successfully.
I believe that the default mechanism of checkpointing (the raw input values) would not make sense.
What would be a good solution here?
Is it possible to checkpoint the (small) configuration information and only reprocess what has not already been computed?
TL;DR Spark is not a task orchestration tool. While it has built-in scheduler and some fault tolerance mechanisms built-in, it as suitable for granular task management, as for example server orchestration (hey, we can call pipe on each machine to execute bash scripts, right).
If you want granular recovery choose a minimal unit of computation that makes sense for a given process (read, hash, write looks like a good choice, based on the description), make it an application and use external orchestration to submit the jobs.
You can build poor man's alternative, by checking if expected output exist and skipping part of the job in that case, but really don't - we have variety of battle tested tools which can do way better job than this.
As a side note Spark doesn't provide HA for the driver, only supervision with automatic restarts. Also independent jobs (read -> transform -> write) create independent DAGs - there is no global DAG and proper checkpoint of the application would require full snapshot of its state (like good old BLCR).
when the driver is restarted (default HA in yarn cluster mode).
When the driver of a Spark application is gone, your Spark application is gone and so are all the cached datasets. That's by default.
You have to use some sort of caching solution like https://www.alluxio.org/ or https://ignite.apache.org/. Both work with Spark and both claim to be offering the feature to outlive a Spark application.
There has been times when people used Spark Job Server to share data across Spark applications (which is similar to restarting Spark drivers).

Recovery after driver failure by exception with spark-streaming

We are currently working on a system using kafka, spark streaming, and Cassandra as DB. We are using checkpointing based on the content here [http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/streaming-programming-guide.html#checkpointing]. Inside the function used to create the Streaming context, we use createDirectStream to create our DStream and from this point, we execute several transformations and actions derived from call saveToCassandra on different RDDs
We are running different tests to establish how the application should recover when a failure occurs. Some key points about our scenario are:
We are testing with a fixed number of records in kafka (between 10 million and 20 million), that means, we consume from kafka once and the application brings all the records from kafka.
We are executing the application in --deploy-mode 'client' inside one of the workers, that means that we stop and start the driver manually.
We are not sure how to handle exceptions after DStreams were created, for example, if while writing to cassandra all nodes are dead, we get an exception that aborts the job, but after re-submitting the application, that job is not re-scheduled and the application keeps consuming from kafka getting multiple 'isEmpty' calls.
We made a couple of tests using 'cache' on the repartitioned RDD (which didn't work after a failure different than just stopping and starting the driver), and changing the parameters "query.retry.count", "query.retry.delay" and "spark.task.maxFailures" without success, e.g., the job is aborted after x failed times.
At this point we are confused on how should we use the checkpoint to re-schedule jobs after a failure.

Memsql Spark-Kafka Transform Failure

We have a Spark Cluster running under Memsql, We have different Pipelines running, The ETL setup is as below.
Extract:- Spark read Messages from Kafka Cluster (Using Memsql Kafka-Zookeeper)
Transform:- We have a custom jar deployed for this step
Load:- Data from Transform stage is Loaded in Columnstore
I have below doubts:
What Happens to the Message polled from Kafka, if the Job fails in Transform stage
- Does Memsql takes care of loading that Message again
- Or, the data is Lost
If the data gets Lost, how can I solve this Problem, is there any configuration changes which needs to done for this?
As it stands, at least once semantics are not available in MemSQL Ops. It is on the roadmap and will be present in one of the future releases of Ops.
If you haven't yet, you should check out MemSQL 5.5 Pipelines.
http://blog.memsql.com/pipelines/
This one isn't based on spark, (and transforms are done a bit differently so you might have to rewrite your code), but we have native kafka streams now.
The way we get exactly once with the native version is simple; store the offsets in the database same atomic transaction as the actual data. If something fails and the transaction isn't committed, the offsets won't be committed, so we'll naturally and automatically retry that partition-offset-range.

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