galeaspablo

Let’s separate two advantages in the average case with Kafka.

1. Sequential IO when reading from disk.

2. Use of disk cache (instead of reading from disk) when re-reading recently read events.

#2 helps when you have many consumer groups reading from the tail. And this advantage would extend to index-based streaming.

But #1 would not fully extend to index-based streaming.

When does this matter? When adding a new consumer group you would lose the speed advantage of sequential IO, because it consumes from the beginning (which isn’t in disk cache).

BUT this has become less important now that SSDs are so prevalent and affordable. Additionally, in practice, the bottleneck isn’t in disk IO. Consumers tend to perform IO in other systems that incur O(log n) per insert. Or network cards can get saturated way before disk IO is the limiting factor.

I speculate that we got Kafka et al because we didn’t have such abundance of SSDs in the early 2010’s.

So, returning to your question, you wouldn’t notice the difference in the average case, as long as there are SSDs under the hood.

No problem. :)

Yes, order needs to be known.

So no, it’s not possible to do O(w+h) with streams partitioned by key. Unless, of course you use a supplementary index, but then you might as well not use the streams storage at all and store the records in the same storage as the index.

It’s worth noting that Pulsar does something like this (supplementary way to keep track of acknowledged messages), but their implementation has O(n^2) edge cases.

Option 1, but after so many years banging our heads against the wall reasoning about this, we hoped someone would eventually give us a queue that supports arbitrary causal dependency graphs.

We thought about building it ourselves, because we know the data structures, high level algorithms, and disk optimizations required. BUT we pivoted our company, so we've postponed this for the foreseeable future. After all, theory is relatively easy, but a true production grade implementation takes years.

Great intuition. Exactly right. More details in one of my other comments, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43796688

Great follow up question, thank you. I could talk about this "topic" for days, so I appreciate the opportunity to expand. :)

Let's imagine ourselves as a couple of engineers at Acme Foreign Exchange House. We'd like to track Acme's net cash position across multiple currencies, and execute trades accordingly (e.g., heding). And we'd like to retrospectively analyze our hedges, to assess their effectiveness.

Let's say I have this set of transactions (for accounts A, B, C, D, E, F, etc.)

A1 -> A2 -> A3 -> A4

B1 -> B2 -> B3 -> B4

C1-> C2

D1 -> D2 -> D3 -> D4

E1 -> E2

F1

Let's say that that:

- E1 was a deposit made into account E for $2M USD.

- E2 was an outgoing transfer of $2M USD sent to account F (incoming £1.7M GBP at F1).

If we consume our transactions and partiton our consumption by account id, we could get into a state where E1 and F1 are reflected in our net position, but E2 isn't. That is, our calculation has both $2M USD and £1.7M GBP, when in reality we only ever held either $2M USD or £1.7M GBP.

So what could we do?

1. Make sure that we respect causality order. I.e., there's no F1 reflected in our net position if we haven't processed E2.

2. Make sure that pairs of transactions (e.g., E2 and F1) update our net position atomically.

This is otherwise known as a "consistent cut" (see slide 25 here https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6410/2011fa/lectures/19...).

Opinion: the world is causally ordered in arbitrary ways as above. But the tools, frameworks, and infrastructure more readily available to us struggle at modeling arbitrary partially ordered causality graphs. So we shrug our shoulders, and we learn to live with the edge cases. But it doesn't have to be so.

Apologies, we've been so deep into this problem that we take our slang for granted :)

A graphical representation might be worth a thousand words, keeping in mind it's just one example. Imagine you're traversing the following.

A1 -> A2 -> A3...

|

v

B1 -> B2 -> B3...

|

v

C1 -> C2 -> C3...

|

v

D1 -> D2 -> D3...

|

v

E1 -> E2 -> E3...

|

v

F1 -> F2 -> F3...

|

v

...

Efficient concurrent consumption of these messages (while respecting causal dependency) would take O(w + h), where w = the _width_ (left to right) of the longest sequence, and h = the _height_ (top to bottom of the first column)

But Pulsar, Kafka + parallel consumer, Et al. would take O(n^2) either in processing time or in space complexity. This is because at a fundamental level, the underlying data storages store looks like this

A1 -> A2 -> A3...

B1 -> B2 -> B3...

C1 -> C2 -> C3...

D1 -> D2 -> D3...

E1 -> E2 -> E3...

F1 -> F2 -> F3...

Notice that the underlying data storage loses information about nodes with multiple children (e.g., A1 previously parented both A2 and B1)

If we want to respect order, the consumer will be responsible for declining to process messages that don't respect causal order. E.g., attempting to process F1 before E1. Thus we could get into a situation where we try to process F1, then E1, then D1, then C1, then B1, then A1. Now that A1 is processed, kafka tries again, but it tries F1, then E1, then D1, then C1, then B1... And so on and so forth. This is O(n^2) behavior.

Without changing the underlying data storage architecture, you will either:

1. Incur O(n^2) space or time complexity

2. Reimplement the queuing mechanism at the consumer level, but then you might as well not even use Kafka (or others) at all. In practice this is not practical (my evidence being that no one has pulled it off).

3. Face other nasty issues (e.g., in Kafka parallel consumer you can run out of memory or your processing time can become O(n^2)).

Some input from previously working on a superset of this problem. And being in a similar position.

Mature projects have too much bureacracy, and even spending time talking to you = opportunity cost. So making a case for why you're going to solve a problem for them is tough.

New projects (whether at big companies or small companies) have 20 other things to worry about, so the problem isn't big enough.

I wrote about this in our blog if you're curious: https://ambar.cloud/blog/a-new-path-for-ambar

Right on, great question. Some examples:

Example Option 1

You give up on the guarantees across partition keys (bank accounts), and you accept that balances will not reflect a causally consistent state of the past.

E.g., Bob deposits 100, Bob sends 50 to Alice.

Balances: Bob 0 Alice 50 # the source system was never in this state Bob 100 Alice 50 # the source system was never in this state Bob 50 Alice 50 # eventually consistent final state

Example Option 2

You give up on parallelism, and consume in total order (i.e., one single partition / unit of parallelism - e.g., in Kafka set a partitioner that always hashes to the same value).

Example Option 3

In the consumer you "wait" whenever you get a message that violates causal order.

E.g., Bob deposits 100 Bob sends 50 to Alice (Bob-MoneyOut 50 -> Alice-MoneyIn 50).

If we attempt to consume Alice-MoneyIn before Bob-MoneyOut, we exponentially back off from the partition containing Alice-MoneyIn.

(Option 3 is terrible because of O(n^2) processing times in the worst case and the possibility for deadlocks (two partitions are waiting for one another))

That's correct. And keep in mind that you might have new consumers starting from the beginning come into play, so you have to permanently retain the indexes.

And yes, O(n log n ) is not bad at all. Sorted database indexes (whether SQL, NoSQL, or AcmeVendorSQL, etc.) already take O(n log n) to insert n elements into data storage or to read n elements from data storage.

Disclosure (given this is from Confluent): I'm ex MSK (Managed Streaming for Kafka at AWS) and my current company was competing with Confluent before we pivoted.

Yup, this is one more example, just like Pulsar. There are definitely great optimizations to be made on the average case. In the case of parallel consumer, if you'd like to keep ordering guarantees, you retain O(n^2) processing time in the worst case.

The issues arise when you try to traverse arbitrary dependency topologies in your messages. So you're left with two options:

1. Make damn sure that causal dependencies don't exhibit O(n^2) behavior, which requires formal models to be 100% sure. 2. Give up ordering or make some other nasty tradeoff.

At a high level the problem boils down to traversing a DAG in topological order. From computer science theory, we know that this requires a sorted index. And if you're implementing an index on top of Kafka, you might as well embed your data into and consume directly from the index. Of course, this is easier said than done, and that's why no one has cracked this problem yet. We were going to try, but alas we pivoted :)

Edit: Topological sort does not required a sorted index (or similar) if you don't care about concurrency. But then you've lost the advantages of your queue.

It is useful, but it is not generally applicable.

Given an arbitrary causality graph between n messages, it would be ideal if you could consume your messages in topological order. And that you could do so in O(n log n).

No queuing system in the world does arbitrary causality graphs without O(n^2) costs. I dream of the day where this changes.

And because of this, we’ve adapted our message causality topologies to cope with the consuming mechanisms of Kafka et al

To make this less abstract, imagine you have two bank accounts, each with a stream. MoneyOut in Bob’s account should come BEFORE MoneyIn when he transfers to Alice’s account, despite each bank account having different partition keys.

Agreed. The head of line problem is worth solving for certain use cases.

But today, all streaming systems (or workarounds) with per message key acknowledgements incur O(n^2) costs in either computation, bandwidth, or storage per n messages. This applies to Pulsar for example, which is often used for this feature.

Now, now, this degenerate time/space complexity might not show up every day, but when it does, you’re toast, and you have to wait it out.

My colleagues and I have studied this problem in depth for years, and our conclusion is that a fundamental architectural change is needed to support scalable per message key acknowledgements. Furthermore, the architecture will fundamentally require a sorted index, meaning that any such a queuing / streaming system will process n messages in O (n log n).

We’ve wanted to blog about this for a while, but never found the time. I hope this comment helps out if you’re thinking of relying on per message key acknowledgments; you should expect sporadic outages / delays.

Thanks for posting the NPR source.

I read about the anesthesia case from VOX, and they claimed the opposite, namely that there would be no additional costs for the patients https://www.vox.com/policy/390031/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shi...

Good leadership is spot on! Agreed. The cynic part of me sees incentives that discourage mature leadership styles.

Leaders tend to be impatient and think of this quarter’s OKRs as opposed to the business’ long term financial health. In other word the leaders of leaders use standard MBA prescribed incentive structures.

Many engineers don’t truly care about the correctness issue, until it’s too late. Similar to security.

Or they care but don’t bother checking whether what they’re doing is correct.

For example, in my field, where microservices/actors/processes pass messages between each other over a network, I dare say >95% of implementations I see have edge cases where messages might be lost or processed out of order.

But there isn’t an alignment of incentives that fixes this problem. Ie the payment structures for executives and engineers aren’t aligned with the best outcome for customers and shareholders.

If anything, even if he’s aware, I’d say it’s pretty much in line with the spirit.

Albeit, I can’t speak for Tim O’Reilly, but just like I don’t expect to become a billionaire from writing an open source framework, I don’t go around crediting absolutely everything or tipping back. If I assume best intentions (in line with the spirit of HN), it doesn’t look like DHH is trying to make a claim to fame on the back of this phrase.

I can’t help but read this under the lens of my own experiences. For me open source is really about capturing less than I create, much like it’s written in the article. Heck, I’m a founder and we haven’t open sourced our product because we don’t want to do a “pretend” open source like others do, where it’s really just a marketing tool for enterprise.

It does help that I’ve always been able to make ends meet, so that keeps my idealistic vision of open source alive.

In any case, this was an excellent response to https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/

Yes, for operational use cases. Eg event driven microservices communication. Keeping in mind we replace the sink as well, which allows us to do cool things such as https://ambar.cloud/blog/optimal-consumption-with-adaptive-l...

For analytics (eg copy your PG database to Snowflake), Debezium is still relevant.

Hey Denis, I haven’t run into you before. But hi, this is Luis, Ambar’s founder. Nice to meet a fellow data streamer.

When I started writing Ambar I thought streaming from a database was a solved problem. But in operational use cases where ordering and delivery guarantees are assumptions developers need, it isn’t a solved problem. The first version of Ambar was just Debezium under the hood, but guess what, it failed and failed hard. Like you described Kafka. Hence we built Ambar :)

FYI we’ve considered using Redpanda under the hood instead of Kafka, but didn’t dare make the jump yet.

We use Kafka under the hood. We stream instead of poll. We used to work at the Kafka team in AWS :)

Our thesis is that a big blocker is the PhD the whole team needs in Kafka. For example, if you want to set up an API similar to Ambar with tools like Kafka connect, the connectors have failure modes that will bite you once a year and bite you hard. Eg losing your changelog in MySQL, and having to start from scratch or risk losing ordering guarantees.

Disclosure: this post is from my colleague.

A: You have managed vendors that simplify Kafka, such as MSK, Confluent, and Redpanda. And other software like Pulsar.

But we believe the solution to the time sink exposed in the article lies one level of abstraction higher. In the case of data analytics, there are tools/companies such as Decodable/Streamkap/Airbyte that simplify your life as an engineer.

In the case of operational streaming, we (Ambar) are making a bet on the tried and tested outbox/inbox pattern as a replacement for producing directly into Kafka et al, and thus managing all of its quirks and complexities. That’s the alternative we offer, but of course there are other folks in this space.

Admittedly, we didn’t dive deep into alternatives in the post. But we did explain at the end that we’ll cover it in another post. I’ll add a link at the bottom later pointing to some alternatives. :)

Thanks for reading!

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Thanks for sharing your journey. Did you consider open sourcing earlier? Ie as a means of getting distribution / more customers at the price of giving some value away for free?

“Dumb” could be reworded ;)

I would say “irrational when it comes to costs”. Not all developers ask questions such as:

Does paying 10K for convenience save me and my team more than 10k worth of time? Does this vendor make it easy to migrate out?

Of course I’m biased, because I like it better when the answers favor us, cloud vendors. But there are no catch all answers; as always, it depends.

Oh I see. Yeah it does the job. :)

Margins are high. 30-80%

Source: I run a cloud company and have plenty of friends in the space.

As in emulators for different devices a la browser stack. This is more or less a solved problem IME through vendors. Or did you mean something else?

We’ve experimented with this at Ambar. 4000 CAC can be good or bad depending on the LTV of your customers. But if you can indeed get something reproducible you can work on optimizing if you’re within the order of magnitude of being profitable.

But on a small budget, before dumping money on PPC, I recommend getting better signals on intent, even if you don’t get a conversion.

Measure what people are doing once they land, and optimize for better engagement. since ready test your theory to see if you can indeed get customers for 4000 bucks or less.

your standard may vary.

Agreed. My overall / initial point was that I can’t say the time to crack = the time to brute force and start talking about the age of the universe. Even if we had to wait 10,000 years for cryptanalysis to break AES, it’s a blink of an eye in sideral timescale.

quantum cryptography

Quantum cryptography is helpful in detecting eavesdropping (due to the no clone theorem). Ie quantum cryptography is helpful in avoiding asymmetric encryption for key exchange when communicating with symmetric encryption. Eg BB84. And given asymmetric encryption is most vulnerable to quantum attacks (compared to symmetric), quantum cryptography improves today’s state of the art. BUT, I insist that none of this gives provably uncrackable schemes.

AND it might be that we never build such a scheme. After all we have Godel’s incompleteness theorem lying around.

Again, I didn’t say symmetric cryptography :)