Beam Flink & Kubernetes

This repo is a bare minimum sample of running a python beam pipeline on flink deployed in a kubernetes cluster.

Setup (via minikube)

This assumes you're starting in an environment with python, a recent version of beam installed, and minikube.

Start up a simple minikube k8s cluster

minikube start --cpus 4 --memory=6144 --disk-size='20gb'

Build a slightly modified flink image that has docker installed. Building this directly in the minikube registry simplifies things.

eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker build ./flink -t docker-flink:1.10

Deployment

You can deploy flink with or without a job server. If you deploy without, you must run your pipeline using the FlinkRunner along with the option --flink_submit_uber_jar. The FlinkRunner will start a local job service via java and expects the client to have java install. Using flink_submit_uber_jar will pack all artifacts into the jar file it uploads to flink. This is required due to the local job server and the flink taskmanager not sharing the staging volume.

Alternatively you can deploy a job service into the k8s cluster and run your pipeline using the PortableRunner. This requires a more complicated k8s deployment because we must share volume between the job service and the flink taskmanager.

Flink With No Job Server

Deploy the flink components to kubernetes.

kubectl apply -f ./k8s/without_job_server/flink.yaml

Wait a minute for the pods to spin up.

kubectl get pods

Submit a beam pipeline.

FLINK_MASTER_URL=$(minikube service flink-jobmanager-rest --url)
python -m pipeline --runner=FlinkRunner --flink_version 1.10 --flink_master=${FLINK_MASTER_URL} --environment_type=DOCKER --save_main_session --flink_submit_uber_jar

Flink With Job Server

It's also possible to use the PortableRunner by submitting the pipeline to a job server running in k8s.

The job server and the flink taskmanagers need to share the same artifact staging volume. This is necessary so the sdk harness can find the artifacts.

First deploy the persistent volumes and claims.

kubectl apply -f ./k8s/with_job_server/shared.yaml

Then deploy flink.

kubectl apply -f ./k8s/with_job_server/flink.yaml

Last deploy the job server.

kubectl apply -f ./k8s/with_job_server/beam_flink_job_server.yaml

Submit a beam pipeline.

JOB_ENDPOINT=$(minikube service flink-beam-jobserver --url | sed '1q;d')
ARTIFACT_ENDPOINT=$(minikube service flink-beam-jobserver --url | sed '2q;d')
PYTHON_VERSION=$(python --version | cut -d" " -f2 | cut -d"." -f1-2)
BEAM_VERSION=$(python -c "import apache_beam;print(apache_beam.__version__)")
python -m pipeline --runner=PortableRunner --job_endpoint=${JOB_ENDPOINT} --artifact_endpoint=${ARTIFACT_ENDPOINT} --save_main_session --environment_type=DOCKER --environment_config=apache/beam_python${PYTHON_VERSION}_sdk:${BEAM_VERSION}

Tips, Monitoring, & Debugging

[TIP] Pre-download the sdk container in the docker-in-docker service on the taskworker. If you don't do this then the taskworker may timeout waiting for the sdk container to spin up.

PYTHON_VERSION=$(python --version | cut -d" " -f2 | cut -d"." -f1-2)
BEAM_VERSION=$(python -c "import apache_beam;print(apache_beam.__version__)")
TASKMANAGER_POD=$(kubectl get pods --selector=component=taskmanager --no-headers -o name)
kubectl exec ${TASKMANAGER_POD} -c taskmanager -- docker pull apache/beam_python${PYTHON_VERSION}_sdk:${BEAM_VERSION}

Open the flink web UI (this should open a tab in your browser).

minikube service flink-jobmanager-rest

Tail the taskmanager logs.

TASKMANAGER_POD=$(kubectl get pods --selector=component=taskmanager --no-headers -o name)
kubectl logs -f ${TASKMANAGER_POD} -c taskmanager

Tail SDK Harness logs.