samsa 0.3.4

What is Kafka?

Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system. Cluster management happens with ZooKeeper.

Messages

Messages are units of data to be communicated between clients or services. Messages don’t have any have any inherent structure – as far as Kafka is concerned, the message is just an array of bytes and the application can serialize/deserialize the payload in a way that makes sense to it’s own environment.

Brokers

Brokers are nodes/servers that store and serve messages.

Topics

Messages are published to topics, which are similar to channels. Every topic is available on all servers.

Partitions

Topics are divided into partitions, which are distributed across brokers. Each partition is owned by a single broker.

The clients of a Kafka cluster are generally split into two different categories, although these roles are not mutually exclusive:

Producer

Producers publish messages to topics.

Consumer

Consumers subscribe to messages from topics.

Goals of this Project

• Your application code should not be dependent on broker state or Kafka cluster configuration. The only service that it should know about directly is the ZooKeeper cluster.

• Provide a level of abstraction and functionality similar to that of the Scala client, but using Pythonic idioms and native data structures.

Guarantees

• Every publish will be written to (at least) one node, as long as a node is up to accept the write.

Creating a Cluster

>>> from kazoo.client import KazooClient
>>> from samsa.cluster import Cluster
>>> zookeeper = KazooClient()
>>> zookeeper.connect()
>>> cluster = Cluster(zookeeper)

Brokers

To list all of the brokers by their broker ID within the cluster:

>>> print cluster.brokers.keys()
[0, 1]

To get a Broker object by ID, provide the ID as the key in a dictionary item lookup:

>>> print cluster.brokers[0]
<samsa.brokers.Broker at 0x1005f4c10: id=0>

Topics

Cluster objects also provide a dictionary-like interface for retrieving Topic objects by name. For example:

>>> topic = cluster.topics['example-topic']
>>> print topic
<samsa.topics.Topic at 0x1005f4d90: name='example-topic'>

You can also see how many partitions are available to accept writes within a topic by coercing it’s PartitionMap to a list:

>>> print list(topic.partitions)
[<samsa.partitions.Partition at 0x1005f9b90: topic=<samsa.topics.Topic at 0x1005f4d90: name='example-topic'>, broker=<samsa.brokers.Broker at 0x1005f4c10: id=0>, number=0>]

Publishing

To publish to a topic, provide a string or list of strings to be published to a Topic instances’s publish method:

>>> topic.publish('hello world')
>>> topic.publish(['hello', 'world'])

If a list of messages is provided, all messages will be delivered to the same partition, in order, on the same broker. Individual messages hold no such guarantee, and are subject to end up on any number of hosts as determined by the partitioning method, and can be distributed across a number of partitions, potentially losing any ordering between messages.

Consuming

Consumers are organized into consumer groups, which allows Kafka to provide two semantically different methods of message consumption, based on the consumer group configuration.

Queue

Each consumer in a consumer group receives a message once, which provides for a reasonably even distribution of messages around the group since it is the owner of only a subset of the available partitions within the topic. This is similar to a put/get queue or many AMQP-like interfaces.

Topic

Each consumer is it’s own consumer group, and receives all messages sent to the topic since it is the owner of all partitions. This is similar to an evented system, or a publish/subscribe interface.

# of brokers * # of partitions per node = # of consumers in the largest consumer group for this topic

>>> consumer = topic.subscribe('group-name')

>>> for message in consumer:
...     print message