Ingest streaming data from Amazon Kinesis

This guide shows you how to ingest a stream of records from an Amazon Kinesis topic into a Pinot table.

To ingest events from an Amazon Kinesis stream into Pinot, set the following configs into your table config:

{
  "tableName": "kinesisTable",
  "tableType": "REALTIME",
  "segmentsConfig": {
    "timeColumnName": "timestamp",
    "replicasPerPartition": "1"
  },
  "tenants": {},
  "tableIndexConfig": {
    "loadMode": "MMAP",
    "streamConfigs": {
      "streamType": "kinesis",
      "stream.kinesis.topic.name": "<your kinesis stream name>",
      "region": "<your region>",
      "accessKey": "<your access key>",
      "secretKey": "<your secret key>",
      "shardIteratorType": "AFTER_SEQUENCE_NUMBER",
      "stream.kinesis.consumer.type": "lowlevel",
      "stream.kinesis.fetch.timeout.millis": "30000",
      "stream.kinesis.decoder.class.name": "org.apache.pinot.plugin.stream.kafka.KafkaJSONMessageDecoder",
      "stream.kinesis.consumer.factory.class.name": "org.apache.pinot.plugin.stream.kinesis.KinesisConsumerFactory",
      "realtime.segment.flush.threshold.rows": "1000000",
      "realtime.segment.flush.threshold.time": "6h"
    }
  },
  "metadata": {
    "customConfigs": {}
  }
}

where the Kinesis specific properties are:

Property	Description
streamType	This should be set to "kinesis"
stream.kinesis.topic.name	Kinesis stream name
region	Kinesis region e.g. us-west-1
accessKey	Kinesis access key
secretKey	Kinesis secret key
shardIteratorType	Set to LATEST to consume only new records, TRIM_HORIZON for earliest sequence number_,_ AT___SEQUENCE_NUMBER and AFTER_SEQUENCE_NUMBER to start consumptions from a particular sequence number
maxRecordsToFetch	... Default is 20.

Kinesis supports authentication using the DefaultCredentialsProviderChain. The credential provider looks for the credentials in the following order:

• Environment Variables - AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY (RECOMMENDED since they are recognized by all the AWS SDKs and CLI except for .NET), or AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY (only recognized by Java SDK)

• Java System Properties - aws.accessKeyId and aws.secretKey

• Web Identity Token credentials from the environment or container

• Credential profiles file at the default location (~/.aws/credentials) shared by all AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI

• Credentials delivered through the Amazon EC2 container service if AWS_CONTAINER_CREDENTIALS_RELATIVE_URI environment variable is set and security manager has permission to access the variable,

• Instance profile credentials delivered through the Amazon EC2 metadata service

You must provide all read access level permissions for Pinot to work with an AWS Kinesis data stream. See the AWS documentation for details.

Although you can also specify the accessKey and secretKey in the properties above, we don't recommend this insecure method. We recommend using it only for non-production proof-of-concept (POC) setups. You can also specify other AWS fields such as AWS_SESSION_TOKEN as environment variables and config and it will work.

Resharding

In Kinesis, whenever you reshard a stream, it is done via split or merge operations on shards. If you split a shard, the shard closes and creates 2 new children shards. So if you started with shard0, and then split it, it would result in shard1 and shard2. Similarly, if you merge 2 shards, both those will close and create a child shard. So in the same example, if you merge shards 1 and 2, you'll end up with shard3 as the active shard, while shard0, shard1, shard2 will remain closed forever.

Please check out this recipe for more details: https://dev.startree.ai/docs/pinot/recipes/github-events-stream-kinesis#resharding-kinesis-stream

In Pinot, resharding of any stream is detected by periodic task RealtimeValidationManager: https://docs.pinot.apache.org/configuration-reference/controller#realtimesegmentvalidationmanager. This runs hourly. If you rehsard, your new shards will not get detected unless:

1. We finish ingesting from parent shards completely

2. And after 1, the RealtimeValidationManager runs

You will see a period where the ideal state will show all segments ONLINE, as parents have naturally completed ingesting, and we're waiting for RealtimeValidationManager to kickstart the ingestion from children.

If you need the ingestion to happen sooner, you can manually invoke the RealtimeValidationManager: https://docs.pinot.apache.org/basics/concepts/components/cluster/controller#running-the-periodic-task-manually

Limitations

1. ShardID is of the format "shardId-000000000001". We use the numeric part as partitionId. Our partitionId variable is integer. If shardIds grow beyond Integer.MAX\_VALUE, we will overflow into the partitionId space.

2. Segment size based thresholds for segment completion will not work. It assumes that partition "0" always exists. However, once the shard 0 is split/merged, we will no longer have partition 0.