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JIRA

FLINK-25963 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Releasekubernetes-operator-1.0

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Motivation

Kubernetes (k8s) has become the predominant deployment platform for Flink. Over the past several years, a number of integrations have been developed that aim to help operationalize mission-critical Flink applications on k8s. Given the increasing adoption of k8s for Flink deployments and as discussed in [1], there is interest to provide a k8s native solution as part of Flink that can benefit from the rich experience of community members and ultimately make Flink easier to adopt.

Currently Flink comes with built-in embedded k8s support, also referred to as Flink native k8s [2, 3, 4], offering an alternative to the traditional standalone deployment mode. Independently a number of k8s operators have been developed outside of Apache Flink, including [5, 6]. These implementations are not under the umbrella of a neutral entity like the ASF and as a result, tend to lack wider community participation and projects go stale after the maintainers shift focus.

However, the custom resource and operator concepts are central to a Kubernetes native deployment experience. It allows to manage Flink applications and their lifecycle through k8s tooling like kubectl. A key feature of an operator is the automation of application upgrades, which cannot be achieved through the "Flink native" integration alone.

Public Interfaces

The public interface is essentially the custom resource descriptor (CRD), see below.

Proposed Changes

We are proposing to provide an Flink k8s operator implementation as part of Flink that is maintained by the community and closely integrated with the Flink ecosystem. This implementation will benefit from the extensive experience of Flink community members with large scale mission critical Flink deployments and learnings from existing operator implementations. As part of Flink, the operator will have a better chance to follow the development of Flink core, influence changes to Flink core and benefit from the established collaboration processes of the project. We are proposing a dedicated github repository for the operator with operator versioning and releases separate from core Flink (like flink-statefun or flink-shaded). 

Initial Feature Set

For the initial version of the operator we aim to target core aspects of job lifecycle management.

  • Custom Resource to express Flink application in Kubernetes native way (for details see CR example section below)
    • Access to native Flink properties and native Kubernetes pod settings
      • Minimal shorthand (proxy) settings that operator translates to underlying native settings (memory, cpu)
      • shorthand settings override underlying settings
    • Supports all Flink configuration properties
    • Docker image
    • Upgrade policy (savepoint, latest-state, stateless)
    • Pod template for jobmanager and taskmanager
    • External jar artifact fetcher support (s3, https etc.) via init container
    • Support explicit session cluster (no job management) and application mode
      • the session cluster can be used to control jobs externally (like submission via REST API)
  • Create & deploy new Flink application
    • Empty state
    • From savepoint
  • Upgrade Flink application with or w/o savepoint on any CR change, including:
    • Flink configuration change
    • Job jar change
    • Docker image change
  • Pause/Resume Flink application
    • the job will not continue its data processing
    • the job will not be deleted from the cluster
    • the job will release its resources back to the cluster (can be used by other jobs)
    • Stops job with savepoint, tracks savepoint/last checkpoint in CR status for resume.
  • Delete Flink application
  • Integrate with Flink Kubernetes HA module [4]
    • When selected, operator can obtain latest checkpoint from config map and does not depend on a potentially unavailable Flink job REST API
    • This should the default, but not a hard dependency
  • Support Flink UI ingress
  • CI/CD with operator Docker image artifact, publish image to dockerhub
  • Error handling
    • Retry based on exception classifiers
    • Propagation of job submission errors through k8s event and/or status

Flink Native vs Standalone integration

Flink currently supports two different approaches to running jobs on Kubernetes:

  1. Standalone mode
    1. supported by existing OSS operators
    2. operator only entity that creates k8s objects
    3. users can interact with k8s objects directly to manage job resources, scaling etc
    4. Flink processes don’t require access to API server to create pods
    5. job submission by operator without Flink client dependency
  2. Flink native (embedded) k8s integration [2]
    1. reuse native integration client within operator for job submission
    2. no support for reactive scaling, operator handles parallelism change
    3. users should not interact with k8s objects directly as those are managed by Flink
    4. requires wider access privileges for Flink jobmanager process (creates taskmanager pods)
    5. introduces tighter coupling between operator and supported Flink versions due to dependency on Flink client 

In the long run it might make sense to support both deployment modes in the operator, however initially we should focus the development effort on a single approach. Maybe start with support for [2] since we could reuse the code in a Java based implementation.

CR Example

  kind: FlinkDeployment
metadata:
  name: flink-wordcount-example
  namespace: flink-operator
  annotations:
  labels:
    environment: development
spec:
  image: example:latest
  flinkVersion: "1.14"
  flinkConfiguration:
    // everything for flink-conf.yaml
    state.savepoints.dir: file:///checkpoints/flink/savepoints
  podTemplate:
    // everything that a k8s pod template supports
    // defaults for both, job and task manager pods
  jobManager:
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: "200Mi"
        cpu: "0.1"
    replicas: 1
    podTemplate:
      // everything that a k8s pod template supports
      // layered over common template
  taskManager:
    taskSlots: 2
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: "200Mi"
        cpu: "0.1"
    podTemplate:
      // everything that a k8s pod template supports,
      // layered over common template
  // job can be optional for plain session cluster
  job:    
    jarURI: "file:///wordcount-operator-example-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar"
    parallelism: 3
    entryClass: "org.apache.flink.WordCount"
    args: ""
    upgradeMode: (stateless, savepoint)
    state: (running, suspended, error)
    initialSavepointPath: "s3://mysavepoint"
  logging:
    // customize logging config in flink container   
  status:
    ...
    // information about the actual state
    // including latest savepoint/checkpoint etc.   

Java Operator SDK

The Flink operator should be built using the java-operator-sdk . The java operator sdk is the state of the art approach for building a Kubernetes operator in Java. It uses the Fabric8 k8s client like Flink does and it is open source with Apache 2.0 license.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

As this is a completely new standalone component, no migration will be necessary strictly speaking.

The user facing artifact is the CRD. Eventually we will need a compatibility story for the CRD, similar to the evolution of the Flink REST API.

  • While experimental, we may introduce breaking changes to the current version of the CRD
  • Once stable, the operator should support the previous version of CRD when breaking changes are made
  • Supported Flink versions: operator should support n (TBD) Flink versions. Similar to a downstream project with Flink dependency.
  • Above is relevant to reuse of Flink native client within operator. The Flink native integration itself must provide backward compatibility and compatible with lowest supported Flink version

Test Plan

Describe in few sentences how the FLIP will be tested. We are mostly interested in system tests (since unit-tests are specific to implementation details). How will we know that the implementation works as expected? How will we know nothing broke?

Rejected Alternatives

Using Go to implement the operator

While Go is often a natural fit for implementing k8s operators and there are already some open-source examples of Flink operators implemented in Go we still feel that Java is more suitable for this new component.

Main reasons for choosing Java over Go

  • Direct access to Flink Client libraries for submitting, managing jobs and handling errors
  • Most Flink developers have strong Java experience while there are only few Go experts
  • Easier to integrate with existing build system and tooling
  • Required k8s clients and tools for building an operator are also available in Java

References