Spark/Spark Streaming in production without HDFS

Question

I have been developing applications using Spark/Spark-Streaming but so far always used HDFS for file storage. However, I have reached a stage where I am exploring if it can be done (in production, running 24/7) without HDFS. I tried sieving though Spark user group but have not found any concrete answer so far. Note that I do use checkpoints and stateful stream processing using updateStateByKey.

Answer 1

Depending on the streaming(I've been using Kafka), you do not need to use checkpoints etc.

Since spark 1.3 they have implemented a direct approach with so many benefits.

Simplified Parallelism: No need to create multiple input Kafka streams and union-ing them. With directStream, Spark Streaming will create as many RDD partitions as there is Kafka partitions to consume, which will all read data from Kafka in parallel. So there is one-to-one mapping between Kafka and RDD partitions, which is easier to understand and tune.

Efficiency: Achieving zero-data loss in the first approach required the data to be stored in a Write Ahead Log, which further replicated the data. This is actually inefficient as the data effectively gets replicated twice - once by Kafka, and a second time by the Write Ahead Log. This second approach eliminate the problem as there is no receiver, and hence no need for Write Ahead Logs.

Exactly-once semantics: The first approach uses Kafka’s high level API to store consumed offsets in Zookeeper. This is traditionally the way to consume data from Kafka. While this approach (in combination with write ahead logs) can ensure zero data loss (i.e. at-least once semantics), there is a small chance some records may get consumed twice under some failures. This occurs because of inconsistencies between data reliably received by Spark Streaming and offsets tracked by Zookeeper. Hence, in this second approach, we use simple Kafka API that does not use Zookeeper and offsets tracked only by Spark Streaming within its checkpoints. This eliminates inconsistencies between Spark Streaming and Zookeeper/Kafka, and so each record is received by Spark Streaming effectively exactly once despite failures.

If you are using Kafka, you can found out more here: https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.3.0/streaming-kafka-integration.html

Approach 2.