Auto-scaling Kinesis Data Streams applications on Kubernetes

A step-by-step guide to auto-scale your Kinesis Data Streams consumer applications on Kubernetes, so you can save on costs and improve resource efficiency.

By Abhishek Gupta

May 18, 2023 • 3 Minute Read

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Want to learn how to auto-scale your Kinesis Data Streams consumer applications on Kubernetes, so you can save on costs and improve resource efficiency? This blog offers a step-by-step guide on how to do just that.

By leveraging Kubernetes for auto-scaling Kinesis consumer applications, you can benefit from its built-in features such as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. If you’re not familiar with Kubernetes, check out Nigel Poulton’s article: “What is Kubernetes, and why should I learn it?”

What is Amazon Kinesis and Kinesis Data Streams?

Amazon Kinesis is a platform for real-time data processing, ingestion, and analysis. Kinesis Data Streams is a Serverless streaming data service that enables developers to collect, process, and analyze large amounts of data in real-time from various sources such as social media, IoT devices, logs, and more. It is part of the Kinesis streaming data platform, along with Kinesis Data Firehose, Kinesis Video Streams, and Kinesis Data Analytics.

Kinesis Data Streams can scale elastically and continuously adapt to changes in data ingestion rates and stream consumption rates. It can be used to build real-time data analytics applications, real-time dashboards, and real-time data pipelines.

Let’s start off with an overview of some of the key concepts of Kinesis Data Streams.

Kinesis Data Streams: High-level architecture

A Kinesis data stream is a set of shards. Each shard has a sequence of data records.
The producers continually push data to Kinesis Data Streams, and the consumers process the data in real time.
A partition key is used to group data by shard within a stream. Kinesis Data Streams segregates the data records belonging to a stream into multiple shards. It uses the partition key that is associated with each data record to determine which shard a given data record belongs to.
Consumers get records from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, process them and store their results in Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon S3 etc. These consumers are also known as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Application. One of the methods of developing custom consumer applications that can process data from KDS data streams is to use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL).

How do Kinesis consumer applications scale horizontally?

The Kinesis Client Library ensures there is a record processor running for every shard and processing data from that shard. KCL helps you consume and process data from a Kinesis data stream by taking care of many of the complex tasks associated with distributed computing and scalability. It connects to the data stream, enumerates the shards within the data stream and uses leases to coordinate shard associations with its consumer applications.

A record processor is instantiated for every shard it manages. KCL pulls data records from the data stream, pushes the records to the corresponding record processor and checkpoints processed records. More importantly, it balances shard-worker associations (leases) when the worker instance count changes or when the data stream is re-sharded (shards are split or merged). This means that you are able to scale your Kinesis Data Streams application by simply adding more instances since KCL will automatically balance the shards across the instances.

But, you still need a way to scale your applications when the load increases. Of course, you could do it manually or build a custom solution to get this done.

This is where Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) can help. KEDA is a Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling component that can monitor event sources like Kinesis and scale the underlying Deployments (and Pods) based on the number of events needing to be processed.

To witness auto-scaling in action, you will work with a Java application that uses the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) 2.x to consume data from a Kinesis Data Stream. It will be deployed to a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon EKS and will be scaled automatically using KEDA. The application includes an implementation of the ShardRecordProcessor that processes data from the Kinesis stream and persists it to a DynamoDB table. We will use the AWS CLI to produce data to the Kinesis stream and observe the scaling of the application.

Before we dive in, here is a quick overview of KEDA.

What is KEDA?

KEDA is an open-source CNCF project that’s built on top of native Kubernetes primitives such as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and can be added to any Kubernetes cluster. Here is a high level overview of its key components (you can refer to the KEDA documentation for a deep-dive):

The keda-operator-metrics-apiserver component in KEDA acts as a Kubernetes metrics server that exposes metrics for the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
A KEDA Scaler integrates with an external system (such as Redis) to fetch these metrics (e.g. length of a List) to drives auto scaling of any container in Kubernetes based on the number of events needing to be processed.
The role of the keda-operator component is to activate and deactivate Deployment i.e. scale to and from zero.

You will see the Kinesis Stream KEDA scaler in action that scales based on the shard count of AWS Kinesis Stream.

^{From KEDA documentation}

Now let's move on to the practical part of this post.

Prerequisites

In addition to an AWS account, you will need to have the AWS CLI, kubectl, Docker, Java 11 and Maven installed.

Setup an EKS cluster, create a DynamoDB table and a Kinesis Data Stream

Auto-scaling Kinesis Data Streams applications on Kubernetes

There are a variety of ways in which you can create an Amazon EKS cluster. I prefer using eksctl CLI because of the convenience it offers. Creating an an EKS cluster using eksctl, can be as easy as this:

      eksctl create cluster --name <cluster name> --region <region e.g. us-east-1>

For details, refer to the Getting started with Amazon EKS – eksctl.

Create a DynamoDB table to persist application data. You can use the AWS CLI to create a table with the following command:

          aws dynamodb create-table \
    --table-name users \
    --attribute-definitions AttributeName=email,AttributeType=S \
    --key-schema AttributeName=email,KeyType=HASH \
    --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5
    

Create Kinesis stream with two shards using the AWS CLI:

      aws kinesis create-stream --stream-name kinesis-keda-demo --shard-count 2

Clone this GitHub repository and change to the right directory:

          git clone https://github.com/abhirockzz/kinesis-keda-autoscaling
cd kinesis-keda-autoscaling
    

Ok, let’s get started!

Setup and configure KEDA on EKS

For the purposes of this tutorial, you will use YAML files to deploy KEDA. But you could also use Helm charts.

Install KEDA:

          # update version 2.8.2 if required

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kedacore/keda/releases/download/v2.8.2/keda-2.8.2.yaml

Verify the installation:

          # check Custom Resource Definitions
kubectl get crd

# check KEDA Deployments
kubectl get deployment -n keda

# check KEDA operator logs
kubectl logs -f $(kubectl get pod -l=app=keda-operator -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}' -n keda) -n keda
    

Configure IAM Roles

The KEDA operator as well as the Kinesis consumer application need to invoke AWS APIs. Since both will run as Deployments in EKS, we will use IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) to provide the necessary permissions.

In this particular scenario:

The KEDA operator needs to be able to get the shard count for a Kinesis stream - it does so using the DescribeStreamSummary API.
The application (KCL library to be specific) needs to interact with Kinesis and DynamoDB - it needs a bunch of IAM permissions to do so.

Configure IRSA for KEDA operator

Set your AWS Account ID and OIDC Identity provider as environment variables:

          ACCOUNT_ID=$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query "Account" --output text)

#update the cluster name and region as required
export EKS_CLUSTER_NAME=demo-eks-cluster
export AWS_REGION=us-east-1

OIDC_PROVIDER=$(aws eks describe-cluster --name $EKS_CLUSTER_NAME --query "cluster.identity.oidc.issuer" --output text | sed -e "s/^https:\/\///")

Create a JSON file with Trusted Entities for the role:

          read -r -d '' TRUST_RELATIONSHIP <<EOF
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Federated": "arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:oidc-provider/${OIDC_PROVIDER}"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "${OIDC_PROVIDER}:aud": "sts.amazonaws.com",
          "${OIDC_PROVIDER}:sub": "system:serviceaccount:keda:keda-operator"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
EOF
echo "${TRUST_RELATIONSHIP}" > trust_keda.json
    

Now, create the IAM role and attach the policy (take a look at policy_kinesis_keda.json file for details):

          export ROLE_NAME=keda-operator-kinesis-role

aws iam create-role --role-name $ROLE_NAME --assume-role-policy-document file://trust_keda.json --description "IRSA for kinesis KEDA scaler on EKS"

aws iam create-policy --policy-name keda-kinesis-policy --policy-document file://policy_kinesis_keda.json
aws iam attach-role-policy --role-name $ROLE_NAME --policy-arn=arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:policy/keda-kinesis-policy

Associate the IAM role and Service Account:

          kubectl annotate serviceaccount -n keda keda-operator eks.amazonaws.com/role-arn=arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:role/${ROLE_NAME}

# verify the annotation 
kubectl describe serviceaccount/keda-operator -n keda
    

You will need to restart KEDA operator Deployment for this to take effect:

          kubectl rollout restart deployment.apps/keda-operator -n keda

# to verify, confirm that the KEDA operator has the right environment variables
kubectl describe pod -n keda $(kubectl get po -l=app=keda-operator -n keda --output=jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) | grep "^\s*AWS_"

# expected output

AWS_STS_REGIONAL_ENDPOINTS:   regional
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION:           us-east-1
AWS_REGION:                   us-east-1
AWS_ROLE_ARN:                 arn:aws:iam::<AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>:role/keda-operator-kinesis-role
AWS_WEB_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE:  /var/run/secrets/eks.amazonaws.com/serviceaccount/token

    

Configure IRSA for the KCL consumer application

Start by creating a Kubernetes Service Account:

          kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: kcl-consumer-app-sa
EOF

    

Create a JSON file with Trusted Entities for the role:

          read -r -d '' TRUST_RELATIONSHIP <<EOF
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Federated": "arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:oidc-provider/${OIDC_PROVIDER}"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "${OIDC_PROVIDER}:aud": "sts.amazonaws.com",
          "${OIDC_PROVIDER}:sub": "system:serviceaccount:default:kcl-consumer-app-sa"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
EOF
echo "${TRUST_RELATIONSHIP}" > trust.json
    

Now, create the IAM role and attach the policy (take a look at policy.json file for details):

          export ROLE_NAME=kcl-consumer-app-role

aws iam create-role --role-name $ROLE_NAME --assume-role-policy-document file://trust.json --description "IRSA for KCL consumer app on EKS"

aws iam create-policy --policy-name kcl-consumer-app-policy --policy-document file://policy.json

aws iam attach-role-policy --role-name $ROLE_NAME --policy-arn=arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:policy/kcl-consumer-app-policy

Associate the IAM role and Service Account:

          kubectl annotate serviceaccount -n default kcl-consumer-app-sa eks.amazonaws.com/role-arn=arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:role/${ROLE_NAME}

# verify the annotation
kubectl describe serviceaccount/kcl-consumer-app-sa
    

The core infrastructure is now ready. Let’s prepare and deploy the consumer application.

Deploy KCL consumer application to EKS

You first need to build the Docker image and push it to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) (refer to the Dockerfile for details).

Build and push the Docker image to ECR

          # create runnable JAR file
mvn clean compile assembly\:single

# build docker image
docker build -t kcl-consumer-app .

AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query "Account" --output text)

# create a private ECR repo
aws ecr get-login-password --region us-east-1 | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin $AWS_ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

aws ecr create-repository --repository-name kcl-consumer-app --region us-east-1

# tag and push the image
docker tag kcl-consumer-app:latest $AWS_ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/kcl-consumer-app:latest
docker push $AWS_ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/kcl-consumer-app:latest

    

Build and push the Docker image to ECR

Update the consumer.yaml to include the Docker image you just pushed to ECR. The rest of the manifest remains the same:

          apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: kcl-consumer
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: kcl-consumer
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: kcl-consumer
    spec:
      serviceAccountName: kcl-consumer-app-sa
      containers:
        - name: kcl-consumer
          image: AWS_ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/kcl-consumer-app:latest
          imagePullPolicy: Always
          env:
            - name: STREAM_NAME
              value: kinesis-keda-demo
            - name: TABLE_NAME
              value: users
            - name: APPLICATION_NAME
              value: kinesis-keda-demo
            - name: AWS_REGION
              value: us-east-1
            - name: INSTANCE_NAME
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: metadata.name

    

Create the Deployment:

          kubectl apply -f consumer.yaml

# verify Pod transition to Running state
kubectl get pods -w
    

KCL app autoscaling in action with KEDA

Now that you’ve deployed the consumer application, the KCL library should jump into action. The first thing it will do is create a “control table” in DynamoDB - this should be the same as the name of the KCL application (which in this case is kinesis-keda-demo).

It might take a few minutes for the initial co-ordination to happen and the table to get created. You can check the logs of the consumer application to track the progress.

          kubectl logs -f $(kubectl get po -l=app=kcl-consumer --output=jsonpath={.items..metadata.name})
    

Once the lease allocation is complete, check the table and note the leaseOwner attribute:

          aws dynamodb describe-table --table-name kinesis-keda-demo
aws dynamodb scan --table-name kinesis-keda-demo
    

Now, let’s send some data to the Kinesis stream using the AWS CLI

      export KINESIS_STREAM=kinesis-keda-demo

aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user1", "city":"new york"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user2", "city":"tel aviv"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user3", "city":"new delhi"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user4", "city":"seattle"}' | base64)

The KCL application persists each record to a target DynamoDB table (which is named users in this case). You can check the table to verify the records.

      aws dynamodb scan --table-name users

Notice the value for the processed_by attribute? It’s the same as KCL consumer Pod. This will make it easier for us to verify the end to end auto scaling process.

Create the KEDA scaler for Kinesis

Here is the ScaledObject definition. Notice that it’s targeting the kcl-consumer Deployment (the one we just created) and the shardCount is set to 1:

          apiVersion: keda.sh/v1alpha1
kind: ScaledObject
metadata:
  name: aws-kinesis-stream-scaledobject
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    name: kcl-consumer
  triggers:
    - type: aws-kinesis-stream
      metadata:
        # Required
        streamName: kinesis-keda-demo
        # Required
        awsRegion: "us-east-1"
        shardCount: "1"
        identityOwner: "operator"
    

Create the KEDA Kinesis scaler:

      kubectl apply -f keda-kinesis-scaler.yaml

Verify KCL application auto-scaling

We started off with one Pod of our KCL application. But, thanks to KEDA, we should now see the second Pod coming up.

          kubectl get pods -l=app=kcl-consumer -w

# check logs of the new pod
kubectl logs -f <enter Pod name>
    

Our application was able to auto-scale to two Pods because we had specified shardCount: "1" in the ScaledObject definition. This means that there will be one Pod per shard in the Kinesis stream.

Check kinesis-keda-demo control table in DynamoDB - You should see an update for the leaseOwner.

Let’s send some more data to the Kinesis stream.

      export KINESIS_STREAM=kinesis-keda-demo

aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user5", "city":"new york"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user6", "city":"tel aviv"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user7", "city":"new delhi"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user8", "city":"seattle"}' | base64)

Verify the value for the processed_by attribute. Since we have scaled out to two Pods, the value should be different for each record, since each Pod will process a subset of the records from the Kinesis stream.

Increase Kinesis stream capacity

Let’s scale out the number of shards from two to three and continue to monitor KCL application auto-scaling.

          aws kinesis update-shard-count --stream-name kinesis-keda-demo --target-shard-count 3 --scaling-type UNIFORM_SCALING
    

Once Kinesis resharding is complete, the KEDA scaler will spring into action and scale out the KCL application to three Pods.

      kubectl get pods -l=app=kcl-consumer -w

Just like before, confirm that the Kinesis shard lease has been updated in the kinesis-keda-demo control table in DynamoDB - check the leaseOwner attribute.

Continue to send more data to the Kinesis stream. As expected, the Pods will share the record processing and this will reflect in the processed_by attribute in the users table.

      export KINESIS_STREAM=kinesis-keda-demo

aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user9", "city":"new york"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user10", "city":"tel aviv"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user11", "city":"new delhi"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user12", "city":"seattle"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user14", "city":"tel aviv"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user15", "city":"new delhi"}' | base64)
aws kinesis put-record --stream-name $KINESIS_STREAM --partition-key [email protected] --data $(echo -n '{"name":"user16", "city":"seattle"}' | base64)

Scale down: So far, we have only scaled in one direction. What happens when we reduce the shard capacity of the Kinesis stream? Try this out for yourself - reduce the shard count from three to two and see what happens to the KCL application.

Once you have verified the end to end solution, you should clean up the resources to avoid incurring any additional charges.

Delete resources

Delete the EKS cluster, Kinesis stream, and DynamoDB table.

          eksctl delete cluster --name keda-kinesis-demo
aws kinesis delete-stream --stream-name kinesis-keda-demo
aws dynamodb delete-table --table-name users
    

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how to use KEDA to auto-scale a KCL application that consumes data from a Kinesis stream.

You can configure the KEDA scaler as per your application requirements. For example, you can set the shardCount to 3 and have one Pod for every three shards in your Kinesis stream. However, if you want to maintain a one to one mapping, you can set the shardCount to 1 and KCL will take care of distributed coordination and lease assignment, thereby ensuring that each Pod has one instance of the record processor. This is an effective approach that allows you to scale out your Kinesis stream processing pipeline to meet the demands of your applications.

Abhishek G.

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