Jesse J. Cook af6c590f5b Eliminate Redundant Downloads of Uncached Images
Multiple requests for an image that is not yet cached on the Glance
API node handling the request currently results in multiple download
requests for the same image from the object store. For example,
1000 concurrent build requests based off an uncached image can result
in 1000 download requests from the object store.

Proposing for `untargeted` as the original author is no longer available
and the spec has been reviewed carefully.

Change-Id: I09c73b4520d5e88a27d9089c709c2e116a2d6ac7
Implements: bp duplicate-downloads
2017-06-22 09:56:32 -04:00

12 KiB

Eliminate Redundant Downloads of Uncached Images

Include the URL of your launchpad blueprint:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/glance/+spec/duplicate-downloads

Multiple requests for an image that is not yet cached on the Glance API node handling the request currently results in multiple download requests for the same image from the backend store. For example, 1000 concurrent build requests based off an uncached image can result in 1000 download requests from the backend store.

Problem description

Feature: Elasticity

    In order to briefly leverage the power of the Cloud to do some work,
    As an OpenStack Powered Cloud customer leveraging Glance caching
    I want to quickly provision a large number of servers, perform some
    work, and then destroy them.

    Scenario Outline: Concurrent Requests for Uncached Image
        Given a single Glance API node
        And the requested image exists in the backend store
        And the requested image is uncached on the Glance API node
        When <n> concurrent request(s) for the image is/are made
        Then the image will be downloaded from the backend store <m> times
        And the image will be cached on the Glance API node
        And every request for the image will succeed

        Examples: Concurrent Requests
            | n | m |
            | 1 | 1 |
            | 2 | 1 |

    Scenario: Concurrent Requests for Uncached Image Fails
        Given a single Glance API node
        And the requested image exists in the backend store
        And the requested image is uncached on the Glance API node
        When 2 concurrent requests for the image are made
        And mid-download the client closes the first connection
        Then only the first download request will fail
        And the image will be cached on the Glance API node

    Scenario: Stream to all requests while caching
        Given a Glance API node (1) with this feature deployed
        And a Glance API node (2) without this feature deployed
        And the requested image exists in the backend store
        And the requested image is uncached on Glance API node 1
        And the requested image is uncached on Glance API node 2
        When 2 concurrent requests are made to API node 1
        And 2 concurrent requests are made to API node 2
        Then the 2 requests to API node 1 will succeed
        And the 2 requests to API node 2 will succeed
        And the image will be cached on Glance API node 1
        And the image will be cached on Glance API node 2
        And the request completion time between the 2 requests to node 1
            will be statistically less than or equal to
            the request completion time between the 2 requests to node 2

Proposed change

Currently, the Glance caching middleware returns an iterator that downloads from the cache only if the image is already cached. If the image is uncached, the request is passed onto the API to obtain an iterator that will download directly from the store. The response from the API containing this direct iterator is returned back through the caching middleware. If the image is completely uncached when the middleware processes the response, it will wrap the direct download iterator from the API in an another iterator that will tee to the cache (i.e. read from the store and write to both the client and the cache via a split pipe).

Therefore, depending on the state of the cache, one of three iterators can be returned: an iterator to the cache (if the image is completely cached), an iterator to the store (if the image is partially cached), or a teeing iterator that streams from the store and writes to the cache (if the image is completely uncached). This approach is racey and can result in many responses downloading directly from the store and a subset of those teeing data to the same location on the filesystem.

Ideally, any image download request that is received, regardless of cache state, would both encounter the same interface and execute the same code path to retrieve the image. We currently adhere to the former (i.e. consistent interface), but not the latter (i.e. we return different iterators based on cache state). This introduces unnecessary complexity into the system.

The proposed solution is to remove this complexity by, one, refactoring the middleware to fully encapsulate the work to retrieve the image from the store and write it to the cache, and two, serve the download requests from the cache irrespective of whether the image was already cached when the request was received. While the exact mechanism for achieving this might vary, one example of how this can be achieved follows:

if the cache file does not exist:
    create it
    spawn a worker
return waiting iterator(the cache file)

def worker():
    request image download information via API request
    download image to cache

def waiting_iterator(the cache file):
    with open(the cache file) as fp:
        while True:
            chunk = read in the next chunk
            if chunk:
                yield chunk
            elif the cache file is still being cached
                wait a bit
            else:
                We done!
                break

A few notes regarding implementation:

  1. The worker could be one or more processes or threads.
  2. The data returned to the clients should be consistent and correct regardless of the cache state or how the data is downloaded and stored in the cache.
  3. Download time can vary based on the current cache state.
  4. The implementation must be resilient. Multiple requests can fail if the cache fails. Intelligent retries must be implemented.

This change helps enforce separation between the code that serves the data to the client and the cache middleware implementation. The cache middleware is a caching proxy and is responsible for downloading data to the cache in a resilient manner and reliably returning data requested from the cache. Any implementation that would leverage the cache, need not worry about the interactions between the backend store and the cache. More specifically, with the logic to download the images moved out of the iterators and behind the proxy, requests are no longer dependent upon each other. While the first request to the cache for a particular image might trigger a cache miss (worker spawned to download the image), the success of that request is not tied to the success of the image being cached or the success of any future request for the image.

One additional consideration, out of scope for this change, is that some requests might prefer to download directly from the store rather than the cache. For the purposes of this change, if the caching middleware is enabled, all requests will be downloaded from the cache.

Alternatives

  1. Add a configuration option, eliminate_duplicate_downloads, to enable this feature. The addition of a configuration option to control how the caching middleware behaves puts unnecessary burden on the operator. The caching middleware should meet the expected behaviors as outlined in the problem description without introducing a new configuration option. The only value of such option is to allow a phased roll-out of the feature. If the consensus is to introduce such an option, being defaulted to disabled, it should then be deprecated and defaulted to enabled in the next release.

  2. Update the cache middleware response handler to return a waiting iterator (see below) if the image is cached or caching. This ensures only the first request to reach the response handler results in the data being downloaded from the object store. All other requests will stream from the cache.

    Update the cache middleware request handler to return a waiting iterator (see below) if the image is cached or caching. This is an optimization to prevent requests unnecessarily reaching the root app and generating a new download iterator likely resulting in a new connection being established when the cache has already initiated or completed.

    The iterator will allow download from the cache as data becomes available. The iterator will read until the image is fully cached and all data is read. If the cache of the image fails, the cached image will be cleaned up, and each request downloading from the cache will fail requiring a retry by the client.

    In both the case where eliminate_duplicate_downloads is enabled (new behavior) or eliminate_duplicate_downloads is disabled (current behavior) up to n requests, where n is the number of requests made, will result in a cache miss in the cache middleware request handler and reach the root app, returning a download iterator back to the cache middleware response handler. In both cases, the first response arriving back to the cache middleware will result in a download from the object store streamed to the client and stored in the cache.

    When eliminate_duplicate_downloads is disabled (current behavior), all responses reaching the cache middleware from the root app will return the download iterator from the root app, resulting in a download from the backend store for each request arriving before the image is fully cached. When eliminate_duplicate_downloads is enabled (new behavior), only the first response will result in a download from the backend store. All other requests will stream from the cache using a waiting iterator.

    Enabling the eliminate_duplicate_downloads configuration reduces failures and improves performance when a large number of image download requests are made. It comes at the cost of all downloads occurring while an image is being cached depending on that single cache to be successful. This means a cache failure could result in more clients needing to retry, potentially after waiting for nearly the entire image to download.

  3. Create a lock within the middleware request handler: This prevents requests from reaching the root app and establishing a download iterator in a race to be the first to initiate the download in the cache middleware response handler. However, it comes at a reliability and complexity cost. Logic would have to be implemented in the request handler to recover from failures between the request and response. That's a lot of squeeze for not a lot of juice.

  4. Move the cache out of the middleware into the root app and provide a locking mechanism around caching and downloading. There are architectural benefits to this. However, it is a serious undertaking, and I believe that any conversations around this should be had completely outside the context of this change.

  5. Move cache out of Glance API: This requires client side logic and new / external caching code.

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

See Other deployer impact

Performance Impact

  1. Image request time for concurrent requests will decrease.
  2. Bandwidth consumed between Glance API nodes and backend store will decrease.

Other deployer impact

Every request being served from the cache will impact the reliability and performance profile. The bottleneck between the backend store and Glance will be removed for the thundering herd problem. However, there could still be a bottleneck between the hypervisors and the Glance API nodes.

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee: unassigned

Reviewers

Core reviewer(s): unassigned

Work Items

  1. Add tests
  2. Update the cache methods in the drivers
  3. Add multi-process / thread safe cache worker(s) to middleware
  4. Update the cache request handler
  5. Update the cache response handler
  6. Update the docs

Dependencies

None

Testing

SEE Problem Description for scenarios to be tested.

Documentation Impact

Document any new configuration options, if any.

References

None