Open-source Deep Dive: Broadway (Part 2) — Inner workings of Broadway

This open-source deep dive has been split into two parts! The first part covers the prerequisite knowledge that would be good to know when trying to understand the inner workings of Broadway. The second part is an in-depth analysis of the implementation of various features of Broadway.

This is the second part of the deep dive and the following topics will be covered:

1. Rate limiting
2. Batching messages
3. Telemetry
4. Creating a built-in testing support for pipelines
5. Achieving graceful shutdowns
6. Other interesting bits of code

If you want a refresher on the concepts behind Broadway (like message queues and concurrency in Elixir) or to better understand Broadway’s pipeline architecture from a bird’s eye view, you can find the first part here!

What’s the scoop?

Now that we have explored the overall architecture of a Broadway pipeline, we can look at how certain features in Broadway are implemented.

Rate limiting

Rate limiting refers to the act of limiting the amount of data that can be requested or processed in a given period of time

Rate limiting is applied across producers within a single pipeline to control the number of events emitted within a given period of time.

This is especially useful when the hardware of the machine running the pipeline is not able to keep up with processing large numbers of events demanded at a time — possibly due to a poorly configured pipeline.

Some producers do not leverage the rate limiting feature of Broadway. For instance, the RabbitMQ producer creates an active listener, which means that event emission is not inhibited by the rate limiter. Instead, events are emitted the moment messages are published to the message queue (unless otherwise configured).

But for the producers that do leverage the rate limiting — such as the Amazon SQS producer — rate limiting is applied in two instances:

a) When consumers make demands to the producer-consumer or producer

If the producer can still emit events, any demand made by the consumer will be handled by the producer. We take into account the rate limit threshold. If there are too many events to emit, the excess messages are stored in a message buffer that will have to be cleared later on.

Each message that can be emitted will be transformed into the standard event structure that Broadway uses.

If the producer can no longer emit messages, any demand made is stored in a demand buffer that is cleared later on.

b) When the rate limit is being reset after the given interval

After the given interval, the rate limit threshold can be reset. However, we may have accumulated demands and messages in their respective buffers. We may find that the threshold has not been met before we reset it. Thus, we can use this remaining threshold to clear any lingering demands and messages stored in their respective buffers.

Once we have cleared as many messages as our remaining threshold allows, we will reset the threshold and schedule for another reset. These resets are scheduled at fixed intervals.

The rate limiting threshold is maintained as an atomic (discussed later on). This atomic array is generated by the RateLimiter process. This module handles all behavior surrounding working with the rate limit threshold. ProducerStage handles the actual logic of managing the demands of consumers.

When the producer cannot emit any more events, i.e. the threshold has been reached, an internal state is set to :closed to avoid future demands from being handled.

Batching

Batching groups events based on given properties and sends them to designated “sub-pipelines” or batch processors to be handled. For instance, we might design a pipeline that stores events with even numbers in an S3 bucket and ones with odd numbers on Google Drive.

The Batcher process is assigned unique names for identification and events that are emitted from the producer must be tagged to a batcher. Failure to do so will result in a runtime error. This only applies if batching is enabled.

In order for the producer to send the appropriate events to the respective batcher, a PartitionDispatcher is used. Essentially, it defines the behavior of how events are emitted to consumers. A PartitionDispatcher dispatches events to certain consumers based on a given criteria (defined as a hash function). In this case, the criterion is the name of the batcher from the given event. This means that when we assign a batcher to the event, it will be dispatched to only that batcher. More information about dispatchers in GenStage can be found in the official documentation.

Even within the batcher, further grouping can be made based on a batch key assigned to the event. This may be used to ensure that certain events are processed together. Internally, the batcher will accumulate events before emitting them. However, as it cannot sit around accumulating events forever, a batch is emitted at regular intervals regardless of how many events are stored in it.

The BatchProcessor process handles a single batch at a time. It is similar to a regular processor, except it works on a batch of events. The handle_batch callback is used here.

Telemetry

Telemetry is used in Broadway to benchmark certain operations that occur such as the duration that a handle_message callback takes.

Broadway relies on the telemetry library. Within the code, events are emitted when these operations occur and key measurements such as duration are tracked. Handlers/listeners of these events can be setup to respond to these events.

Telemetry is not an Elixir-only feature. It is commonly used to perform application monitoring. OpenTelemetry is a really interesting framework that offers powerful application monitoring through telemetry.

Built-in testing

To test the pipeline, we should focus on ensuring that the data processing aspect of the pipeline works as intended. However, as we rely on external services for input, it would be hard to coordinate a test suite to work with a live data source as we may not be able to replicate the data source or publish data to the data source at will due to access limitations. Thus, Broadway has designed a testing utility that allows us to test the pipeline’s data processing capacity without relying on the data source.

Broadway provides a placeholder producer module. This producer does not rely on any data sources. Instead, messages are emitted directly into the pipeline.

The producer module should be tested separately if there is core behavior that cannot be tested along with the pipeline.

This form of unit testing ensures that we reduce potential points of failure in our test suite if any of the aforementioned problems with using the original data source should surface.

Graceful shutdowns

Broadway boasts about having graceful shutdowns. This is a rather interesting concept to explore as it relies heavily on the concurrency system of Elixir.

Essentially, the pipeline can only exist in two states — when all components are online and when all components are shutting down. There is no point in time where a single component will shutdown on its own without being restarted. This is because of the way that the supervisor of each component declares restart strategies ensuring that should a child process encounters any errors, it will be restarted without a hitch. This way, the only time where our components can shut down is when we shut down our main process or pipeline supervisor process. When either process is terminated, we want to properly handle all remaining events in the pipeline before shutting off every component.

This is achieved through a mix of concurrency features. But before we can explain how it works, a simple introduction of exit signals and process termination is due.

Exit signals and process termination

Processes can be linked to one another. When either process receives an exit signal — which can occur when the process is terminated forcibly or when it receives an exit signal propagated from its parent — it will propagate the exit signal to the linked process and that process will terminate as well.

Process linking

However, these exit signals can be trapped instead. When this occurs, rather than terminating the process that receives the propagated exit signal, the exit signal is sent as a message, allowing the receiving process to handle the exit as though it was just another message.

When a process is terminated, an optional terminate/2 callback can be declared to perform any cleanup before the process is actually terminated. This is useful if we have any lingering operations that should be completed before we terminate the process.

Supervisors can start a list of child processes and is responsible for managing the restart strategy of each child. The interaction between a supervisor and terminate is rather interesting. When a child is terminated, it is restarted accordingly. When a supervisor terminates, all of its children will also be terminated. If a child process traps exits, the terminate callback is called. If not, it will simply terminate immediately without calling the callback. More information about how supervisor interact with shutdowns can be found in the official documentation.

Back to our regularly scheduled deep dive…

With a basic understanding of exit trapping and process termination, we can actually understand how graceful shutdowns in Broadway works.

When the main process or the pipeline supervisor process is terminated, the main process — which traps exit signals — will invoke its terminate callback which will inform the Terminator process to begin trapping exits and terminate our pipeline supervisor. As this Terminator process is a child of the pipeline supervisor, it will invoke its implementation of terminate.

The exit signal propagates to the other components through their supervisors terminating and they will also invoke their terminate callback if they trap exits such as producers disconnecting from the data source.

The Terminator process is responsible for ensuring that all events still within the pipeline are processed before terminating the pipeline entirely.

It does so in three phases:

1. Notify that the processors do not resubscribe to producers through a state flag
2. Drain the producers of any events remaining by emitting the events through the pipeline
3. Wait for the batch processors (which will be the very last component in the pipeline) to terminate before terminating the supervisor

Interestingly, as the producer may be waiting to drain events, we may not want to cancel all of its consumers immediately. Thus, we rely on GenStage#async_info to queue the message to cancel all consumers at the end of the GenStage message queue — effectively waiting for all other events to be processed before cancelling all consumers. If batching is enabled, the processors will also wait for the batches to be processed before cancelling all consumers.

These mechanisms ensure that all events left in the pipeline is properly processed before the pipeline terminates, thus achieving graceful shutdowns.

Fascinating discovery!

These are some interesting bits of code that Broadway has.

__using__ configurations

Like other libraries in Elixir, use Broadway is where it all begins. As discussed in the previous open-source deep dive, the behavior of use can be altered by defining the __using__ macro.

There are three interesting bits of code in the __using__ macro:

location: keep

Used to report runtime errors from inside the quote. Without this, errors are reported where the defined function (in quote) is invoked. This is to ensure that we are aware of where the errors are occurring. More information about this configuration can be found here.

bind_quoted

Used to create bindings within the quote. When a binding is created, the value is automatically unquoted (which includes evaluation) and the value cannot be unquoted again. This is especially used when we do not want to re-evaluate the value multiple times.

More information quoting and unquoting in Elixir can be found in the official tutorial and a simplified explanation and example of binding can be found here.

@behavior

Used to define interface-like behavior where modules that adopt these behaviors can implement callbacks defined. In this case, when a module use Broadway, it will have to implement certain callbacks like handle_message while other callbacks like handle_batch remain optional.

More information about typespecs can be found in the official documentation.

Module metadata processing

While on the topic of meta-programming, module metadata can also be processed.

ensure_loaded? ensures that a given module is loaded. In Broadway, this is used to ensure that the :persistent_term module from Erlang is available for Elixir — the only time it will not be available is when the version of Elixir is too old. Documentation here.

function_exported? returns whether a module contains a definition for a public function with a given arity. Used to execute functions from modules if they are defined. Documentation here.

Dynamic process naming

As the pipeline can comprise of any number of components, Broadway supports dynamically generated processes. These dynamically generated processes are assigned names that follow a fixed convention — comprising of the name of the pipeline, the process type, and the index of the component among the other components of the same type.

The names are returned as quoted atoms where the atom has a space in it so it has to be declared via :”” .

Storage options in Elixir

Besides the basic data structures like lists and dictionaries, Elixir and Erlang offer other ways of storing data within processes.

Atomics

:atomics are a way of performing atomic operations on a set of mutable atomic variables.

Used to maintain the rate limiting threshold.

Previously, the rate limiter used ETS instead but atomic operations are much better for concurrent systems as they avoid race conditions when multiple producer processes are attempting to modify the rate limit.

Persistent term

Storage for Erlang terms that is optimised for reading terms at the expense of writing and updating terms.

Used to store pipeline metadata like producer names etc.

Queue

Manage first-in, first-out queues.

Used to manage message and demand buffers in the producer.

Process dictionaries

Store state within a process directly although its usage is generally frowned upon.

Used to store batches in the batcher.

A better alternative might have been to use an Agent or ETS instead.

Edit! I clarified with the team about their decision to use process dictionaries over ETS, this was their response:

The correct solution here would be to simply use a map. But because this is very intensive code, we need a mutable option, and the process dictionary is the most efficient one. ETS would be slow as data has to be copied in and out of ETS.
This is one of the very cases where using the pdict for performance is justified. :)

So, the reason why they decided to use a process dictionary over ETS is due to the performance requirement of batching! Very interesting!

Options validation

Dashbit — the team behind Broadway — developed an options validation library called NimbleOptions that aims to be a small library for validating and documenting high-level options.

A set of definitions for the available options are created first and these can be used to validate a keyword list — aka the options.

If the options are invalid, an error is returned, otherwise an :ok status along with the options are returned. The returned options have default values filled in.

Default values in dictionaries

Broadway has an interesting way of fanning out default values for the options keyword list. In the options keyword list, a “parent” value for :partition_by, :hibernate_after, and :spawn_opt is provided.

options = [
  partition_by: ..., # these are parent values
  hibernate_after: ...,
  producer: [
    hibernate_after: ... # this is a child value
  ]
]

The parent value will be used for producers, processors, and batchers if no explicit child value is provided. Alternatively, we might want to fan out a parent value to only two of the three unset child values while maintaining the original child value of the third.

This is done by merging the child options into the parent options. Thus, if the child does not define a value for the option, the parent value is inherited.

Closing the curtains

To conclude, Broadway is a powerful library for building data processing pipelines. These pipelines are built on top of the robust concurrency system that Elixir boasts.

Broadway is a very versatile library and the documentation contains detailed guides about using it with various data sources. Check out the Github repository and documentation!

If you want to get a basic understanding of the underlying concepts of Broadway or better visualise the architecture of a pipeline in Broadway, check out the first part here!

Open-source Deep Dive is a series where I pick apart open-source projects to explain the underlying concepts that power these projects and share my findings about the project!