elasticsearch/docs/internal/DistributedArchitectureGuide.md

Distributed Area Team Internals

(Summary, brief discussion of our features)

Networking

ThreadPool

(We have many thread pools, what and why)

ActionListener

Callbacks are used extensively throughout Elasticsearch because they enable us to write asynchronous and nonblocking code, i.e. code which doesn't necessarily compute a result straight away but also doesn't block the calling thread waiting for the result to become available. They support several useful control flows:

• They can be completed immediately on the calling thread.
• They can be completed concurrently on a different thread.
• They can be stored in a data structure and completed later on when the system reaches a particular state.
• Most commonly, they can be passed on to other methods that themselves require a callback.
• They can be wrapped in another callback which modifies the behaviour of the original callback, perhaps adding some extra code to run before or after completion, before passing them on.

ActionListener is a general-purpose callback interface that is used extensively across the Elasticsearch codebase. ActionListener is used pretty much everywhere that needs to perform some asynchronous and nonblocking computation. The uniformity makes it easier to compose parts of the system together without needing to build adapters to convert back and forth between different kinds of callback. It also makes it easier to develop the skills needed to read and understand all the asynchronous code, although this definitely takes practice and is certainly not easy in an absolute sense. Finally, it has allowed us to build a rich library for working with ActionListener instances themselves, creating new instances out of existing ones and completing them in interesting ways. See for instance:

• all the static methods on ActionListener itself
• ThreadedActionListener for forking work elsewhere
• RefCountingListener for running work in parallel
• SubscribableListener for constructing flexible workflows

Callback-based asynchronous code can easily call regular synchronous code, but synchronous code cannot run callback-based asynchronous code without blocking the calling thread until the callback is called back. This blocking is at best undesirable (threads are too expensive to waste with unnecessary blocking) and at worst outright broken (the blocking can lead to deadlock). Unfortunately this means that most of our code ends up having to be written with callbacks, simply because it's ultimately calling into some other code that takes a callback. The entry points for all Elasticsearch APIs are callback-based (e.g. REST APIs all start at org.elasticsearch.rest.BaseRestHandler#prepareRequest, and transport APIs all start at org.elasticsearch.action.support.TransportAction#doExecute) and the whole system fundamentally works in terms of an event loop (a io.netty.channel.EventLoop) which processes network events via callbacks.

ActionListener is not an ad-hoc invention. Formally speaking, it is our implementation of the general concept of a continuation in the sense of continuation-passing style (CPS): an extra argument to a function which defines how to continue the computation when the result is available. This is in contrast to direct style which is the more usual style of calling methods that return values directly back to the caller so they can continue executing as normal. There's essentially two ways that computation can continue in Java (it can return a value or it can throw an exception) which is why ActionListener has both an onResponse() and an onFailure() method.

CPS is strictly more expressive than direct style: direct code can be mechanically translated into continuation-passing style, but CPS also enables all sorts of other useful control structures such as forking work onto separate threads, possibly to be executed in parallel, perhaps even across multiple nodes, or possibly collecting a list of continuations all waiting for the same condition to be satisfied before proceeding (e.g. SubscribableListener amongst many others). Some languages have first-class support for continuations (e.g. the async and await primitives in C#) allowing the programmer to write code in direct style away from those exotic control structures, but Java does not. That's why we have to manipulate all the callbacks ourselves.

Strictly speaking, CPS requires that a computation only continues by calling the continuation. In Elasticsearch, this means that asynchronous methods must have void return type and may not throw any exceptions. This is mostly the case in our code as written today, and is a good guiding principle, but we don't enforce void exceptionless methods and there are some deviations from this rule. In particular, it's not uncommon to permit some methods to throw an exception, using things like ActionListener#run (or an equivalent try ... catch ... block) further up the stack to handle it. Some methods also take (and may complete) an ActionListener parameter, but still return a value separately for other local synchronous work.

This pattern is often used in the transport action layer with the use of the ChannelActionListener class, which wraps a TransportChannel produced by the transport layer. TransportChannel implementations can hold a reference to a Netty channel with which to pass the response back to the network caller. Netty has a many-to-one association of network callers to channels, so a call taking a long time generally won't hog resources: it's cheap. A transport action can take hours to respond and that's alright, barring caller timeouts.

(TODO: add useful starter references and explanations for a range of Listener classes. Reference the Netty section.)

REST Layer

The REST and Transport layers are bound together through the ActionModule. ActionModule#initRestHandlers registers all the rest actions with a RestController that matches incoming requests to particular REST actions. RestController#registerHandler uses each Rest*Action's #routes() implementation to match HTTP requests to that particular Rest*Action. Typically, REST actions follow the class naming convention Rest*Action, which makes them easier to find, but not always; the #routes() definition can also be helpful in finding a REST action. RestController#dispatchRequest eventually calls #handleRequest on a RestHandler implementation. RestHandler is the base class for BaseRestHandler, which most Rest*Action instances extend to implement a particular REST action.

BaseRestHandler#handleRequest calls into BaseRestHandler#prepareRequest, which children Rest*Action classes extend to define the behavior for a particular action. RestController#dispatchRequest passes a RestChannel to the Rest*Action via RestHandler#handleRequest: Rest*Action#prepareRequest implementations return a RestChannelConsumer defining how to execute the action and reply on the channel (usually in the form of completing an ActionListener wrapper). Rest*Action#prepareRequest implementations are responsible for parsing the incoming request, and verifying that the structure of the request is valid. BaseRestHandler#handleRequest will then check that all the request parameters have been consumed: unexpected request parameters result in an error.

How REST Actions Connect to Transport Actions

The Rest layer uses an implementation of AbstractClient. BaseRestHandler#prepareRequest takes a NodeClient: this client knows how to connect to a specified TransportAction. A Rest*Action implementation will return a RestChannelConsumer that most often invokes a call into a method on the NodeClient to pass through to the TransportAction. Along the way from BaseRestHandler#prepareRequest through the AbstractClient and NodeClient code, NodeClient#executeLocally is called: this method calls into TaskManager#registerAndExecute, registering the operation with the TaskManager so it can be found in Task API requests, before moving on to execute the specified TransportAction.

NodeClient has a NodeClient#actions map from ActionType to TransportAction. ActionModule#setupActions registers all the core TransportActions, as well as those defined in any plugins that are being used: plugins can override Plugin#getActions() to define additional TransportActions. Note that not all TransportActions will be mapped back to a REST action: many TransportActions are only used for internode operations/communications.

Transport Layer

(Managed by the TransportService, TransportActions must be registered there, too)

(Executing a TransportAction (either locally via NodeClient or remotely via TransportService) is where most of the authorization & other security logic runs)

(What actions, and why, are registered in TransportService but not NodeClient?)

Direct Node to Node Transport Layer

(TransportService maps incoming requests to TransportActions)

Chunk Encoding

XContent

Performance

Netty

(long running actions should be forked off of the Netty thread. Keep short operations to avoid forking costs)

Work Queues

Cluster Coordination

(Sketch of important classes? Might inform more sections to add for details.)

(A NodeB can coordinate a search across several other nodes, when NodeB itself does not have the data, and then return a result to the caller. Explain this coordinating role)

Node Roles

Master Nodes

Master Elections

(Quorum, terms, any eligibility limitations)

Cluster Formation / Membership

(Explain joining, and how it happens every time a new master is elected)

Discovery

Master Transport Actions

Cluster State

Master Service

Cluster State Publication

(Majority concensus to apply, what happens if a master-eligible node falls behind / is incommunicado.)

Cluster State Application

(Go over the two kinds of listeners -- ClusterStateApplier and ClusterStateListener?)

Persistence

(Sketch ephemeral vs persisted cluster state.)

(what's the format for persisted metadata)

Replication

(More Topics: ReplicationTracker concepts / highlights.)

What is a Shard

Primary Shard Selection

(How a primary shard is chosen)

Versioning

(terms and such)

How Data Replicates

(How an index write replicates across shards -- TransportReplicationAction?)

Consistency Guarantees

(What guarantees do we give the user about persistence and readability?)

Locking

(rarely use locks)

ShardLock

Translog / Engine Locking

Lucene Locking

Engine

(What does Engine mean in the distrib layer? Distinguish Engine vs Directory vs Lucene)

(High level explanation of how translog ties in with Lucene)

(contrast Lucene vs ES flush / refresh / fsync)

Refresh for Read

(internal vs external reader manager refreshes? flush vs refresh)

Reference Counting

Store

(Data lives beyond a high level IndexShard instance. Continue to exist until all references to the Store go away, then Lucene data is removed)

Translog

(Explain checkpointing and generations, when happens on Lucene flush / fsync)

(Concurrency control for flushing)

(VersionMap)

Translog Truncation

Direct Translog Read

Index Version

Lucene

(copy a sketch of the files Lucene can have here and explain)

(Explain about SearchIndexInput -- IndexWriter, IndexReader -- and the shared blob cache)

(Lucene uses Directory, ES extends/overrides the Directory class to implement different forms of file storage. Lucene contains a map of where all the data is located in files and offsites, and fetches it from various files. ES doesn't just treat Lucene as a storage engine at the bottom (the end) of the stack. Rather ES has other information that works in parallel with the storage engine.)

Segment Merges

Recovery

(All shards go through a 'recovery' process. Describe high level. createShard goes through this code.)

(How is the translog involved in recovery?)

Create a Shard

Local Recovery

Peer Recovery

Snapshot Recovery

Recovery Across Server Restart

(partial shard recoveries survive server restart? reestablishRecovery? How does that work.)

How a Recovery Method is Chosen

Data Tiers

(Frozen, warm, hot, etc.)

Allocation

(AllocationService runs on the master node)

(Discuss different deciders that limit allocation. Sketch / list the different deciders that we have.)

APIs for Balancing Operations

(Significant internal APIs for balancing a cluster)

Heuristics for Allocation

Cluster Reroute Command

(How does this command behave with the desired auto balancer.)

Autoscaling

(Reactive and proactive autoscaling. Explain that we surface recommendations, how control plane uses it.)

(Sketch / list the different deciders that we have, and then also how we use information from each to make a recommendation.)

Snapshot / Restore

(We've got some good package level documentation that should be linked here in the intro)

(copy a sketch of the file system here, with explanation -- good reference)

Snapshot Repository

Creation of a Snapshot

(Include an overview of the coordination between data and master nodes, which writes what and when)

(Concurrency control: generation numbers, pending generation number, etc.)

(partial snapshots)

Deletion of a Snapshot

Restoring a Snapshot

Detecting Multiple Writers to a Single Repository

Task Management / Tracking

(How we identify operations/tasks in the system and report upon them. How we group operations via parent task ID.)

What Tasks Are Tracked

Tracking A Task Across Threads

Tracking A Task Across Nodes

Kill / Cancel A Task

Persistent Tasks

Cross Cluster Replication (CCR)

(Brief explanation of the use case for CCR)

(Explain how this works at a high level, and details of any significant components / ideas.)

Cross Cluster Search

Indexing / CRUD

(Explain that the Distributed team is responsible for the write path, while the Search team owns the read path.)

(Generating document IDs. Same across shard replicas, _id field)

(Sequence number: different than ID)

Reindex

Locking

(what limits write concurrency, and how do we minimize)

Soft Deletes

Refresh

(explain visibility of writes, and reference the Lucene section for more details (whatever makes more sense explained there))

Server Startup

Server Shutdown

Closing a Shard

(this can also happen during shard reallocation, right? This might be a standalone topic, or need another section about it in allocation?...)