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proposal: Added proposal for new Thanos component: Thanos Frontend.
Signed-off-by: Bartlomiej Plotka <bwplotka@gmail.com>
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title: Adding a New Thanos Component that Embeds Cortex Query Frontend | ||
type: proposal | ||
menu: proposals | ||
status: in-review | ||
owner: bwplotka | ||
--- | ||
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### Related Tickets | ||
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* Response caching: https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1651 | ||
* Moving query frontend to separate repo: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/issues/1672 | ||
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## Summary | ||
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This proposal describes addition of a new Thanos command (component) into `cmd/thanos` called `frontend`. | ||
This component will literally import a certain version of Cortex [frontend package](https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/tree/4410bed704e7d8f63418b02b328ddb93d99fad0b/pkg/querier/frontend). | ||
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We will go through rationales, and potential alternatives. | ||
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## Motivation | ||
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[Cortex Frontend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyBbImSDOrI&t=2s) was introduced by Tom in August 2019. It was designed | ||
to be deployed in front of Prometheus Query API in order to ensure: | ||
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* Query split by time. | ||
* Query step alignment. | ||
* Query retry logic | ||
* Query limit logic | ||
* Query response cache in memory, Memcached or Redis. | ||
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Since the nature of Cortex backend is really similar to Thanos, with exactly the same PromQL API, and long term capabilities, the caching | ||
work done for Cortex fits to Thanos. Given also our good collaboration in the past, it feels natural to reuse Cortex's code. | ||
We even started discussion to move it to separate repo, but there was no motivation towards this, for a good reason. | ||
At the end we were advertising to use cortex query frontend on production on top of Thanos and this works considerably well, with some | ||
problems on edge cases and for downsampled data as mentioned [here]() | ||
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However, we realized recently that asking users to install suddenly Cortex component on top of Thanos system is extremely confusing: | ||
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* Cortex has totally different way of configuring services. It requires to decide what module you have in single YAML file. Thanos in opposite | ||
have flags and different subcommand for each component. | ||
* Cortex has bit different way of configuring memcached, which is inconsistent with what we have in Thanos Stote Gateway. | ||
* There are many Cortex specific configuration items which can confuse Thanos user and increase complexity overall (e.g. ) | ||
* We have many ideas how to improve Cortex Query Frontend on top of Thanos, but adding Thanos specific configuration options will increase | ||
complexity on Cortex side as well. | ||
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All of this were causing confusion and questions like [this](https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/CK5RSSC10/p1586504362400300?thread_ts=1586492170.387900&cid=CK5RSSC10). | ||
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At the end we decided with Thanos and Cortex maintainers that the ultimately it would be awesome to create a new Thanos subcommand called `frontend`. | ||
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## Use Cases | ||
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* User can cache responses for query range | ||
* User can use the same configuration patterns as rest of Thanos components. | ||
* Thanos Developer does not need to write and maintain custom response cache logic. | ||
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## Goals of this design | ||
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* Enable response caching that will easy to use for Thanos users. | ||
* Keep it extensible and scalable for future improvements like advanced query planning, queuing, rate limiting etc. | ||
* Reuse as much as possible between projects, contribute. | ||
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## No Goals | ||
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* Create Thanos specific response caching from scratch. | ||
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## Proposal | ||
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The idea is to create `thanos frontend` component that allows specifying following options: | ||
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* `--query-range.split-interval`, `time.Duration` | ||
* `--query-range.max-retries-per-request`, `int`, default = `5` | ||
* `--query-range.disable-step-align`, `bool` | ||
* `--query-range.response-cache-ttl` `time.Duration` default = `1m` | ||
* `--query-range.response-cache-config(-file)` `pathorcontent` + [CacheConfig](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/blob/55cb8ca38b3539381dc6a781e637df15c694e50a/pkg/store/cache/factory.go#L32) | ||
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We plan to have in-mem, fifo and memcached support for now. Cache config will be exactly the same as the one used for Store Gateway. | ||
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### Open Questions | ||
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* Is `thanos frontend` a valid name? I feel it's short and verbose enough. | ||
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### Alternatives | ||
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#### Don't add anything, document Cortex query frontend and add examples of usage | ||
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Unfortunately we tried this path already without success. Reasons were mentioned in [Motivation](202004_embedd_cortex_frontend.md#Motivation) | ||
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#### Add response caching to Querier itself, in the same binary. | ||
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This will definitely simplify deployment if Querier would allow caching directly. However, this way is not really scalable. | ||
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Furthermore, eventually frontend will be responsible for more than just caching. It is meant to do query planning like splitting or even | ||
advanced query paralization (query sharding). This might mean future improvements in terms of query scheduling, queuing and retrying. | ||
This means that at some point we would need an ability to scale query part and caching/query planner totally separately. | ||
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NOTE: We can still consider just simple response caching inside Querier if user will request so. | ||
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#### Write response caching from scratch. | ||
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I think this does not need to be explained. Response caching has proven to be not trivial. It's really amazing that we | ||
have opportunity to work towards something that works with experts in the field like @tomwilkie and others from Loki and Cortex Team. | ||
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Overall, [Reusing is caring](https://www.bwplotka.dev/2020/how-to-became-oss-maintainer/#5-want-more-help-give-back-help-others). | ||
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## Work Plan | ||
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1. Refactor [IndexCacheConfig](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/blob/55cb8ca38b3539381dc6a781e637df15c694e50a/pkg/store/cache/factory.go#L32) to generic cache config so we can reuse. | ||
1. Add necessary changes to Cortex frontend | ||
* Metric generalization (they are globals now). | ||
1. Add `thanos frontend` subcommand. | ||
1. Add proper e2e test using cache. | ||
1. Document new subcommand | ||
1. Add to [kube-thanos](https://github.com/thanos-io/kube-thanos0) | ||
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## Future Work | ||
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Improvements to Cortex query frontend, so Thanos `frontend` as described [here](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1651) |
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--- | ||
title: "Proposals:" | ||
--- | ||
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List of current proposals. | ||
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Proposals can have 5 Statuses (`.Params.Status`): | ||
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* accepted | ||
* complete | ||
* rejected | ||
* in-review | ||
* draft |