Chapter 9. Cruise Control for cluster rebalancing

Cruise Control reduces the time and effort involved in running an efficient and balanced Kafka cluster.

A typical cluster can become unevenly loaded over time. Partitions that handle large amounts of message traffic might be unevenly distributed across the available brokers. To rebalance the cluster, administrators must monitor the load on brokers and manually reassign busy partitions to brokers with spare capacity.

Cruise Control automates the cluster rebalancing process. It constructs a workload model of resource utilization for the cluster—​based on CPU, disk, and network load—​and generates optimization proposals (that you can approve or reject) for more balanced partition assignments. A set of configurable optimization goals is used to calculate these proposals.

When you approve an optimization proposal, Cruise Control applies it to your Kafka cluster. When the cluster rebalancing operation is complete, the broker pods are used more effectively and the Kafka cluster is more evenly balanced.

To rebalance a Kafka cluster, Cruise Control uses optimization goals to generate optimization proposals, which you can approve or reject.

Optimization goals are constraints on workload redistribution and resource utilization across a Kafka cluster. With a few exceptions, AMQ Streams supports all the optimization goals developed in the Cruise Control project. The supported goals, in the default descending order of priority, are as follows:

For more information on each optimization goal, see Goals in the Cruise Control Wiki.

Goals configuration in AMQ Streams custom resources

You configure optimization goals in Kafka and KafkaRebalance custom resources. Cruise Control has configurations for hard optimization goals that must be satisfied, as well as master, default, and user-provided optimization goals. Optimization goals are subject to any capacity limits on broker resources.

The following sections describe each goal configuration in more detail.

Hard goals and soft goals

Hard goals are goals that must be satisfied in optimization proposals. Goals that are not configured as hard goals are known as soft goals. You can think of soft goals as best effort goals: they do not need to be satisfied in optimization proposals, but are included in optimization calculations. An optimization proposal that violates one or more soft goals, but satisfies all hard goals, is valid.

Cruise Control will calculate optimization proposals that satisfy all the hard goals and as many soft goals as possible (in their priority order). An optimization proposal that does not satisfy all the hard goals is rejected by Cruise Control and not sent to the user for approval.

In Cruise Control, the following master optimization goals are preset as hard goals:

RackAwareGoal; ReplicaCapacityGoal; DiskCapacityGoal; NetworkInboundCapacityGoal; NetworkOutboundCapacityGoal

You configure hard goals in the Cruise Control deployment configuration, by editing the hard.goals property in Kafka.spec.cruiseControl.config.

apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
spec:
  kafka:
    # ...
  zookeeper:
    # ...
  entityOperator:
    topicOperator: {}
    userOperator: {}
  cruiseControl:
    brokerCapacity:
      inboundNetwork: 10000KB/s
      outboundNetwork: 10000KB/s
    config:
      hard.goals: >
        com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.NetworkInboundCapacityGoal,
        com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.NetworkOutboundCapacityGoal
      # ...

Increasing the number of configured hard goals will reduce the likelihood of Cruise Control generating valid optimization proposals.

If skipHardGoalCheck: true is specified in the KafkaRebalance custom resource, Cruise Control does not check that the list of user-provided optimization goals (in KafkaRebalance.spec.goals) contains all the configured hard goals (hard.goals). Therefore, if some, but not all, of the user-provided optimization goals are in the hard.goals list, Cruise Control will still treat them as hard goals even if skipHardGoalCheck: true is specified.

Master optimization goals

The master optimization goals are available to all users. Goals that are not listed in the master optimization goals are not available for use in Cruise Control operations.

Unless you change the Cruise Control deployment configuration, AMQ Streams will inherit the following master optimization goals from Cruise Control, in descending priority order:

RackAwareGoal; ReplicaCapacityGoal; DiskCapacityGoal; NetworkInboundCapacityGoal; NetworkOutboundCapacityGoal; ReplicaDistributionGoal; PotentialNwOutGoal; DiskUsageDistributionGoal; NetworkInboundUsageDistributionGoal; NetworkOutboundUsageDistributionGoal; TopicReplicaDistributionGoal; LeaderReplicaDistributionGoal; LeaderBytesInDistributionGoal; PreferredLeaderElectionGoal

Five of these goals are preset as hard goals.

To reduce complexity, we recommend that you use the inherited master optimization goals, unless you need to completely exclude one or more goals from use in KafkaRebalance resources. The priority order of the master optimization goals can be modified, if desired, in the configuration for default optimization goals.

You configure master optimization goals, if necessary, in the Cruise Control deployment configuration: Kafka.spec.cruiseControl.config.goals

Default optimization goals

Cruise Control uses the default optimization goals to generate the cached optimization proposal. For more information about the cached optimization proposal, see Section 9.3, “Optimization proposals overview”.

You can override the default optimization goals by setting user-provided optimization goals in a KafkaRebalance custom resource.

Unless you specify default.goals in the Cruise Control deployment configuration, the master optimization goals are used as the default optimization goals. In this case, the cached optimization proposal is generated using the master optimization goals.

apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
spec:
  kafka:
    # ...
  zookeeper:
    # ...
  entityOperator:
    topicOperator: {}
    userOperator: {}
  cruiseControl:
    brokerCapacity:
      inboundNetwork: 10000KB/s
      outboundNetwork: 10000KB/s
    config:
      default.goals: >
         com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.RackAwareGoal,
         com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.ReplicaCapacityGoal,
         com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.DiskCapacityGoal
      # ...

If no default optimization goals are specified, the cached proposal is generated using the master optimization goals.

User-provided optimization goals

User-provided optimization goals narrow down the configured default goals for a particular optimization proposal. You can set them, as required, in spec.goals in the KafkaRebalance custom resource:

KafkaRebalance.spec.goals

User-provided optimization goals can generate optimization proposals for different scenarios. For example, you might want to optimize leader replica distribution across the Kafka cluster without considering disk capacity or disk utilization. So, you create a KafkaRebalance custom resource containing a single user-provided goal for leader replica distribution.

User-provided optimization goals must:

To ignore the configured hard goals in an optimization proposal, add the skipHardGoalCheck: true option to the KafkaRebalance custom resource.

An optimization proposal is a summary of proposed changes that would produce a more balanced Kafka cluster, with partition workloads distributed more evenly among the brokers. Each optimization proposal is based on the set of optimization goals that was used to generate it, subject to any configured capacity limits on broker resources.

An optimization proposal is contained in the Status.Optimization Result property of a KafkaRebalance custom resource. The information provided is a summary of the full optimization proposal. Use the summary to decide whether to:

All optimization proposals are dry runs: you cannot approve a cluster rebalance without first generating an optimization proposal. There is no limit to the number of optimization proposals that can be generated.

Cached optimization proposal

Cruise Control maintains a cached optimization proposal based on the configured default optimization goals. Generated from the workload model, the cached optimization proposal is updated every 15 minutes to reflect the current state of the Kafka cluster. If you generate an optimization proposal using the default optimization goals, Cruise Control returns the most recent cached proposal.

To change the cached optimization proposal refresh interval, edit the proposal.expiration.ms setting in the Cruise Control deployment configuration. Consider a shorter interval for fast changing clusters, although this increases the load on the Cruise Control server.

Contents of optimization proposals

The following table explains the properties contained in an optimization proposal:

To deploy Cruise Control to your AMQ Streams cluster, define the configuration using the cruiseControl property in the Kafka resource, and then create or update the resource.

Deploy one instance of Cruise Control per Kafka cluster.

Auto-created topics

The following table shows the three topics that are automatically created when Cruise Control is deployed. These topics are required for Cruise Control to work properly and must not be deleted or changed.

To prevent the removal of records that are needed by Cruise Control, log compaction is disabled in the auto-created topics.

The config property in Kafka.spec.cruiseControl contains configuration options as keys with values as one of the following JSON types:

You can specify and configure all the options listed in the "Configurations" section of the Cruise Control documentation, apart from those managed directly by AMQ Streams. Specifically, you cannot modify configuration options with keys equal to or starting with one of the following strings:

If restricted options are specified, they are ignored and a warning message is printed to the Cluster Operator log file. All the supported options are passed to Cruise Control.

apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
spec:
  # ...
  cruiseControl:
    # ...
    config:
      default.goals: >
         com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.RackAwareGoal,
         com.linkedin.kafka.cruisecontrol.analyzer.goals.ReplicaCapacityGoal
      cpu.balance.threshold: 1.1
      metadata.max.age.ms: 300000
      send.buffer.bytes: 131072
    # ...

Capacity configuration

Cruise Control uses capacity limits to determine if certain resource-based optimization goals are being broken.

You specify capacity limits for Kafka broker resources in the brokerCapacity property in Kafka.spec.cruiseControl . Capacity limits can be set for the following broker resources in the described units:

Because AMQ Streams Kafka brokers are homogeneous, Cruise Control applies the same capacity limits to every broker it is monitoring.

apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
spec:
  # ...
  cruiseControl:
    # ...
    brokerCapacity:
      disk: 100G
      cpuUtilization: 100
      inboundNetwork: 10000KB/s
      outboundNetwork: 10000KB/s
    # ...

Logging configuration

Cruise Control has its own configurable logger:

Cruise Control uses the Apache log4j logger implementation.

Use the logging property to configure loggers and logger levels.

You can set the log levels by specifying the logger and level directly (inline) or use a custom (external) ConfigMap. If a ConfigMap is used, you set logging.name property to the name of the ConfigMap containing the external logging configuration. Inside the ConfigMap, the logging configuration is described using log4j.properties.

Here we see examples of inline and external logging.

apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
# ...
spec:
  cruiseControl:
    # ...
    logging:
      type: inline
      loggers:
        cruisecontrol.root.logger: "INFO"
    # ...

apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta1
kind: Kafka
# ...
spec:
  cruiseControl:
    # ...
    logging:
      type: external
      name: customConfigMap
    # ...

When you create or update a KafkaRebalance resource, Cruise Control generates an optimization proposal for the Kafka cluster based on the configured optimization goals.

Analyze the summary information in the optimization proposal and decide whether to approve it.

You can approve an optimization proposal generated by Cruise Control, if its status is ProposalReady. Cruise Control will then apply the optimization proposal to the Kafka cluster, reassigning partitions to brokers and changing partition leadership.

Once started, a cluster rebalance operation might take some time to complete and affect the overall performance of the Kafka cluster.

If you want to stop a cluster rebalance operation that is in progress, apply the stop annotation to the KafkaRebalance custom resource. This instructs Cruise Control to finish the current batch of partition reassignments and then stop the rebalance. When the rebalance has stopped, completed partition reassignments have already been applied; therefore, the state of the Kafka cluster is different when compared to prior to the start of the rebalance operation. If further rebalancing is required, you should generate a new optimization proposal.

If an issue occurs when creating a KafkaRebalance resource or interacting with Cruise Control, the error is reported in the resource status, along with details of how to fix it. The resource also moves to the NotReady state.

To continue with the cluster rebalance operation, you must fix the problem in the KafkaRebalance resource itself. Problems might include the following:

After fixing the issue, you need to add the refresh annotation to the KafkaRebalance resource. During a “refresh”, a new optimization proposal is requested from the Cruise Control server.