Passive and Partially Active Fault Tolerance for Massively Parallel Stream Processing Engines

Abstract

Fault-tolerance techniques for stream processing engines can be categorized into passive and active approaches. However, both approaches have their own inadequacies in Massively Parallel Stream Processing Engines (MPSPE). The passive approach incurs a long recovery latency especially when a number of correlated nodes fail simultaneously, while the active approach requires extra replication resources. In this paper, we propose a new fault-tolerance framework, which is Passive and Partially Active (PPA). In a PPA scheme, the passive approach is applied to all tasks while only a selected set of tasks will be actively replicated. The number of actively replicated tasks depends on the available resources. If tasks without active replicas fail, tentative outputs will be generated before the completion of the recovery process. We also propose effective and efficient algorithms to optimize a partially active replication plan to maximize the quality of tentative outputs. We implemented PPA on top of Storm, an open-source MPSPE and conducted extensive experiments using both real and synthetic datasets to verify the effectiveness of our approach.