Streaming a Kafka topic in a Delta table on S3 using Spark Structured Streaming

At Wehkamp we use Apache Kafka in our event driven service architecture. It handles high loads of messages really well. We use Apache Spark to run analysis, data processing and machine learning.

When I work with Kafka, the words of Mark van Gool, a data architect, always echo in my head: "Kafka should not be used as a data store!" It is really tempting for me to do so, but most event topics have a small retention period. Our data strategy specifies that we should store data on S3 for further processing. Raw S3 data is not the best way of dealing with data on Spark, though. In this blog I'll show how you can use Spark Structured Streaming to write JSON records on a Kafka topic into a Delta table. This will make the data structured and faster to process.

Note: This article assumes that you're dealing with a JSON topic without a schema. It also assumes that the buckets are mounted to the file system, so we can read and write to them directly (without the need for boto3). Also: I'm using Databricks Cloud, so some parts may be specific to that environment.

1. Intro
2. Design
   1. Steps
3. (1.) Configuration
   1. Global variables
   2. Widgets
   3. Parse widgets
   4. Locations by convention
4. (2.) Schema
   1. Schema inference
   2. Load schema
5. (3.) Read Kafka Stream
6. (4.) Delta table
   1. Ensure the Delta table
   2. Upsert by Kafka key
   3. Write stream data
7. (5.) Clean up
   1. Optimize
   2. Vacuum
8. Databricks Database Table
9. Reading a Delta table
10. Final thoughts
11. Further reading
12. Changelog
13. Comments

Design

To make things easier to understand, I've made a diagram of the setup we're trying to create. Let's assume we have 2 topics that we need to turn into Delta tables. We have another notebook that consumes those delta tables.

Each topic gets its own Delta table in its own bucket. The topics are read by parametrized jobs that will use Spark Structured Streaming to stream updates into the table. The jobs can run every hour or continuously, depending on your needs. Each job will save the Kafka group id, so it continues reading from Kafka where it left of.

The notebook that needs data from the topics now connects to the delta table and consumes that data. This way the notebook becomes decoupled from Kafka. The Delta table now works like a database, it contains a single row per key.

Steps

We need to do the following steps:

1. Add widgets to parametrize the notebook. Use the widgets content to determine the configuration.
2. Infer the Kafka schema of the topic and persist it for later use.
3. Create a schema from the schema file and read the Kafka topic.
4. Ensure the Delta table has the right schema and write the table using an upsert.
5. Clean up the Delta table.

Let's start!

1. Configuration

We will build a generic notebook, so we must add some widgets to influence the way the notebook runs:

• Let's add a debug setting to support debug runs that don't touch production files.
• We'll use the streaming setting to indicate if we want to use continues streaming or only trigger it once (False). Most of our jobs are only scheduled once every hour.
• The topic holds the Kafka topic we want to turn into a delta table.
• The update Kafka schema indicates that we want to re-infer the Kafka schema. We need this if the structure of the topic changes.

The widgets look like this:

Global variables

Let's start out with a cell with global variables that will not be parametrized.

kafka_broker = "my.kafka.queue:9092"
bucket_prefix = "my-company-bucket-prefix-"

At Wehkamp we use prefixes for buckets.

Widgets

Let's set up the widgets:

true_false = ["True", "False"]

dbutils.widgets.removeAll()
dbutils.widgets.text("topic", "", "Topic")
dbutils.widgets.dropdown("debug", "True", true_false, "Debug")
dbutils.widgets.dropdown("streaming", "False", true_false, "Streaming")
dbutils.widgets.dropdown("update_kafka_schema", "False", true_false, "Update Kafka Schema")

Parse widgets

Now that we have our widgets, we should parse it to variables. I've lifted some code from this blog to help me get the values from the widgets:

def str_to_bool(value):
  FALSE_VALUES = ['false', 'no', '0']
  TRUE_VALUES = ['true', 'yes', '1']
  lvalue = str(value).lower()
  if lvalue in (FALSE_VALUES): return False
  if lvalue in (TRUE_VALUES):  return True
  raise Exception("String value should be one of {}, but got '{}'.".format(
    FALSE_VALUES + TRUE_VALUES, value))


def validate_required_argument_and_return_value(name):
  value = getArgument(name)
  if len(value) < 1:
    dbutils.notebook.exit("'{}' argument value is required.".format(name))
  return value

Let's convert the widgets values to variables:

debug = str_to_bool(getArgument("debug"))
topic = validate_required_argument_and_return_value("topic")
streaming = str_to_bool(getArgument("streaming"))
update_kafka_schema = str_to_bool(getArgument("update_kafka_schema"))

Locations by convention

To write a Delta table, we need 3 settings: the location of the delta table, the location of the checkpoints and the location of the schema file. Let's use the name of the topic as a convention to get these locations:

bucket = "/mnt/{}{}-delta".format(bucket_prefix, topic)

delta_location = bucket + "/delta-table"
checkpoint_location = bucket + "/checkpoints";
schema_location = bucket + "/kafka_schema.json";

if debug:
  delta_location += "_debug"
  checkpoint_location += "_debug"
  schema_location += "_debug.json" 

print("Debug:               ", debug)
print("Streaming:           ", streaming)
print("Update Kafka Schema: ", update_kafka_schema)
print("Broker:              ", kafka_broker)
print("Topic:               ", topic)
print("Delta:               ", delta_location)
print("Checkpoint:          ", checkpoint_location)
print("Schema:              ", schema_location)

2. Schema

The Kafka topic contains JSON. To properly read this data into Spark, we must provide a schema. To make things faster, we'll infer the schema once and save it to an S3 location. Upon future runs we'll use the saved schema.

Schema inference

Before we can read the Kafka topic in a streaming way, we must infer the schema. Let's use the code from this blog to infer the schema. We'll start with some imports:

import json, os, re

from delta.tables import *

from pyspark.sql.functions import *
from pyspark.sql.types import *
from pyspark.sql import *

Now, let's define a method to infer the schema of a Kafka topic and return it in the JSON format:

def infer_topic_schema_json(topic):

    df_json = (spark.read
               .format("kafka")
               .option("kafka.bootstrap.servers", kafka_broker)
               .option("subscribe", topic)
               .option("startingOffsets", "earliest")
               .option("endingOffsets", "latest")
               .option("failOnDataLoss", "false")
               .load()
               # filter out empty values
               .withColumn("value", expr("string(value)"))
               .filter(col("value").isNotNull())
               # get latest version of each record
               .select("key", expr("struct(offset, value) r"))
               .groupBy("key").agg(expr("max(r) r")) 
               .select("r.value"))
    
    # decode the json values
    df_read = spark.read.json(
      df_json.rdd.map(lambda x: x.value), multiLine=True)
    
    # drop corrupt records
    if "_corrupt_record" in df_read.columns:
        df_read = (df_read
                   .filter(col("_corrupt_record").isNotNull())
                   .drop("_corrupt_record"))
 
    return df_read.schema.json()

Inferring a schema might take a while, as Spark has to read the entire topic to determine the schema. That's why we cache it in the S3 bucket, so we only have to infer the schema once.

infer_schema = update_kafka_schema

if not infer_schema:
  try:
      topic_schema_txt = dbutils.fs.head(schema_location)
  except:
    infer_schema = True
    pass

if infer_schema:
  topic_schema_txt = infer_topic_schema_json(topic)
  dbutils.fs.rm(schema_location)
  dbutils.fs.put(schema_location, topic_schema_txt)

Note: I'm using dbutils.fs because writing a file with file.write will write the file to the driver, but not to S3.

Load schema

Loading the JSON from S3 into a schema is super simple:

topic_schema = StructType.fromJson(json.loads(topic_schema_txt))
print(topic_schema)

3. Read Kafka Stream

Now we can finally start to use Spark Structured Streaming to read the Kafka topic. The function we'll use looks a lot like the infer_topic_schema_json function. The main difference is the usage of readStream that will use structured streaming.

def read_stream_kafka_topic(topic, schema):
    return (spark.readStream
            .format("kafka")
            .option("kafka.bootstrap.servers", kafka_broker)
            .option("subscribe", topic)
            .option("startingOffsets", "earliest")
            .option("failOnDataLoss", "false")
            .load()
            # filter out empty values
            .withColumn("value", expr("string(value)"))
            .filter(col("value").isNotNull())
            .select(
              # offset must be the first field, due to aggregation
              expr("offset as kafka_offset"),
              expr("timestamp as kafka_ts"),
              expr("string(key) as kafka_key"),
              "value"
            )
            # get latest version of each record
            .select("kafka_key", expr("struct(*) as r"))
            .groupBy("kafka_key")
            .agg(expr("max(r) r"))
            # convert to JSON with schema
            .withColumn('value', 
                        from_json(col("r.value"), topic_schema))
            .select('r.kafka_key', 
                    'r.kafka_offset', 
                    'r.kafka_ts', 
                    'value.*'
            ))

Let's read our topic into a dataframe:

df = read_stream_kafka_topic(topic, topic_schema)

4. Delta table

Now that we have a (streaming) dataframe of our Kafka topic, we need to write it to a Delta table.

Ensure the Delta table

First, we need to make sure the Delta table is present. Here is where we can use the schema of the dataframe to make an empty dataframe. This dataframe will create an empty Delta table if it does not exist.

(spark
 .createDataFrame([], df.schema)
 .write
 .option("mergeSchema", "true")
 .format("delta")
 .mode("append")
 .save(delta_location))

Upsert by Kafka key

The kafka_key is a unique identifier for each record. We can use the key to update the data in the Delta table. We'll use this script to make that upsert happen:

def upsertToDelta(df, batch_id): 
  (DeltaTable
   .forPath(spark, delta_location)
   .alias("t")
   .merge(df.alias("s"), "s.kafka_key = t.kafka_key")
   .whenMatchedUpdateAll()
   .whenNotMatchedInsertAll()
   .execute())

We want to update or insert all the columns of our dataframe into the Delta table, so we are using whenNotMatchedInsertAll and whenMatchedUpdateAll. More information can be found in the documentation of the DeltaMergeBuilder.

Write stream data

Now that we have everything in place, we can write to our delta table:

w = df.writeStream;

if not streaming:
  w = w.trigger(once=True)

(w.format("delta")
 .option("checkpointLocation", checkpoint_location) 
 .foreachBatch(upsertToDelta) 
 .outputMode("update") 
 .start(delta_location)) 

5. Clean up

A few notes on clean up. When you do streaming, you might want to schedule a separate job that does the clean up periodically. When you only "trigger once", you can wait for the cell to finish with the following code:

# wait for streaming to finish
while spark.streams.active != []:
  time.sleep(10)

Optimize

Let's optimize the delta table first. We use the default bin-packing to produce evenly-balanced data files with respect to their size on disk.

sql = "OPTIMIZE delta.`{}`".format(delta_location)
spark.sql(sql)
None

Note: when you use partitioning and z-ordering to optimize the layout of your Delta table, you might benefit from running the optimize on a separate job and cluster. We've seen some use-cases where it was cheaper to run the optimization once every 4 hours on a massive CPU cluster.

Vacuum

Next, we'll vacuum to throw away unused files that are older than 7 days. You might not want this in your specific use case, but we see delta tables growing way too big because we did not vacuum.

sql = "VACUUM delta.`{}`".format(delta_location)
spark.sql(sql)
None

The impact of VACUUM on some of our older tables is massive:

You might want to read up on the Delta Time Travel feature and make a conscious decision if you want to keep using it.

Databricks Database Table

You can add the table to the Databricks database, so it is easier is to query:

database = "bronze"
table_name = topic.replace("-", "_")

First we need to ensure the database:

spark.sql("CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS {}".format(database))

Then we can ensure the table:

spark.sql("""
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS {}.{}
USING DELTA
LOCATION '{}'
""".format(database, table_name, delta_location))

Reading a Delta table

Reading a Delta table based on the location is a piece of pie:

def read_delta(mnt, columns = ['*']):
  return (spark.read
          .format("delta")
          .load(mnt)
          .select(columns))

df_delta = read_delta(delta_location)

It is even easier when using a table:

df = spark.table("{}.{}".format(database, table_name))

Final thoughts

I've shown one way of using Spark Structured Streaming to update a Delta table on S3. The combination of Databricks, S3 and Kafka makes for a high performance setup. But the real advantage is not in just serializing topics into the Delta Lake, but combining sources to create new Delta tables that are updated on the fly and provide relevant data to your domain.

We've seen an uplift in the performance of scripts that used to query Kafka themselves (some had an uplift of 25%). A delta table is faster and makes code easier to read. We see that the total cost goes down.

A big shout-out to Jesse Bouwman (Data Scientist) and Martinus Slomp (Senior .NET Developer) for the collaboration on this code.

Further reading

While working on this topic I found some excellent sources for reading:

• Introduction to Delta Lake: Delta Lake Quickstart
• Delta Lake: Table Deletes, Updates, and Merges
• The Delta Lake Project Turns to Linux Foundation to Become the Open Standard for Data Lakes
• Simple, Reliable Upserts and Deletes on Delta Lake Tables using Python APIs
• Easy Spark optimization for max record: aggregate instead of join?
• Add more color to the Python code of your Databricks notebook

Changelog

2022-06-20: Improved the Vacuum section with an impact table and better phrasing.
2021-03-17: Added the Table section.
2021-03-15: Moved the cleanup section after the write.
2021-01-02: Added popups to the diagrams and screenshots.
2020-06-24: Added vacuum and optimize commands for improved performance.
2019-11-09: Initial article.