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Trying to split out Airflow processes onto 2 servers. Server A, which has been already running in standalone mode with everything on it, has the DAGs and I'd like to set it as the worker in the new setup with an additional server.
Server B is the new server which would host the metadata database on MySQL.
Can I have Server A run LocalExecutor, or would I have to use CeleryExecutor? Would airflow scheduler has to run on the server that has the DAGs right? Or does it have to run on every server in a cluster? Confused as to what dependencies there are between the processes
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To set up an airflow cluster, we need to install below components and services: Airflow Webserver: A web interface to query the metadata to monitor and execute DAGs. Airflow Scheduler: It checks the status of the DAG's and tasks in the metadata database, create new ones if necessary, and sends the tasks to the queues.
Create a init script and use the command "daemon" to run this as service. Show activity on this post. You can use a ready-made AMI (namely, LightningFLow) from AWS Marketplace which provides Airflow services (webserver, scheduler, worker) which are enabled at startup.
This post has shown how to create those dependencies even if you don't control the upstream DAGs: add a new DAG that relies on using the ExternalTaskSensor (one sensor per upstream DAG), encode the dependencies between the DAGs as dependencies between the sensor tasks, run the DAG encoding the dependencies in the same ...
SQLite database can be used to run Airflow for development purpose as it does not require any database server (the database is stored in a local file). There are many limitations of using the SQLite database (for example it only works with Sequential Executor) and it should NEVER be used for production.
This article does an excellent job demonstrating how to cluster Airflow onto multiple servers.
Multi-Node (Cluster) Airflow Setup
A more formal setup for Apache Airflow is to distribute the daemons across multiple machines as a cluster.
Benefits
Higher Availability
If one of the worker nodes were to go down or be purposely taken offline, the cluster would still be operational and tasks would still be executed.
Distributed Processing
If you have a workflow with several memory intensive tasks, then the tasks will be better distributed to allow for higher utilizaiton of data across the cluster and provide faster execution of the tasks.
Scaling Workers
Horizontally
You can scale the cluster horizontally and distribute the processing by adding more executor nodes to the cluster and allowing those new nodes to take load off the existing nodes. Since workers don’t need to register with any central authority to start processing tasks, the machine can be turned on and off without any downtime to the cluster.
Vertically
You can scale the cluster vertically by increasing the number of celeryd daemons running on each node. This can be done by increasing the value in the ‘celeryd_concurrency’ config in the {AIRFLOW_HOME}/airflow.cfg file.
Example:
celeryd_concurrency = 30
You may need to increase the size of the instances in order to support a larger number of celeryd processes. This will depend on the memory and cpu intensity of the tasks you’re running on the cluster.
Scaling Master Nodes
You can also add more Master Nodes to your cluster to scale out the services that are running on the Master Nodes. This will mainly allow you to scale out the Web Server Daemon incase there are too many HTTP requests coming for one machine to handle or if you want to provide Higher Availability for that service.
One thing to note is that there can only be one Scheduler instance running at a time. If you have multiple Schedulers running, there is a possibility that multiple instances of a single task will be scheduled. This could cause some major problems with your Workflow and cause duplicate data to show up in the final table if you were running some sort of ETL process.
If you would like, the Scheduler daemon may also be setup to run on its own dedicated Master Node.
Apache Airflow Cluster Setup Steps
Pre-Requisites
Additional Documentation
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All airflow processes need to have the same contents in their airflow_home folder. This includes configuration and dags. If you only want server B to run your MySQL database, you do not need to worry about any airflow specifics. Simply install the database on server B and change your airflow.cfg's sql_alchemy_conn parameter to point to your database on Server B and run airflow initdb from Server A.
If you also want to run airflow processes on server B, you would have to look into scaling using the CeleryExecutor.
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