Proper way to programmatically stop an Alpakka Kafka stream

Question

We are trying to use Akka Streams with Alpakka Kafka to consume a stream of events in a service. For handling event processing errors we are using Kafka autocommit and more than one queue. For example, if we have the topic user_created, which we want to consume from a products service, we also create user_created_for_products_failed and user_created_for_products_dead_letter. These two extra topics are coupled to a specific Kafka consumer group. If an event fails to be processed, it goes to the failed queue, where we try to consume again in five minutes--if it fails again it goes to dead letters.

On deployment we want to ensure that we don't lose events. So we are trying to stop the stream before stopping the application. As I said, we are using autocommit, but all of these events that are "flying" are not processed yet. Once the stream and application are stopped, we can deploy the new code and start the application again.

After reading the documentation, we have seen the KillSwitch feature. The problem that we are seeing in it is that the shutdown method returns Unit instead Future[Unit] as we expect. We are not sure that we won't lose events using it, because in tests it looks like it goes too fast to be working properly.

As a workaround, we create an ActorSystem for each stream and use the terminate method (which returns a Future[Terminate]). The problem with this solution is that we don't think that creating an ActorSystem per stream will scale well, and terminate takes a lot of time to resolve (in tests it takes up to one minute to shut down).

Have you faced a problem like this? Is there a faster way (compared to ActorSystem.terminate) to stop a stream and ensure that all the events that the Source has emitted have been processed?

Answer 1

From the documentation (emphasis mine):

When using external offset storage, a call to Consumer.Control.shutdown() suffices to complete the Source, which starts the completion of the stream.

val (consumerControl, streamComplete) =
  Consumer
    .plainSource(consumerSettings,
                 Subscriptions.assignmentWithOffset(
                   new TopicPartition(topic, 0) -> offset
                 ))
    .via(businessFlow)
    .toMat(Sink.ignore)(Keep.both)
    .run()

consumerControl.shutdown()

Consumer.control.shutdown() returns a Future[Done]. From its Scaladoc description:

Shutdown the consumer Source. It will wait for outstanding offset commit requests to finish before shutting down.

Alternatively, if you're using offset storage in Kafka, use Consumer.Control.drainAndShutdown, which also returns a Future. Again from the documentation (which contains more information about what drainAndShutdown does under the covers):

val drainingControl =
  Consumer
    .committableSource(consumerSettings.withStopTimeout(Duration.Zero), Subscriptions.topics(topic))
    .mapAsync(1) { msg =>
      business(msg.record).map(_ => msg.committableOffset)
    }
    .toMat(Committer.sink(committerSettings))(Keep.both)
    .mapMaterializedValue(DrainingControl.apply)
    .run()

val streamComplete = drainingControl.drainAndShutdown()

The Scaladoc description for drainAndShutdown:

Stop producing messages from the Source, wait for stream completion and shut down the consumer Source so that all consumed messages reach the end of the stream. Failures in stream completion will be propagated, the source will be shut down anyway.