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Old-Clients

· 3 min read
Christopher Kujawa
Christopher Kujawa
Chaos Engineer @ Zeebe

It has been awhile since the last post, I'm happy to be back.

In today's chaos day we want to verify the hypothesis from zeebe-chaos#34 that old clients can't disrupt a running cluster.

It might happen that after upgrading your Zeebe to the newest shiny version, you might forget to update some of your workers or starters etc. This should normally not an issue since Zeebe is backwards compatible, client wise since 1.x. But what happens when older clients are used. Old clients should not have a negative effect on a running cluster.

TLDR Older clients (0.26) have no negative impact on a running cluster (1.2), and clients after 1.x are still working with the latest version.

Chaos Experiment​

We will run a simple setup with, three nodes and three partitions (replication factor 3). The version we use is the latest release candidate (1.2.0). Normally we run a load of 200 process instances per second (pi/s) on our benchmarks. This time we will put a load of 100 pi/s to get something running and start an old starter (v0.26.x) with the same frequency. Later we will scale the old starter to see whether it makes any effect.

Expected​

We expect that we can start and complete the 100 pi/s, since we can normally run 200 pi/s.

Actual​

The cluster was first started with starters of the same version, and we saw a stable load of ~100 process instances completed per second. After starting the old starters (with version 0.26.3), we can't observe any difference.

Interesting is even when scaling the starters up to 10 replicas, which means 1000 PI creations per second, it doesn't seem to make any effect. Side note: The starters have been modified, such they only start instances without deploying the model.

old26-general

The drops we see in the processing are related to restart's.

The gateway and grpc metrics doesn't indicate that more requests are sent.

old26-grpc old26-gateway

If we take a look in the clients log, we can see that the request are failing because the RPC Method names have been changed between 0.26 and 1.0.

java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: io.grpc.StatusRuntimeException: UNIMPLEMENTED: Method not found: gateway_protocol.Gateway/CreateWorkflowInstance
	...
Caused by: io.grpc.StatusRuntimeException: UNIMPLEMENTED: Method not found: gateway_protocol.Gateway/CreateWorkflowInstance
	...

It seems this kind of "old" requests can be blocked quite early in the request chain to make no effect.

In order to experiment a bit further I created a starter image with version 1.0 to see whether this still works with our newest release candidate 1.2.

We can see in the metrics right after starting the starter that the throughput goes up and we can reach our 200 pi/s.

old10-general

We run the benchmark overnight, and we haven't seen any issues. Be aware that the throughput is calculated over the 24h which makes is lower than 200.

general

Furthermore, taking a look at the resource consumption, especially at the gateway, gives no evidence that something wrong is going on.

res

Result​

We were able to confirm the hypothesis written in zeebe-chaos#34, that an old client can't disrupt a running cluster.

Found Bugs​

None this time :)