receive + receive controller: Eliminate downtime when scaling up/down hashring replicas.

[bwplotka]

We hit cases when introducing more replicas, Thanos controller updates the hashing which makes receive ring is unstable due to one node being expected but down. We need to find a way that improves this state, it's quite fragile at the moment.

Mitigation: Turn of thanos-receive-controller and increase replicas, then turn on controller back.

[bjoydeep]

Thanks @bwplotka . What we ended up doing was something a little cruder (since this was just a test env). We stopped all receivers. rm -rf ed the recv PVs (yes, we lost 2 hours of data that was not yet persisted in Obj store) and the restarted receivers with higher replicas. It seemed to work more efficiently (less memory + cpu in aggregate) given the same workload. Will try your suggestion and see how it works. But being able to increase the number of replicas on the fly dynamically is a real need ofcourse. BTW @bwplotka do we have any recommendations on running odd vs even number of replicas.

[spaparaju]

https://github.com/observatorium/thanos-receive-controller/pull/70 might help :)

[r0mdau]

We hit the same kind of issue when terminating a k8s node which is hosting replicas to finally loose the quorum. We use a "Chaosmonkey" script that terminate randomly 1 ec2 instance per day from our EKS cluster.

It took approximately 30 minutes for the quorum to be restored (no manual actions).

Logs

level=error ts=2022-01-03T15:48:28.468568897Z caller=handler.go:366 component=receive component=receive-handler err="2 errors: replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict; replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-16.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict" msg="internal server error"
 
level=error ts=2022-01-03T16:00:15.101622584Z caller=handler.go:366 component=receive component=receive-handler err="2 errors: replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-16.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict; replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict" msg="internal server error"
 
level=error ts=2022-01-03T16:03:05.711160692Z caller=handler.go:366 component=receive component=receive-handler err="2 errors: replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-16.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict; replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict" msg="internal server error"
 
level=error ts=2022-01-03T16:07:22.526307825Z caller=handler.go:366 component=receive component=receive-handler err="2 errors: replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-16.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict; replicate write request for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: quorum not reached: forwarding request to endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: rpc error: code = AlreadyExists desc = store locally for endpoint thanos-receive-default-receivers-17.thanos-receive-default-receivers.receivers.svc.cluster.local:10901: conflict" msg="internal server error"

I see 2 things here :

• eliminate or reduce downtime when there are movements of pods, like scaling (this issue)
• identify primary receivers of the quorum to schedule them on different nodes and also forward to a live primary (I can maybe create an other issue)

(I miss knowledge on how it's working internally)

[michael-burt]

If quorum is lost, does the Receiver stop ingesting samples all together? Is there a metric which can be used to fire an alert when quorum is lost?

I am struggling to understand best practices around scaling the hash ring. If http_requests_total{code=200"} on the Receiver goes to 0, does this imply that no metrics are being ingested?