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Sample: Reliable Task Scheduling on Google Compute Engine

In distributed systems, such as a network of Google Compute Engine instances, it is challenging to reliably schedule tasks because any individual instance may become unavailable due to autoscaling or network partitioning.

Google AppEngine provides a Cron service. Using this service for scheduling and Google Cloud Pub/Sub for distributed messaging, you can build an application to reliably schedule tasks across a fleet of Compute Engine instances.

This sample illustrates how to build a solution. For a full description of the design pattern used in this sample, see Reliably Schedule Tasks on Google Compute Engine.

About the sample

This sample contains two components:

  • An App Engine application, that uses App Engine Cron Service to relay cron messages to Cloud Pub/Sub topics.

  • A utility that runs on Compute Engine. This utility monitors a Cloud Pub/Sub topic. When it detects a new message, it runs the corresponding command locally on the server.

You specify the cron messages to send in the cron.yaml file of the App Engine application. This file is written in YAML format. The App Engine application uses the final path component of the event-handler URL as the name of the corresponding Cloud Pub/Sub topic. For example, if an event handler is specified as url: /events/test, the Cloud Pub/Sub topic name is test.

When the Cron Service fires a scheduled event, the App Engine application handles the request and passes the cron message to the corresponding Cloud Pub/Sub topic. If the specified Cloud Pub/Sub topic does not exist, the App Engine application creates it.

The utility running on the Compute Engine instances receives cron messages from Cloud Pub/Sub and runs the specified commands that are normally run by cron. To do so, it performs the following actions:

  • Creates subscriptions to Cloud Pub/Sub topics.
  • Monitors those subscriptions for new messages using a long-polling loop.
  • In response to messages, it runs the corresponding command in a subprocess, during which it:
    • Maintains the the lease on the Cloud Pub/Sub message and extends the lease time on a Cloud Pub/Sub message as needed for long-running commands.
    • Acknowledges and releases the message on exit of the command. The exit code is not required to be successful; additional retry logic is left as an exercise.

This sample includes the reusable wrapper code of the utility, an example of its use, and a sample script that it runs.

How to run the sample

The overview for configuring and running this sample is as follows:

  1. Create a project and other cloud resources.
  2. Clone or download the sample code.
  3. Specify cron jobs in a YAML file.
  4. Deploy the App Engine application.
  5. Run a utility on Compute Engine that monitors the Cloud Pub/Sub topic for messages. and, on detecting one, runs a sample script locally on the instance.
  6. Verify the script ran on schedule by checking the Cloud Logging output.

Prerequisites

Ensure that the following is installed if not already on your system:

Important: This tutorial uses several billable components of Google Cloud Platform. To estimate the cost of running this sample:

  • Assume the utility runs on a single `f1-micro` Google Compute Instance for 15 minutes of one day while you test the sample. After which, you delete the project, releasing all resources. That's 0.25 hours per month.
  • For Google App Engine costs, assume that the App Engine application runs on a single instance for 15 minutes. This results in 1 instance hour, or a rate of .00014 instances per hour averaged over a month.
Use the [Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=beb5326f-90c3-4842-9c3f-a3761b40fbe3) to generate a cost estimate based on this projected usage. New Cloud Platform users may be eligible for a [free trial](http://cloud.google.com/free-trial).

Clone the sample code

To clone the GitHub repository to your computer, run the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/reliable-task-scheduling-compute-engine-sample

Change directories to the reliable-task-scheduling-compute-engine-sample directory. The exact path depends on where you placed the directory when you cloned the sample files from GitHub.

$ cd reliable-task-scheduling-compute-engine-sample

Specify cron jobs

App Engine Cron Service job descriptions are specified in gae/cron.yaml, a file in the App Engine application. You define tasks for App Engine Task Scheduler in YAML format. The following example shows the syntax.

cron:
  - description: <description of the job>
           url: /events/<topic name to publish to>
           schedule: <frequency in human-readable format>

For a complete description of how to use YAML to specify jobs for Cron Service, including the schedule format, see Scheduled Tasks with Cron for Python.

Leave the default cron.yaml as is for now to run through the sample.

Upload the application to App Engine

In order for the App Engine application to schedule and relay your events, you must upload it to a Developers Console project. This is the project that you created in Prerequisites.

  1. Configure the gcloud command-line tool to use the project you created in Prerequisites.

     $ gcloud config set project <your-project-id>

    Where you replace <your-project-id> with the identifier of your cloud project.

  2. Include the Python API client in your App Engine application.

     $ pip install -t gae/lib/ google-api-python-client

    Note: if you get an error and used Homebrew to install Python on OS X, see this fix.

  3. Create an App Engine App

     $ gcloud beta app create

  4. Deploy the application to App Engine.

     $ gcloud app deploy --version=1 gae/app.yaml \
   gae/cron.yaml

After you deploy the App Engine application it uses the App Engine Cron Service to schedule sending messages to Cloud Pub/Sub. If a Cloud Pub/Sub topic specified in yaml.cron does not exist, the application creates it.

You can see the cron jobs under in the console under:

Compute > App Engine > Task queues > Cron Jobs

You can also see the auto-created topic (after about a minute) in the console:

Big Data > Pub/Sub

How Cloud Pub/Sub subscriptions are specified

The utility running on a Compute Engine instance monitors a set of Cloud Pub/Sub topic subscriptions and runs commands on that instance each time it receives a message. By configuring which topics the utility monitors, you can control the tasks that run on each instance. Separating the scheduling logic from the utility logic using Cloud Pub/Sub messaging gives you the ability to schedule all of your tasks with ``, and then configure the utility on each instance to listen to only the task messages that apply to that instance.

In the sample implementation of the utility, the topic to subscribe to is set as a variable in test_executor.py.

TOPIC = 'test'

This value is used when the code creates an Executor object to monitor a Cloud Pub/Sub topic.

test_executor = Executor(topic=TOPIC, project=PROJECT, task_cmd=logger, subname='logger_sample_task')

If you only need the utility to monitor a single topic, you can simply change the value of TOPIC in this script. To have the utility monitor multiple topics, you need to instantiate multiple Executor objects.

For this runthrough of the sample, leave TOPIC set to 'test' so you can verify your results as described in the following sections.

Specify the commands to run on the instance

In this sample, the utility acts as a wrapper to run commands that can be configured as cron jobs. These commands are specified in the test_executor.py file. For this example, the command runs a script logger_sample_task.py that simply prints output to stdout.

script_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'logger_sample_task.py'))
sample_task = "python -u %s" % script_path

To modify the sample to run your own tasks, update the command syntax in the sample_task variable.

For your first time running the sample, leave this set to the logger_sample_task script so you can verify your results as described in the following sections.

Install the utility script on a Compute Engine instance

The utility script runs on your Compute Engine instances and subscribes to the Cloud Pub/Sub topics you specified in cron.yaml. When the utility script receives a message, it runs the corresponding task locally. To make this possible, install the utility script on each instance where you want durable cron jobs to run. The script files are in the gce directory.

  1. Create a Compute Engine instance with Cloud Pub/Sub scope. In the following example, the instance name is cronworker.

     $  gcloud compute instances create cronworker \
   --machine-type f1-micro \
   --scopes https://www.googleapis.com/auth/pubsub,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/logging.write \
   --zone us-central1-a

  2. Edit gce/test_executor.py to change the project constant:

     PROJECT = 'your-project-id'

    Replace your-project-id with the identifier of your cloud project.

  3. Copy the utility script files to the new instance.

     $  gcloud compute copy-files gce `whoami`@cronworker: \
   --zone us-central1-a

  4. SSH into the Compute Engine instance. The following steps are run on the instance over the SSH session.

     $  gcloud compute ssh cronworker \
   --zone us-central1-a

  5. Update the apt-get package lists on the instance.

     $ sudo apt-get update

  6. Install pip and the Python development libraries on the instance.

     $ sudo apt-get install -y python-pip python-dev

  7. Install the Python client library for accessing Google APIs on the instance with Python Pip.

     $ sudo pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client pytz

  8. Change directories on the instance to the directory where you uploaded the utility script files.

     $ cd gce

  9. Run the utility file script, test_executor.py

    $ python test_executor.py

Verify cron jobs run on the instance

After you start the utility, it checks for messages on the specified Cloud Pub/Sub topic ('test', by default). When it checks the subscription and receives a message, it runs a sample task that simply prints output to stdout. If you are still connected to the instance using SSH, you’ll see output like the following when the task runs.

Doing work... 1
Doing work... 2
Doing work... 3
…
Doing work... 20

The utility script records its activity using Google Cloud Logging. After a cron job has had time to run, you can view the stdout output of the job in the Logs Viewer for Google Compute Engine.

  1. Open the Developers Console and select your project from the list.

  2. From the navigational menu, select Monitoring > Logs.

  3. Expand the dropdown box displaying App Engine and select Compute Engine.

  4. Expand the dropdown box displaying All Logs, and select task_runner to display the logged messages from the executor utility, and test_sample_task_task to display the output of the sample task running on the Compute Engine instance.

You can also see the topic in the Pub/Sub console now lists the subscription.

Clean up

Now that you have tested the sample, delete the cloud resources you created to prevent further billing for them on your account.

  • Delete the Compute Engine instance.

      $ gcloud compute instances delete cronworker --zone=us-central1-a

  • Disable and delete the App Engine application as described in Disable or delete your application in the Google App Engine documentation.

  • Delete the Cloud Pub/Sub topic. You can delete the topic and associated subscriptions from the Cloud Pub/Sub section of the Developers Console.

##License:

Copyright 2015 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.