Apache Flink Stateful Functions

Stateful Functions is an API that simplifies the building of distributed stateful applications with a runtime built for serverless architectures. It brings together the benefits of stateful stream processing - the processing of large datasets with low latency and bounded resource constraints - along with a runtime for modeling stateful entities that supports location transparency, concurrency, scaling, and resiliency.

It is designed to work with modern architectures, like cloud-native deployments and popular event-driven FaaS platforms like AWS Lambda and KNative, and to provide out-of-the-box consistent state and messaging while preserving the serverless experience and elasticity of these platforms.

Stateful Functions is developed under the umbrella of Apache Flink.

This README is meant as a brief walkthrough on the StateFun Python SDK and how to set things up to get yourself started with Stateful Functions in Python.

For a fully detailed documentation, please visit the official docs.

For code examples, please take a look at the examples.

Table of Contents

• Python SDK Overview
• Contributing
• License

Python SDK Overview

Background

The JVM-based Stateful Functions implementation has a RequestReply extension (a protocol and an implementation) that allows calling into any HTTP endpoint that implements that protocol. Although it is possible to implement this protocol independently, this is a minimal library for the Python programing language that:

• Allows users to define and declare their functions in a convenient way.

• Dispatches an invocation request sent from the JVM to the appropriate function previously declared.

A Mini-Tutorial

Define and Declare a Function

from statefun import StatefulFunctions

functions = StatefulFunctions()

@functions.bind("demo/greeter")
def greet(context, message: LoginEvent):
    print("Hey " + message.user_name)

This code declares a function with a FunctionType("demo", "greeter") and binds the greet Python instance to it.

Expose with a Request Reply Handler

from statefun import RequestReplyHandler

handler = RequestReplyHandler(functions)

Using the Handler with your Favorite HTTP Serving Framework

For example, using Flask:

@app.route('/statefun', methods=['POST'])
def handle():
    response_data = handler(request.data)
    response = make_response(response_data)
    response.headers.set('Content-Type', 'application/octet-stream')
    return response

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

This creates an HTTP server that accepts requests from the Stateful Functions cluster and dispatches it to the handler.

Composing the Module YAML File

The remaining step would be to declare this function type in a module.yaml

functions:
  - function:
    meta:
      kind: http
      type: demo/greeter
    spec:
      endpoint: http://<end point url>/statefun
      states:
        - foo
        - bar
        - baz

Eager State Registration

The request reply protocol requires that the state names would be registered in the module YAML file under the states section (see the example above). The state values could be absent (None or a google.protobuf.Any) and they can be generally obtained via the context parameter:

@functions.bind("demo/greeter")
def greet(context, message: LoginEvent):
    session = context['session']
    if not session:
       session = start_session(message)
       context['session'] = session
    ...

Testing

1. Create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

2. Install dependencies

pip3 install .

3. Run unit tests

python3 -m unittest tests

Contributing

There are multiple ways to enhance the Stateful Functions API for different types of applications; the runtime and operations will also evolve with the developments in Apache Flink.

You can learn more about how to contribute in the Apache Flink website. For code contributions, please read carefully the Contributing Code section and check the Stateful Functions component in Jira for an overview of ongoing community work.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.

apache-flink-statefun dependencies