Taskbroker

Taskbroker provides a Kafka consumer, RPC interface, and inflight task storage that form the core engine of asynchronous task execution at Sentry.

High level overview

flowchart LR

Sentry -- produce activation --> k[(Kafka)]
k -- consume messages --> Taskbroker
Taskbroker -- store --> sql[(SQLite)]
Worker -- grpc GetTask --> Taskbroker
Worker -- grpc SetTaskStatus --> Taskbroker

Loading

Sentry (and other applications in the future) produce task activations. Taskbroker consumes those messages and stores them in a SQLite database to avoid head-of-line blocking, enable out-of-order execution and per-task acknowledgements.

Workers communicate with Taskbroker via gRPC. There are two primary gRPC methods:

• GetTask Workers can request a task from Taskbroker.
• SetTaskStatus Once a worker has completed a task, SetTaskStatus is used to report the task's outcome.

Building

Taskbroker is written in Rust and requires the latest stable Rust compiler. To compile, run:

cargo build --release

The resulting binary ends up in target/release/ along with debug information files.

Development

To build taskbroker we require the latest stable Rust and protoc. The root of the repository contains a Makefile with frequently run development commands:

• make setup Run setup tasks to create and configure your development environment.
• make test Run rust tests.
• make integration-test Run end to end tests.
• make format Format rust code with cargo fmt and cargo clippy.

Building and Running

The simplest way to run taskbroker is with cargo. You'll also need kafka running. Kafka is typically managed with devservices:

cargo run -- -c ./config/config-sentry-dev.yaml

Configuration

Taskbroker uses YAML files for configuration, and all of the available configuration options can be found in Config

All configuration options can also be defined as environment variables using the TASKBROKER_ prefix.

Tests

The test suite is composed of unit and integration tests in Rust, and end-to-end tests scripted with python.

# Run unit/integration tests
make test

# Run end-to-end tests
make integration-test

Linting

We use rustfmt and clippy from the latest stable channel for code formatting and linting:

# Check for formatting issues
make style

# Fix formatting and lint issues
make format