[discuss] long running actions

[Michael Marth <mm...@adobe.com.INVALID>]

Hi all,

taking this discussion from Slack to here:

What would be the best way to support long running actions, especially actions for which the duration is unknown when the action is started.
An example is e.g. a blackbox container that transcodes a video. The main issue is that OW limits the amount of time an action can run.

In my mind, one aspect should also be that there must be a way to inspect progress and health of such a long running action. Maybe using the action logs is a simple way to do this.

Couple of comments that were made on Slack already:
Markus: “it should be possible to make the upper bound of the runtime to be settable to “Inf”. Would “only” need adjustment in the HttpClient used towards the container to support an infinite timeout” [1]
Rodric: “callbacks more suitable then” [2]
James: “would think you want some timeout (however large) to stop an action which never returns.” [3]

Interested in your thoughts.

Michael

[1] https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/archives/C3TPCAQG1/p1527684780000110
[2] https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/archives/C3TPCAQG1/p1527685597000100
[3] https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/archives/C3TPCAQG1/p1527689801000253

Re: [discuss] long running actions

[Chetan Mehrotra <ch...@gmail.com>]

Just a quick thought ... May be do it like its done in Travis

1. Each action gets an upper limit say 1 hr (its 50 min in Travis)

2. If there is no progress logging done for say 10 mins then task gets
killed. Here callbacks or long polling would be better

3. An action can still have multiple sub action (like stage jobs in Travis [1])

This way we guard resource consumption for run away actions and still
support long running jobs.

Chetan Mehrotra
[1] https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/build-stages/


On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 3:46 PM, Michael Marth <mm...@adobe.com.invalid> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> taking this discussion from Slack to here:
>
> What would be the best way to support long running actions, especially actions for which the duration is unknown when the action is started.
> An example is e.g. a blackbox container that transcodes a video. The main issue is that OW limits the amount of time an action can run.
>
> In my mind, one aspect should also be that there must be a way to inspect progress and health of such a long running action. Maybe using the action logs is a simple way to do this.
>
> Couple of comments that were made on Slack already:
> Markus: “it should be possible to make the upper bound of the runtime to be settable to “Inf”. Would “only” need adjustment in the HttpClient used towards the container to support an infinite timeout” [1]
> Rodric: “callbacks more suitable then” [2]
> James: “would think you want some timeout (however large) to stop an action which never returns.” [3]
>
> Interested in your thoughts.
>
> Michael
>
> [1] https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/archives/C3TPCAQG1/p1527684780000110
> [2] https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/archives/C3TPCAQG1/p1527685597000100
> [3] https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/archives/C3TPCAQG1/p1527689801000253
>