tests

[dipinhora]

There are currently very few tests. Ideally there should be a more comprehensive test suite of automated tests along with a document of manual tests (with detailed instructions) that can be run.

[dipinhora]

Testing brainstorming ideas

Things to test:

Basic functionality of the client from a producer and consumer perspective:

• able to connect to kafka broker
• able to request data
• able to produce data
• does it handle errors from kafka broker appropriately when trying to do the above?

More advanced stuff:

• leader change occurring, or leader change fails (or ends up with the same leader), do we handle this scenario correctly?

Unit tests:

• mocked up brokers, producers, consumers, that throw specific types of errors in specific scenarios
  • This is basically the route most other integrations with Kafka have gone
• ideal: generic mock broker that connects over TCP, that any client could communicate with.
  • Should have more than just the simple cases:
    • error on first connect/request
    • error later down the line (e.g. 10th request, or 10th request after 5th write)
    • error on specific topic or partition, etc.
• Something similar to Yahoo Steaming Benchmark, with a Kafka Client Test framework that has a generic mock broker in it, which behaves a certain way, and then you have apps built in different clients and different languages, that try to reproduce the same behaviour (e.g. spec behaviour) with that mock broker.
  • e.g. topic:test, partition:0 is set up to have a specific response, and all the clients will receive that response. Now test that all clients behave the same way when they receive that response.

Test Broker

• Not connected to an actual kafka cluster (not necessarily, anyway)
• clients connect to it as if they would to a real cluster
• needs to implement the full kafka protocol
  • how many versions of this protocol need to be supported?
• some sort of flexible way to describe where and how errors should occur
  • could be hard coded in the broker
• client connects to an initial set of seed brokers
  • update meta data request (data about the entire cluster: ip address, topics, partitions, leaders for each topic, etc.)
  • connect to all the real brokers
• Test Broker can bind to multiple addresses to act as all of the brokers
  • This simplifies a lot of the work
  • Helps control timing for everything
  • Can choose how many addresses, topics, partitions, etc. are in the meta data response
• Protocol is relatively simple.
• Broker is allowed to disconnect connection if something goes wrong that it cannot handle.
  • Client is required to handle reconnecting to a new (or existing) valid broker.

Proxy Broker

• proxy a real kafka broker
• intercept certain requests using a filter and apply some transformation to them
• transparently forward the rest
• Definitely have to intercept the metadata requests that include the real brokers' IP addresses (to prevent the clients from just connecting directly to the real brokers)
• We don't really want to do this. It has a lot of issues around keeping state in terms of errors that we would show the client, but that the cluster is unaware of (because they never really occurred)