Running a Serverless Lucene Reverse Geocoder

Running a Serverless Lucene Reverse Geocoder Alexander Reelsen alex@elastic.co @spinscale

Agenda ‣ What is serverless? ‣ Searching for Locations ‣ Demo ‣ Searching with Lucene using a binary

Serverless?

Serverless? ‣ FaaS (Function as a Service) ‣ Execution Environment as a Service ‣ Payment model: Pay per code runtime ‣ Not running? No bill! ‣ Configure memory size (also changes CPU power) ‣ Maximum function execution time ‣ Provider takes care of scaling functions

Providers? ‣ AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions, Azure Cloud Functions, Cloudflare, IBM OpenWhisk ‣ Faastruby, Binaris, Spotinst ‣ K8s: KNative, Fission, Kubeless, Nuclio, OpenFaas ‣ Docker: Fn, OpenFaas

Java? ‣ Not too well suited for short lived tasks ‣ JVM startup time ‣ JIT compiler ‣ Dependency initialisation ‣ Application initialisation

Location search

Reverse Geocoder ‣ Input: Latitude, Longitude ‣ Output: City (a readable representation)

Search across points ‣ Each city gets indexed with a lat/lon pair ‣ Search for the next point to the supplied one ‣ Problem: Neighbours!

Point based search: Near neighbours

Point based search: Near neighbours

Search across shapes ‣ Each city gets indexed with a lat/lon pair ‣ Certain cities get indexed as a geoshape ‣ Search twice: ‣ Lat/Lon within any shape ‣ Lat/Lon nearby any point

Geo and Lucene: BFF! ‣ LatLonPoint: two points, 4 bytes each ‣ LatLonShape: triangular mesh tesselation

Geo and Lucene: BFF! https://home.apache.org/~mikemccand/geobench.html

Geo and Lucene: BFF! https://home.apache.org/~mikemccand/geobench.html

Serverless Lucene ‣ Local execution, index part of the package ‣ Offline index creation ‣ Packaging index into code ‣ Index needs to be unpacked, using Lucene via classpath resources is tricky

Demo

Summary ‣ Works! ‣ Problem: Data quality, getting accurate shape data ‣ Problem: First invocation (up to 2s) ‣ JVM startup ‣ Lucene index opening

Faster startup & runtime

Enter GraalVM! ‣ A new compiler, supporting HotSpot and AOT compilation ‣ Graal compiler part of Java9 (experimental!) ‣ Graal JIT compiler part of Java10 (Linux 64bit only) ‣ Project Metropolis: Java-on-Java Hotspot implementation ‣ Truffle: Interpreter to implement other languages on top of graal (jruby replacement)

Enter GraalVM! ‣ AOT static compilation + SubstrateVM = executable binaries of java apps ‣ Using SubstrateVM ‣ Reflection!

Discussion … ask all the things!

Links ‣ https://serverless.com/framework/docs/ ‣ https://www.openfaas.com ‣ https://cloud.google.com/knative/ ‣ https://kubeless.io/ ‣ https://fission.io/ ‣ http://fnproject.io/ ‣ https://nuclio.io ‣ https://openwhisk.incubator.apache.org/ ‣ https://www.graalvm.org ‣ https://openjdk.java.net/projects/metropolis/ ‣ https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/substratevm ‣ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_geocoding