Time to Live (TTL)

Use Cases

TTL can serve as a storage efficiency optimization for use cases where the data is transient in nature, and not useful beyond a certain age.

TTL can also be useful in certain scenarios where the data should not be retained longer than prescribed for compliance reasons. Note that for these scenarios, it is important to understand (as explained above) that the rewind time is the minimum, not maximum, TTL. It is also advisable to schedule the periodic purging such that there is a margin of safety in case of infra delays or failures.

Usage

There are two ways to achieve TTL compliance, via Repush with TTL or via empty push. The major differences between both approaches is the original data source and how real-time buffer is replayed.

	Source Data for TTL	Real-time buffer replay
Empty push	None	Replay real-time buffer with hybrid-rewind-seconds config
Repush with TTL	Existing version topic	Replay real-time buffer with rewind.time.in.seconds.override config

Repush with TTL

Repush with TTL runs as a VenicePushJob that reads the data in the existing version of the store, and writes it back as a new version. The TTL is enforced by the VenicePushJob, which only writes records that are younger than the specified TTL. Repush with TTL can also be configured and scheduled periodically to enforce TTL.

The store-level rewind time (in hybrid store configs) is used as the default TTL time. A custom TTL time can be specified by setting one of the following configs on the VenicePushJob:

Config	TTL behavior
repush.ttl.seconds	Records older than the specified value will expire
repush.ttl.start.timestamp	Records that were written before the specified timestamp will expire

The rewind.time.in.seconds.override is a configurable value in push job (Default: 24 hours).

This brings two major benefits:

1. The repush job de-dupes writes to the same key, so that the servers need to ingest fewer events.
2. The repush job sorts the data, thus allowing servers to ingest in a more optimized way.

How to enable

In order to enable repush with ttl, a VenicePushJob needs to be configured with the following configs:

source.kafka = true
repush.ttl.enable = true

For more options related to repush, refer to the Repush guide.

Empty push

For Venice stores that receive nearline writes, it is possible to set up a periodic purge of records that are older than some threshold.

The way this works is by leveraging the real-time buffer replay mechanism of hybrid stores. As part of pushing a new store-version, after the push finishes, but before swapping the read traffic over to the new version, there is a buffer replay phase where the last N seconds of buffered real-time data is replayed. The replayed data gets overlaid on top of the data from the Full Push.

This can be leveraged in order to enforce TTL on the dataset. By scheduling periodic empty pushes and configuring how far back to replay the real-time data (N), one can control the TTL parameters. The time to live is defined by N, which acts as a “minimum TTL”, while the “maximum TTL” is N + delay between each empty push. For example, if you schedule a daily empty push, and N = 6 days, then the oldest data in your store will be at least 6 days old, and at most 7 days old.

N can be set up by configuring the hybrid-rewind-seconds using venice-admin-tool.

How to enable

At the moment, there are two ways to perform empty pushes:

1. Via the empty-push command in the admin tool.
2. Via the Venice Push Job, executed from a Hadoop grid, but with an input directory that contains a file with no records in it.