+1 to discussing PCollection annotations on a separate thread. It would be confusing to mix them up.
----------- The question around conflicts is interesting, but confusing to me. I don't think they exist in general. I keep coming back around to that it depends on the annotation and the purpose of composites. Optionality saves us here too. Composites are nothing without their internal hypergraph structure. Eventually it comes down to executing the leaf nodes. The alternative to executing the leaf nodes is when the composite represents a known transform and is replaced by the runner on submission time. Lets look at each. If there's a property that only exists on the leaf nodes, then it's not possible to bubble up that property to the composite in all cases. Afterall, it's not necessarily the case that a privacy preserving transform maintains the property for all output edges as not all such edges pass through the preserving transform. On the other hand, with memory or gpu recommendations, that might set a low bar on the composite level. But, composites (any transform really) can be runner replaced. I think it's fair to say that a runner replaced composite is not beholden to the annotations of the original leaf transforms, especially around physical requirements. The implementations are different. If a known composite at the composite level requires GPUs and it's known replacement doesn't, I'd posit that replacement was a choice the runner made since it can't provision machines with GPUs. But, crucially around privacy annotated transforms, a runner likely shouldn't replace a given subgraph that contains a privacy annotationed transform unless the replacements provide the same level of privacy. However, such replacements only happens with well known transforms with known properties anyway, so this can serve as an additional layer of validation for a runner aware of the properties. This brings me back to my position: that the notion of conflicts is very annotation dependant, and that defining them as optional is the most important feature to avoid issues. Conflicts don't exist as an inherent property of annotations on ptransform of the hypergraph structure. Am i wrong? No one has come up with an actual example of a conflict as far as i understand the thread. Even Reuven's original question is more about whether the runner is forced to look at leaf bodes rather than only looking at the composite. Assuming the composite isn't replaced, the runner needs to look at the leaf nodes regardless. And as discussed above there's no generalized semantics that fit for all kinds of annotations, once replacements are also considered. On Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 6:35 AM Ismaël Mejía <ieme...@gmail.com> wrote: > +1 Nice to see there is finally interest on this. Annotations for > PTransforms make total sense! > > The semantics should be strictly optional for runners and correct > execution should not be affected by lack of support of any annotation. > We should however keep the set of annotations small. > > > PTransforms are hierarchical - namely a PTransform contains other > PTransforms, and so on. Is the runner expected to resolve all annotations > down to leaf nodes? What happens if that results in conflicting annotations? > > +1 to this question, This needs to be detailed. > > I am curious about how the end user APIs of this will look maybe in > Java or Python, just an extra method to inject a Map or via Java > annotations/Python decorators? > > We might prefer not to mix the concepts of annotations and > environments because this will limit the scope of annotations. > Annotations are different from environments because they serve a more > general idea: to express an intention and it is up to the runner to > choose the strategy to accomplish this, for example in the GPU > assignation case it could be to rewrite resource allocation via > Environments but it could also just delegate this to a resource > manager which is what we could do for example for GPU (or data > locality) cases on the Spark/Flink classic runners. If we tie this to > environments we will leave classic runners out of the loop for no > major reason and also not cover use cases not related to resource > allocation. > > I do not understand the use case to justify PCollection annotations > but to not mix this thread with them, would you be interested to > elaborate more about them in a different thread Jan? > > On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 2:28 AM Robert Bradshaw <rober...@google.com> > wrote: > > > > I agree things like GPU, high-mem, etc. belong to the environment. If > > annotations are truly advisory, one can imagine merging environments > > by taking the union of annotations and still producing a correct > > pipeline. (This would mean that annotations would have to be a > > multi-map...) > > > > On the other hand, this doesn't seem to handle the case of privacy > > analysis, which could apply to composites without applying to any > > individual component, and don't really make sense as part of a > > fusion/execution story. > > > > On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 4:00 PM Robert Burke <rob...@frantil.com> wrote: > > > > > > That's good historical context. > > > > > > But then we'd still need to codify the annotation would need to be > optional, and not affect correctness. > > > > > > Conflicts become easier to manage, (as environments with conflicting > annotations simply don't get merged, and stay as distinct environments) but > are still notionally annotation dependant. Do most runners handle > environments so individually though? > > > > > > Reuven's question is a good one though. For the Go SDK, and the > proposed implementation i saw, they only applied to leaf nodes. This is an > artifact of how the Go SDK handles composites. Nothing stops it from being > implemented on the composites Go has, but it didn't make sense otherwise. > AFAICT Composites are generally for organizational convenience and not for > functional aspects. Is this wrong? Afterall, does it make sense for > environments to be on leaves and composites either? It's the same issue > there. > > > > > > > > > On Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 3:45 PM Kenneth Knowles <k...@apache.org> wrote: > > >> > > >> I am +1 to the proposal but believe it should be moved to the > Environment. I could be convinced otherwise, but would want to really > understand the details. > > >> > > >> I think we haven't done a great job communicating the purpose of the > Environment proto. It was explicitly created for this purpose. > > >> > > >> 1. It tells the runner things it needs to know to interpret the DoFn > (or other UDF). So these are the existing proto fields like docker image > (in the payload) and required artifacts that were staged. > > >> 2. It is also the place for additional requirements or hints like > "high mem" or "GPU" etc. > > >> > > >> Every user function has an associated environment, and environments > exist only for the purpose of executing user functions. In fact, > Environment originated as inline requirements/attributes for a user > function proto message and was separated just to make the proto smaller. > > >> > > >> A PTransform is an abstract concept for organizing the graph, not an > executable thing. So a hint/capability/requirement on a PTransform only > really makes sense as a scoping mechanism for applying a hint to a bunch of > functions within a subgraph. This seems like a user interface concern and > the SDK should own propagating the hints. If the hint truly applies to the > whole PTransform and *not* the parts, then I am interested in learning > about that. > > >> > > >> Kenn > > >> > > >> On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 10:54 AM Robert Burke <rob...@frantil.com> > wrote: > > >>> > > >>> That's a good question. > > >>> > > >>> I think the main difference is a matter of scope. Annotations would > apply to a PTransform while an environment applies to sets of transforms. A > difference is the optional nature of the annotations they don't affect > correctness. Runners don't need to do anything with them and still execute > the pipeline correctly. > > >>> > > >>> Consider a privacy analysis on a pipeline graph. An annotation > indicating that a transform provides a certain level of anonymization can > be used in an analysis to determine if the downstream transforms are > encountering raw data or not. > > >>> > > >>> From my understanding (which can be wrong) environments are rigid. > Transforms in different environments can't be fused. "This is the python > env", "this is the java env" can't be merged together. It's not clear to me > that we have defined when environments are safely fuseable outside of > equality. There's value in that simplicity. > > >>> > > >>> AFIACT environment has less to do with the machines a pipeline is > executing on than it does about the kinds of SDK pipelines it understands > and can execute. > > >>> > > >>> > > >>> > > >>> On Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 10:36 AM Chad Dombrova <chad...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > >>>>> > > >>>>> > > >>>>> Another example of an optional annotation is marking a transform > to run on secure hardware, or to give hints to profiling/dynamic analysis > tools. > > >>>> > > >>>> > > >>>> There seems to be a lot of overlap between this idea and > Environments. Can you talk about how you feel they may be different or > related? For example, I could see annotations as a way of tagging > transforms with an Environment, or I could see Environments becoming a > specialized form of annotation. > > >>>> > > >>>> -chad > > >>>> >
