How to: Horizontally scale subscribers with StatefulSets

Unlike Deployments, where Pods are ephemeral, StatefulSets allows deployment of stateful applications on Kubernetes by keeping a sticky identity for each Pod.

Below is an example of a StatefulSet with Dapr:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: python-subscriber
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: python-subscriber  # has to match .spec.template.metadata.labels
  serviceName: "python-subscriber"
  replicas: 3
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: python-subscriber # has to match .spec.selector.matchLabels
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "python-subscriber"
        dapr.io/app-port: "5001"
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: python-subscriber
        image: ghcr.io/dapr/samples/pubsub-python-subscriber:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 5001
        imagePullPolicy: Always

When subscribing to a pub/sub topic via Dapr, the application can define the consumerID, which determines the subscriber’s position in the queue or topic. With the StatefulSets sticky identity of Pods, you can have a unique consumerID per Pod, allowing each horizontal scale of the subscriber application. Dapr keeps track of the name of each Pod, which can be used when declaring components using the {podName} marker.

On scaling the number of subscribers of a given topic, each Dapr component has unique settings that determine the behavior. Usually, there are two options for multiple consumers:

• Broadcast: each message published to the topic will be consumed by all subscribers.
• Shared: a message is consumed by any subscriber (but not all).

Kafka isolates each subscriber by consumerID with its own position in the topic. When an instance restarts, it reuses the same consumerID and continues from its last known position, without skipping messages. The component below demonstrates how a Kafka component can be used by multiple Pods:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: pubsub
spec:
  type: pubsub.kafka
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: brokers
    value: my-cluster-kafka-bootstrap.kafka.svc.cluster.local:9092
  - name: consumerID
    value: "{podName}"
  - name: authRequired
    value: "false"

The MQTT3 protocol has shared topics, allowing multiple subscribers to “compete” for messages from the topic, meaning a message is only processed by one of them. For example:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: mqtt-pubsub
spec:
  type: pubsub.mqtt3
  version: v1
  metadata:
    - name: consumerID
      value: "{podName}"
    - name: cleanSession
      value: "true"
    - name: url
      value: "tcp://admin:public@localhost:1883"
    - name: qos
      value: 1
    - name: retain
      value: "false"

Next steps

• Try the pub/sub tutorial.
• Learn about messaging with CloudEvents and when you might want to send messages without CloudEvents.
• Review the list of pub/sub components.
• Read the API reference.