Introduction

Project Meadowlark is a proof-of-concept implementation of the Ed-Fi API Specification, currently supporting Data Standard 3.3b, built on managed services provided by AWS. This document describes the system architecture, including: managed service infrastructure and flow; frameworks used in programming the solution; and notes about potential future direction.

→ More information on  Meadowlark

Cloud Managed Services

The big three cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) all provide similar managed services that could have been used to build this application. The choice of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not an endorsement of Amazon per se. Rather, the development team needed to commit to one service in order to remain focused on delivering a usable proof-of-concept without over-engineering up-front. Further development of Meadowlark into a product would require additional effort to ensure that the core software can easily be used on any cloud platform that provides similar managed service capabilities.

→ More information on cloud parity

Infrastructure

The following diagram illustrates the managed service infrastructure utilized by Meadowlark.

What does each of these services provide?

• API Gateway is  front-end web server that acts as a proxy back to the separate Lambda functions. With the help of the API Gateway, client applications need know only a single base URL, and the different resource endpoints can opaquely point back to different back-end services.
• Lambda Functions are small, purpose-built, serverless runtime hosts for application code. In the Meadowlark solution, there are ten different Lambda Functions that handle inbound requests from the API Gateway. For simplicity, only a single icon represents all ten in the diagram above.
• DynamoDB is a high-performance NoSQL database for key-value storage. One of the powerful features of DynamoDB is its Change Data Capture (CDC) Streaming: each change to an item stored in the database creates an event on a stream. Another Lambda function detects this event to provide post-processing.
• OpenSearch is a NoSQL database originally based on ElasticSearch, providing high-performance indexing and querying capabilities. All of the "GET by query" (aka "GET by example") client requests are served by this powerful search engine.
• CloudWatch provides advanced collection and monitoring capabilities for logs, including detailed logging written in to the Meadowlark Lambda functions.

Utilizing Multiple Databases

In traditional application development, including the Ed-Fi ODS/API Platform, all Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) operations are serviced by a single database server. Project Meadowlark has opted to adopt the strategy of choosing a database that is fit-to-purpose. DynamoDB is incredibly fast and highly scalable for online transaction processing (OLTP), allowing the web API layer to respond to the client very quickly. As a key-value store, a DynamoDB table contains only a small number of columns, and the raw JSON payload received in POST and PUT requests are stored directly in a column. This improves both the write speed and the speed of retrieving a single object from the database. 

A key difference between this document storage approach, compared to relational database modeling, comes in the form of searchability. DynamoDB has the ability to add "secondary indexes" that can help find individual items by some global criteria. But these are limited and very different than the indexes found in a relational database, which can be tuned to identify items based on any column. In other words, when storing an entire document, Dynamo DB is a poor choice for trying to search by query terms (e.g. "get all students with last name Doe"). 

This is where OpenSearch shines. Based on ElasticSearch, OpenSearch is also a NoSQL document store. The key difference is that it indexes everything in the document, and has a powerful search engine across the indexes.

OpenSearch is not designed to be a robust solution for high performance write operations, so it does not make sense to write directly to it. DynamoDB's change data capture process fills the gap by triggering another Lambda function that copies the object data, as written to DynamoDB, into OpenSearch (or deletes that object).

Eventual Consistency

DynamoDB stores multiple copies of the data for resiliency and high availability, and only one of these copies receives the initial write operation. The service guarantees that all other copies will eventually come up to date with that initial write operation: the data will eventually be consistent. The tradeoff is connection reliability: queries are not blocked by write operations.

Many people find this disturbing at first, if they are used to thinking about transaction locking in relational databases. But the reality is less scary than it sounds.

Amazon states that it typically takes "one second or less" to bring all copies up to date. How often is a vendor system going to write to an Ed-Fi API, with a fixed requirement that another vendor be able to read that data less than one second later? Let's compare the outcomes of the following three scenarios:

In Scenario 1, Client A receives stale data because they requested it half a second before Client B writes an update. And this is no different than in a relational database.

In Scenario 2, the Client B writes an update half a second before Client A sends a read. Client A might coincidentally be assigned to read from the first database node that received the record, or it might read from a node that is lagging by half a second. Thus it might get stale data, though this is not guaranteed.

Finally in Scenario 3, Client A asks for a record a full second after Client B had written an update, and Client A is nearly guaranteed to get the current (not stale) data. Again, same as with a standard relational database.

The difference between the guaranteed consistency of a relational database and the eventual consistency of a distributed database like DynamoDB is thus more a matter of happenstance than anything. In either case, if Client A reads from the system a millesecond before Client B writes, then Client A will have stale data. If Client A reads after  Client B writes, then the window of time for getting stale data goes up to perhaps a second. But if they do get stale data, they will never know that they weren't in scenario 1.

Eventual consistency is likely "good enough." But it does deserve further community consideration before using it in a production system.

Data Duplication

For many people, this process of copying data into two storage locations (DynamoDB and OpenSearch) may seem very strange. We are taught "write once", avoiding the costs of storing and maintaining duplicate data.

From the storage perspective, there is a false assumption here: when a relational database table has indexes, you are already storing duplicate copies of the data. With paired DynamoDB and OpenSearch, that hidden truth simply comes to the surface. Furthermore, the cost of storage is generally much lower than computation: so one should optimize for compute time more than for storage volume (within reason). OpenSearch is computationally powerful for indexed searches, where DynamoDB is computationally expensive if you try a full-table scan to look for an object via ad hoc query.

There is also an eventual consistency challenge here, one that is more significant than with DynamoDB by itself: there is a greater probability of an error in the CDC stream → Lamba function → OpenSearch write process than in the DynamoDB node synchronization process. This too deserves further scrutiny and operational testing.

Programming Framework

Application Code

The application code has been written in TypeScript running on Node.js, which are popular tools for modern web application development. Using TypeScript/JavaScript also gives us the advantage of leveraging MetaEd, as discussed in the next section.

The code uses the latest software development kit from Amazon, AWS SDK 3, to mediate interactions with AWS services: receiving requests from API Gateway, writing to DynamoDB, and writing to OpenSearch.

As a proof-of-concept, the development team did not spend as much time writing unit tests as would be done in production-ready code. That said, there are unit tests to cover 61% of the application code, with the biggest gap being in the database persistence code, which is naturally harder to unit test. 

MetaEd

The Ed-Fi data standard is defined in code through MetaEd files. The MetaEd application has a build  tool that generates JSON and SQL files that the ODS/API process leverages for auto-generating  significant portions of the Ed-Fi ODS/API Platform. By leveraging that same MetaEd code base, Meadowlark is able to construct an entire API surface in memory without having to generate source code files. And thanks to the (essentially) schema-less nature of the NoSQL databases, there is no need four resource-specific mapping code when performing operations on items in the databases.

As a consequence, Meadowlark does not have any Data Standard specific code. No code changes are needed to support a newer (or older) Data Standard, although migrating data from one standard to another would require an external process.

Deployment

The Serverless Framework provides all of the heavy lifting for packaging the source code into Lambda functions, provisioning required resources in AWS, and setting up the necessary user permissions on AWS objects.

DynamoDB Storage and Referential Integrity

 Meadowlark uses the single-table design approach for storage in DynamoDB, with the following structure:

There are also a couple of experimental columns and secondary indexes for exploring relationship-based authorization.

An important feature of an Ed-Fi API is the ability to enforce referential integrity, rejecting modification requests where the modified item refers to another item that does not actually exist. An Ed-Fi API also rejects attempts to delete items that are referred to by other items.

DynamoDB does not support referential integrity, whereas the ODS/API Platform leverages referential integrity checking built into the SQL database. Therefore Meadowlark had to develop its own system for referential integrity checks, in application code. In short, Meadowlark writes extra items to DynamoDB with pointers to reference items. These items are trivial to look up.

Due to eventual consistency, there is a small but real possibility of a referential integrity check miss . To what extent does this matter?  Another question for the community to explore.

Let us suppose that an API client sends the following request, which contains three references in it: educationOrganization, accountCode, and a descriptor reference embedded in accountCode. 

POST https://xyz/stage-name/v3.3b/ed-fi/accounts

{
    "educationOrganizationReference": {
      "educationOrganizationId": 255901
    },
    "accountIdentifier": "1.200.100.10001",
    "fiscalYear": 2012,
    "accountName": "RegularInstructions",
    "accountCodes": [
      {
        "accountCodeReference": {
          "educationOrganizationId": 255901,
          "fiscalYear": 2011,
          "accountClassificationDescriptor": "uri://ed-fi.org/AccountClassificationDescriptor#Object",
          "accountCodeNumber": "100"
        }
      }
    ]
}

The POST request only needs verify the existence of two other items: the education organization

The request to post an Account does not need to verify the descriptor explicitly - instead, it needs to verify

Future Directions

• event streaming
• S3 for lower cost object reads and for analytics
• caching
• Docker vs. Lambda: Fight
• abstracting for easier cross platform support