proposal: Added proposal for vertical block sharding (limit size bloc…

…k size).

Related to #1424 and #3068

Signed-off-by: Bartlomiej Plotka <bwplotka@gmail.com>

docs/proposals/202011_vertical_block_sharding.md

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+---
+title: "Vertical Block Sharding"
+type: proposal
+menu: proposals
+status: proposed
+owner: @bwplotka
+Date: 2 November 2020
+---
+
+## Prior Reading
+
+Before you start, please read carefully [compactor docs](../components/compact.md), especially `Compaction`, `Resource` and `Scalability` parts.
+
+## Problem Statement
+
+Thanos uses TSDB format to store data in object storage. Block is just a directory with different files. Mainly index file for
+metadata, string interning (symbols) and label-pair index and a few (max 512MB) chunk files to store the actual data.
+Blocks have globally unique ID and are create for certain time ranges and for certain external labels (so also tenants).
+
+This being said, the block size depends on multiple factors:
+
+* Index size
+  * Number of series
+  * Number of labels per series
+  * The cardinality of labels (how many labels are shared between different series)
+  * The length and cardinality of strings inside labels
+* Total Chunk File size
+  * Number of samples per series
+  * Variance of scrape intervals and sample values
+
+Realistically in Thanos system blocks usually are created either by Prometheus or [Thanos Receive](../components/receive.md). In both case the same TSDB database is 
+used. Initial block have always 2 hours range. In terms of "vertical" size it generally does not have more than 10 millions series, as 
+ingesting this many by single Prometheus takes lots of resources, so it's usually sharded functionally at ingestion time if anything.
+
+However, there are few things that can cause arbitrary large blocks in modern Thanos systems:
+
+* Horizontal Compactions, compacts multiple blocks into bigger time ranges. Especially to get advantage of downsampling you 
+want blocks to be compacted to longer time ranges. But this gives benefits only from long living series. On normal heavily used
+Kubernetes we seen average life duration of ~13h, not mentioning few hundred thousands of single sample series. Even with limit
+of 2w time range compaction for Thanos this can result compaction to be not that effecting, casing block to grow to enormous sizes (1TB with index
+sizes over 60 GBs)
+* Recently Thanos and Prometheus enabled [vertical compaction](../components/compact.md#vertical-compactions) (under hidden flag). This introduced
+abilities to do backfilling (importing blocks) and offline deduplications.
+* Both Prometheus and Thanos Receive write paths are getting more & more optimized allowing the initial 2h blocks to be much larger in practice. 
+
+On top of that, there is currently **no programmatic limitation** for the size of the block in write block in Prometheus and Thanos, so in theory
+user can build as large blocks as they want.
+
+### Effects of "Too Large" TSDB blocks.
+
+There are various, sometimes not obvious, limits and drawbacks of too large blocks for both Prometheus and Thanos:
+
+* There is known limitation for Prometheus index file size. It can't exceed 64GB due to [uint32 used for postings](https://grafana.com/blog/2019/10/31/lifting-the-index-size-limit-of-prometheus-with-postings-compression/),
+see [issue](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1424) and [code](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/3d8826a3d42566684283a9b7f7e812e412c24407/tsdb/index/index.go#L279).
+While there is work to lift this limitation and allow bigger indexes, there will be **some** other limit anyway.
+* Compaction is not streaming bytes directly from & to object storage (yet). This is due to its current index format, which is [being worked on](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/3389).
+This means that Compactor has to download all source blocks & upload all output block files to and from disk, impacting the disk storage you need to prepare for Compactor.
+This is a **potential scalability limit for Compactor**
+* Compactor can be currently horizontally scaled to compact among streams of blocks. With some locking mechanisms we can get up to single compaction.
+However, with single block having arbitrary size, this can be **another potential scalability issue**, where you cannot split this operation to two separate machines and do concurrently.
+* Similarly, with reading the data from block, Store Gateway can shard up to single block, so with arbitrary large block, you cannot split lookup and reading to multiple
+instances with the current implementation. This poses **potential scalability issue for Store Gateway**.
+* The object storages are designed for big files, but with some limitation. The current limit e.g for [GCS is 5TB per upload/stored file](https://cloud.google.com/storage/quotas#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20maximum%20size,request%20is%20also%205%20TB).
+* Last, but not the least operating with such big blocks is not easy. We are still creating new ways of deleting, cleaning up or analysing your data for
+easier operation of Thanos. Operating (downloading, rewriting) TBs of bytes per blocks hits limitation of different tooling (e.g SRE can't just use
+own laptop anymore). 
+
+To sum up: Current logic of not caring about the block size got us far, however as expected, it's time to think about limiting the block size (primarily
+index size).
+
+### Related Tickets:
+
+* [Limit size of blocks](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/3068)
+* [index exceeding max size of postings](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1424)
+
+## Goals
+
+* Automatically cap the size of index per block to X GB without impacting read performance.
+  * Optional: CLI for vertical sharding of old blocks. 
+
+## Non Goals
+
+* Redesign Block index format 
+* Introduce breaking changes
+* Lift current limitation of index size
+* Automatically shard old blocks
+
+## Proposal
+
+**We propose to vertically shard all blocks which goes beyond the specified index size limit during the compaction process.**
+
+* Special metadata in meta.json indicating a shard.
+
+TBD
+
+
+
+## Alternatives
+
+* Shard number stored in external label.
+
+## Future Work
+
+* Add [`Cuckoofilter`](https://github.com/seiflotfy/cuckoofilter) to improve query performance on store GW as well with vertically sharded blocks.
+
+![Why Cuckoo filter: https://bdupras.github.io/filter-tutorial/](../img/cuckoo-pros.png)
+
+See paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/cuckoo-conext2014.pdf