Set up the Openflow Connector for Kinesis¶

Prerequisites¶

1. Ensure that you have reviewed About Openflow Connector for Kinesis.

2. Ensure that you have set up Openflow.

Set up a Kinesis stream¶

As an AWS administrator, perform the following actions in your AWS account:

1. Ensure that you have an AWS Account with IAM permissions to access Kinesis Streams and DynamoDB.

2. Optionally, create a dead-letter queue (DLQ) Kinesis Stream. Messages that cannot be successfully parsed can be redirected to a designated DLQ.

Set up Snowflake account¶

As a Snowflake account administrator, perform the following tasks:

1. Create a new role or use an existing role and grant the Database privileges.

2. Create a destination database and destination schema that will be used to create destination tables for storing the data.

   1. If you plan to use the connector’s capability to automatically create destination table if it does not already exist, make sure the user has the required privileges for creating and managing Snowflake objects:

      Object	Privilege	Notes
      Database	USAGE
      Schema	USAGE . CREATE TABLE .	After the schema-level objects have been created, the CREATE object privileges can be revoked.
      Table	OWNERSHIP	Only required when using the Kinesis connector to ingest data into an existing table. . If the connector creates a new target table for records from the Kinesis stream, the default role for the user specified in the configuration becomes the table owner.

      You can use the following script to create and configure a custom role (requires SECURITYADMIN or equivalent):

      USE ROLE SECURITYADMIN;
      
      CREATE ROLE kinesis_connector_role_1;
      GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE kinesis_db TO ROLE kinesis_connector_role_1;
      GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA kinesis_schema TO ROLE kinesis_connector_role_1;
      GRANT CREATE TABLE ON SCHEMA kinesis_schema TO ROLE kinesis_connector_role_1;
      
      -- Only for existing tables
      GRANT OWNERSHIP ON TABLE existing_table1 TO ROLE kinesis_connector_role_1;
      

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3. Create a new Snowflake service user with the type as SERVICE.

4. Grant the Snowflake service user the role you created in the previous steps.

   GRANT ROLE kinesis_connector_role_1 TO USER kinesis_connector_user_1;
   ALTER USER kinesis_connector_user_1 SET DEFAULT_ROLE = kinesis_connector_role_1;
   

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5. Configure with key-pair auth for the Snowflake SERVICE user from step 3.

6. Snowflake strongly recommends this step. Configure a secrets manager supported by Openflow, for example, AWS, Azure, and Hashicorp, and store the public and private keys in the secret store.

   Note

   If for any reason, you do not wish to use a secrets manager, then you are responsible for safeguarding the public key and private key files used for key-pair authentication according to the security policies of your organization.

   1. Once the secrets manager is configured, determine how you will authenticate to it. On AWS, it’s recommended that you the EC2 instance role associated with Openflow as this way no other secrets have to be persisted.

   2. In Openflow, configure a Parameter Provider associated with this Secrets Manager, from the hamburger menu in the upper right. Navigate to Controller Settings » Parameter Provider and then fetch your parameter values.

   3. At this point all credentials can be referenced with the associated parameter paths and no sensitive values need to be persisted within Openflow.

7. If any other Snowflake users require access to the raw ingested documents and tables ingested by the connector (for example, for custom processing in Snowflake), then grant those users the role created in step 1.

8. Designate a warehouse for the connector to use. Start with the smallest warehouse size, then experiment with size depending on the number of tables being replicated, and the amount of data transferred. Large table numbers typically scale better with multi-cluster warehouses, rather than larger warehouse sizes.

Set up the connector¶

As a data engineer, perform the following tasks to install and configure the connector:

Run the flow¶

1. Right-click on the plane and select Enable all Controller Services.

2. Right-click on the imported process group and select Start.

The connector starts the data ingestion.

{
    "id": 1,
    "name": "Steve",
    "body_temperature": 36.6,
    "approved_coffee_types": ["Espresso", "Doppio", "Ristretto", "Lungo"],
    "animals_possessed":
    {
        "dogs": true,
        "cats": false
    },
    "date_added": "2024-10-15"
}

Known issues¶

• The connector’s process group has one output port named as “Upload Failure”. It can be used to handle FlowFiles that were not successfully uploaded to Snowflake. If this port is not connected outside of the connector’s process group, it will display a warning sign that can be ignored.

• All processors, when stopped, can be ordered to run once. ConsumeKinesisStream processor, due to internal architecture, will do no meaningful work when ordered to run once. For the processor to start working, it has to be started and run for about two minutes.