The Pipeline Question when Bashing the Bash

Background: https://medium.com/capital-one-developers/bashing-the-bash-replacing-shell-scripts-with-python-d8d201bc0989

And this

I wonder how/why python did not pick up some sort/form of pipe operator. 🤨
(although coroutine does have .send method 🤔)

— Ivan Pejić (@nadrimajstor) August 26, 2017

The answer to this is interesting because there are two kinds of parallelism. I like to call them architectural and incidental (or casual).  I'll look at architectural parallelism first, because it's what we often think about. Then the incidental parallelism, which I'm convinced is a blight.

Architectural Parallelism

The OS provides big-picture, architectural parallelism. This isn't -- necessarily -- a thing we want to push down into Python applications. There are some tradeoffs here.

One example of big architectural parallelism are big map-reduce processes where the mapping and reducing can (and should) proceed in parallel. There are some constraints around this, and we'll touch on them below.

Another common example is a cluster of microservices that are deployed on the same server. In many cases, each microservice decomposes into a cluster of processes that work in parallel and have a very, very long life. We might have an NGINX front-end for static content and a Python-based Flask back-end for dynamic content.  We might want the OS init process to start these, and we define them in init.d. In other cases, we allocate them to web-based servers where load-balancing handles the details of restarting.

In the map-reduce example, the shell's pipe makes sense. We can define it with a shell script like this: source | map | reduce.  It's hard to beat this for succinct clarity.

In the Ngnix + Flask case, they may talk using a named pipe that outlives the two processes. Conceptually, they work as nginx | flask run.

In some cases, we have log analysis and alerting that are part of microservices management. We can pile this into the processing stream with a conceptual pipeline of nginx | flask run | log reduce | alert. The log reduce filters and reduces the log to find those events that require an alert. If any data makes it into the alert process, it sends the text for human intervention.

There are some distinguishing features.

• They tend to be resource hogs. Either it's a big map-reduce processing request that uses a lot of CPU and memory resources. Or it's a log-running server.
• The data being transported is bytes with a very inexpensive (almost free) serialization. When we think of map-reduce, these processes often work with text as input and output. There may be more complex data structures involved in the reduce, but the cost of serialization is an important concern. When we think of web requests, the request, response, and log pipeline is bytes more-or-less by definition. 
• The parallelism is at the process level because each element does a lot of work and the isolation is beneficial.
• The compute high-value results for actual users.

The OS does this. The complexity is that each OS does this differently. The Python subprocess module (and related projects outside the standard library) provide an elegant mapping into Python. 

It's not built-in to the language. I think that it's because details vary so widely by OS. I think trying to build this into the language leads to a bulky featyre that's not widely-enough used.

Incidental Parallelism

This is -- to me -- a blight. Here's a typical kind of thing we see in the middle of a longer, more complex shell script.

data=`grep pattern file | cut args | sort | head`

# the interesting processing on $data

Computing a value that's assigned to data is a high-cost, low-value step. It creates an intermediate result that's only part of the shell script, and not really the final result. The parallelism feature of the shell's | operator isn't of any profound value since only a tiny bit of data is passed from step to step.

This can be rewritten into Python, but the resulting code won't be a one-liner. It will be longer. It will also be much, much faster. However, the speed difference is rarely relevant if this kind of processing step inside a larger, iterative process.

A trivial rewrite of just one line of code misses the point. The goal is to refactor the script so that this line of code because a simple part of the processing and uses first-class Python data structures. The reason for doing cut and sort operations is generally because the data structure wasn't optimized for the job. A priority queue might have been a better choice, and would have amortized sorting properly and eliminated the need for separate cut and head operations.

This kind of computation can (and should) be done in a single process. The shell pipeline legacy implementation is little more than a short-hand for passing arguments and results among (simple) functions.

We can rewrite this as nested functions.

with Path(file).open() as source:

    head(sorted(cut_mapping(args, grep_filter(pattern, file))))

This will do the same thing. The gigantic benefits of this kind of rewrite involves eliminating two kinds of overheads.

• The fork/exec to spawn subprocesses. A single process will be faster.
• The serialization and deserialization of intermediate results. Avoiding serialization will be faster.

When we rewrite bash to Python, we are able to leverage Python's data structures to write processing that expressive, succinct, and efficient.

This kind of rewriting will also lead to refactoring the adjacent lines of the script -- the interesting processing -- into Python code also. This refactoring can lead to further simplifications and speedups.

The Two Cases

There seem to be two cases of parallelism:

• Big and Architectural. There are many Python packages that provides these features. Look at plumbum, pipes, and joblib for examples. Since the OS implementation details vary so much, it's hard to imagine making this part of the language.
• Small and Incidental.  The incidental parallelism is clever, but inefficient. In many cases, it doesn't seem to create significant value. It seems to be a kind of handy little workaround. It has costs that I find to outstrip the value. 

When replacing the bash with Python, some of the parallelism is architectural, and needs to be preserved. Careful engineering choices will be required. The rest is incidental and needs to be discarded.