S. Lott: The Depths of Degradation or How to Reduce

Let's talk real-world functional programming. Disclosure: I'm a fan of functional programming in Python. (This: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/functional-python-programming)

The usual culprits for functional programming are map(), filter(), generator functions, and the various comprehensions. This is very pleasant and can lead to succinct, expressive code.

The reduce operation, however, is sometimes slippery.  The obvious reductions are sum() and prod().  Some slightly less obvious reductions are these three:

sum0 = lambda s: sum(1 for _ in s)
sum1 = lambda s: sum(s)
sum2 = lambda s: sum(n**2 for n in s)

The first is essentially len(s), but stated more formally. It shows how we can add in filter or transformations. If we're working with a collections.Counter object, we can rewrite these three to work with the values() of a counter. This allows us to have a statistics library that works with a sequence of simple items or a Counter of binned items.

(I've left it as an exercise for the reader to create the summaries of Counters.)

The Health Check Question

The context is an RESTful application's /health end-point. When a client does a GET to /health, we want to provide status of the components on which the app depends as well as a summary.

The details are created like this:

components = (component() for component in COMPONENT_LIST)
init_components = [thing.init_app(app) for thing in components]
details = [component.health() for component in init_components]

We have a list of class definitions for each component. We can create instances of each class. We can initialize these by providing the RESTful app. Finally, we can create a list of the various health end-point status codes.

There's a class definition for other RESTful API's. The health check does a transitive GET to a /health end-point. These are all more-or-less identical.

There are also class definitions for the database and the cache and other non-RESTful components. It's all very pretty and very functional.

Note that the three statements aren't adjacent. They're scattered around to fit better with the way Flask works. The component list is in one place. The initialization happens before the first request. The details are computed as requested.

Also. We don't really use a simple list for the details. It's actually a mapping from which we will derive a vector. I've left that detail out because it's a relatively simple complication.

Representation of Health

We represent health with a simple enumeration of values:

from enum import Enum
class Status(Enum):
    OK = "OK"
    DEGRADED = "DEGRADED"
    DOWN = "DOWN"

This provides the essential definition of health for our purposes. We don't drag around details of the degradation; that's something that we have to determine by looking at our consoles and logs and stuff.  Degradation is (a) rare, and (b) nuanced. Some degradations are mere annoyances: one of the servers is being restarted. Other degradations are hints that something else might be going on that needs investigation: database primary server is down and we're running on a secondary.

Summarizing Health

A subset of the details vector, then, looks like this: [Status.OK, Status.OK, Status.DEGRADED].

How can we summarize this?

First, we need some rules.  Like these:

class Status(Enum):
    OK = "OK"
    DEGRADED = "DEGRADED"
    DOWN = "DOWN"

    def depth(self, other):
        if self == self.OK:
            return {self.OK: self.OK,
                    self.DEGRADED: self.DEGRADED,
                    self.DOWN: self.DEGRADED}[other]
        elif self == self.DEGRADED:
            return {self.OK: self.DEGRADED,
                    self.DEGRADED: self.DEGRADED,
                    self.DOWN: self.DEGRADED}[other]
        elif self == self.DOWN:
            return {self.OK: self.DEGRADED,
                    self.DEGRADED: self.DEGRADED,
                    self.DOWN: self.DOWN}[other]

The depth() method implements a comparison operator that defines the relationships. This can be visualized as a table.

depth	OK	DEGRADED	DOWN
OK	OK	DEGRADED	DOWN
DEGRADED	DEGRADED	DEGRADED	DEGRADED
DOWN	DOWN	DEGRADED	DOWN

This allows us to define a function that uses reduce to summarize the vector of status values.

from functools import reduce
def summary(sequence): 
    return reduce(lambda a, b: a.depth(b), sequence)