I am experimenting with my new Flink cluster(3 Different Machines-> 1 Job Manager, 2-> Task Managers) using RocksDB as State Backend however the checkpointing behaviour I am getting is a little confusing.
More specifically, I have designed a simple WordCount example and my data source is netcat. When I submit my job, the job manager assigns it to a random task manager(no replication as well). I provide some words and then I kill the currenlty running task manager. After a while, the job restarts in the other task manager and I can provide some new words. The confusing part is that state from the first task manager is preserved even when I have killed it.
To my understanding, RocksDB maintains its state in a local directory of the running task manager, so what I expected was when the first task manager was killed to lose the entire state and start counting words from the beginning. So Flink seems to somehow maintain its state in the memory(?) or broadcasts it through JobManager?
Am I missing something?
The RocksDB state backend does keep its working state on each task manager's local disk, while checkpoints are normally stored in a distributed filesystem.
If you have checkpointing enabled, then the spare task manager is able to recover the state from the latest checkpoint and resume processing.