Trifork Blog

The potential of Machine Learning with the Axon Framework

13:18 on September 20th, 2018 by
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Machine Learning creates lots of value in the business processes, if and when applied properly and the right data is available. These days a lot of data is already held within organisations. It is common to see this data unused, with possibilities and insights unseen. While it can be due to limitations of modelling and pattern recognition, we often see practical problems with data quality and availability setting the actual limit. In the recent years, development in this area has increased drastically, and with it, the possibilities!

Axon is a popular lightweight framework used by a growing number of companies which enables you to apply sound architectural principles like DDD, event sourcing and CQRS, and helps you to build less complex and better maintainable applications.

Using these principles, the Axon Framework promises scalability, agility and smooth integration with external systems. As a side effect, they also provide a reliable trail of events leading to a system state. By storing these in an event store, it enables perfect auditing capabilities for the past. This same detailed data also enables you to apply Machine Learning techniques to look forward and get precise predictions of the future

Organisations with all kinds of challenges and optimisation issues now have the opportunity to Forecast user interest and prevent churn, detect fraud right when it happens, and to cluster information to significantly improve recommendations.

Three main principles of Axon is aggregates, repositories and events.

An aggregate is an entity or group of entities that are always kept in a consistent state. For example, a “Contact” aggregate could contain two entities: Name and Address.

A repository is the mechanism that provides access to aggregates. There are two kinds of repositories, ones that save the current state of the aggregate and those that store the events of an aggregate (the Event Store).

An event is anything that has happened in the sense of business. For example, the action of creating a contact in an address book, would result in an event. Importantly, updating this contact, would also result in an event

When developing scalable applications, Axon helps you to focus on business logic. When the business logic changes over time, the original events are not touched but an upcaster maps the new understanding of the world on events before they are pushed to event listeners.

Imagine now, we can use all the events that have happened and stored in the Event Store, for different purposes.

Time series forecasting
Time series forecasting is an important area of Machine Learning which can solve many prediction problems that involve a time component. The dataset for the time series forecasting is a sequence of observations taken sequentially in time, and the goal is to eventually forecast the future values of a series based on this historical dataset. Considering the fact that all the events stored in the Event Store have the time component, we can leverage from the core structure of the Event Store in the Axon Framework and forecast the next trend or predict the next action.

A concrete use-case could be tracking the behaviour of a user on a web-shop, and finding out what actions leads to the purchase an item

Anomaly detection
Another example can be anomaly detection which is a technique used to identify unusual patterns that do not conform to the expected behaviour. It has many applications in business, such as intrusion detection in network traffic, spotting a tumor in an MRI scan, fraud detection in bank transactions and fault detection in operating environments.

Thanks to the Axon Framework, all the events that have been stored in the Event Store collectively help us in detecting what is normal, and hence what is an anomaly. An example use case could be analysing the events from an authentication system, and flagging when someone fails to login too many times, or has attempts from many different IPs.

Better ML Models
We can benefit from the rich and structured data stored in the payload of each event. High quality, structured data, plays a major role in the validity and accuracy of the Machine Learning models generated to solve a business problem.

In the Axon Framework, each event contains a payload which is the data being used in the event. By querying the collection of data related to events, we are able to create a rich dataset of the event’s data which enables us to make a relevant Machine Learning models.

For instance, we could query all the prescriptions which have been given to the patients with dementia. With that information, we were able to generate the next prescription for the patients with similar issues. Basically, we found that it was straightforward to start applying Machine Learning models for recommendation, prediction and recognition on the data stored in terms of events.

Integration
Since our models are based directly on the events that the system generates, it is easy to integrate them and start providing real business value. Examples of integrations would be providing live recommendations, alerting and in general helping decision making. With Axons focus on easy integration, we can even enable the models to take actual decisions.

Conclusion
These examples lead to the conclusion that events from a system built around the Axon Framework are a perfect starting point for Machine Learning. Of course we have a precondition for business value: Understanding the business challenges and being able to integrate the ML solution within the Business processes is paramount to success. If these preconditions are met, applying ML techniques to Axon based systems provide real valuable insights and optimisation possibilities, helping you to solve advanced business challenges.

 

More information about Machine Learning on Axon can be found here: https://trifork.com/ml4axon/

 

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Posted in: Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning

Spring Data Native Queries and Projections in Kotlin

14:34 on August 28th, 2018 by
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Koltin, Spring Boot and JPA

This blog describes the solution to mapping native queries to objects. This is useful because sometimes you want to use a feature of the underlying database implementation (such as PostgreSQL) that is not part of the JPQL standard. By the end of this blog you should be able to confidently use native queries and use their outcome in a type-safe way.

In creating great applications based on Machine Learning solutions, we often come across uses for frameworks and databases that aren’t exactly standard. We sometimes need to build functionality that is either so new or so specific that it hasn’t been adopted into JPA implementations yet.

Working on a project with Spring Data is usually simple albeit somewhat opaque. Write a repository, annotate methods with @Query annotation and presto! You have mapped your database entities to Kotlin objects. Especially since Spring Framework 5 many of the interoperability issues (such as nullable values that are never null) have been alleviated.

Confucius wrote “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”. So, to gauge the extent of our ignorance, let’s have a look at what happens when we cannot use the JPA abstraction layer in full and instead need to work with native queries.

Setting up the entity

When you use non-JPA features of the underlying database store, things can become complex.
Let’s say we have the following PostgreSQL table for storing people:

CREATE TABLE person (
  id BIGSERIAL NOT NULL UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY,
  first_name VARCHAR(20),
  last_name VARCHAR(20)
);

Given we represent an individual person like this:

import javax.persistence.Entity
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue
import javax.persistence.Id
import javax.persistence.Table
@Entity
@Table(name = "person")
class PersonEntity {
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue
  var id: Long? = null
  var firstName: String? = null
  var lastName: String? = null
}

We can access that using a Repository:

import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository
import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository
@Repository interface PersonRepo : JpaRepository<PersonEntity, Long>

We could now implement a custom query on the repository as follows:

@Repository interface PersonRepo : JpaRepository<PersonEntity, Long> {

  @Query("FROM PersonEntity WHERE first_name = :firstName")
  fun findAllByFirstName(@Param("firstName") firstName: String):
    List<PersonEntity>
}

So far so good. It uses JPQL syntax to form database-agnostic queries which is nice because we get some validation of these queries when starting the application, plus the added benefit of the syntax being database-type ignorant.

Adding a native query

Sometimes however, we want to use syntax that is specific to the database that we are using. We can do that by adding the boolean nativeQuery attribute to the @Query annotation and using Postgres’ SQL instead of JPQL:

  @Query("SELECT first_name, random() AS luckyNumber FROM person",
    nativeQuery = true)
  fun getPersonsLuckyNumber(): LuckyNumberProjection?

Obviously this example is simple for the sake of this context, more practical applications are in the area of using the extra data types that Postgres offers such as the cube data type for storing matrices.

You may be, as I was at first, tempted to write a class for LuckyNumberProjection.

class LuckyNumberProjection {
  var firstName: String? = null
  var luckyNumber: Float? = null
}

You will run cause into the following error:

org.springframework.core.convert.ConverterNotFoundException: No converter found
capable of converting from type
[org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.AbstractJpaQuery$TupleConverter$TupleBackedMap]
to type
[com.trifork.machinelearning.PersonRepo$LuckyNumberProjection]

The accompanying stack trace points in the direction of converters. This then makes you need to add a converter. However that doesn’t seem like it should be as hard. Good for us it turns out it isn’t!

Turns out that contrary to Entities, Projections, like Repositories, are expected to be interfaces. So let’s do that instead:

interface LuckyNumberProjection {
  val firstName: String?
  val luckyNumber: Float
}

This should set you straight next time you want to get custom objects mapped out of your JPA queries.

At Trifork Amsterdam, we are currently doing multiple projects using Kotlin using frameworks such as Spring Boot, Axon Framework and Project Reactor on top of Kubernetes clusters using Helm to build small and smart microservices. More and more of those microservices contain our Machine Learning based solutions. These are in a variety of areas ranging from natural language processing (NLP) to time-series analysis and clustering data for recommender systems and predictive monitoring.

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Posted in: Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning | From The Trenches | Java | Kotlin | Software Development | Spring

Integrating the AWS Parameter Store with Spring Cloud

12:32 on July 20th, 2018 by
9 Comments

I’ll tell you all my secrets (but I lie about my past)
— Tom Waits – Tango till they’re sore

tl;dr

We’ve integrated the AWS Parameter Store with Spring Cloud so that it can be used as a secure configuration backend for services deployed to EC2, including ECS. This code has recently been merged in Spring Cloud AWS and is available in its 2.0 release.

Introduction

At the moment I’m working on a project where we’re developing a microservices-based system based on Spring Cloud for the Dutch Lotteries. The services are deployed on Amazon Web Services using Amazon’s current Docker support (ECS).

When we started late last year, we decided to use Consul, both as a service registry and as a key-value store for configuration. Spring Cloud has excellent built-in integration with Consul, both for service discovery as well as for using it as a shared configuration backend.

However, we quickly found out that we needed an internal load balancer to allow ECS to perform health checks on the services, so we might as well use that for server-side load balancing. This eliminated the need for client-side routing and service discovery. Furthermore, we weren’t too happy with the options to easily restrict access to secrets stored as config in Consul and were looking for a configuration service provided by AWS (rather than e.g. Vault) so that we’d no longer need to operate our own Consul cluster or other middleware.

AWS Parameter Store

When we looked for alternative solutions we soon found the AWS Parameter Store: it’s an option provided by EC2 to store all sorts of configuration parameters, including secrets that are encrypted at rest. Using IAM roles you can restrict access to parameters, which can have nested paths that can be used to define ACL-like access constraints. It also integrates with ECS quite nicely, by allowing containers to retrieve credentials to access the store, and provides versioning of parameter values.

This screenshot provides an impression of the corresponding console:

However, when looking for integration with Spring Cloud I just found some open tickets, so I decided to try to develop some integration myself. This blog post describes the result of that effort.

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Posted in: DevOps | Java | Software Development | Spring

Exposing asynchronous communication through a synchronous REST API with Spring 5

16:02 on April 13th, 2018 by
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On my current project, we opted not to use REST for the communication between our services. Instead we make use of AxonIQ’s AxonHub, which acts as a specialized message broker. Messages can be of three types:

  • Command – You want to change something
  • Event – You want to inform others of something that happened
  • Query – You want to know something

The communication is asynchronous and we also have to deal with eventual consistency. If we would create an order by sending a CreateOrderCommand, this order would result in various events which update the state of the Order. We then need to send a query, of which we also receive the result asynchronous.

Our web and mobile frontend communicate with a microservices backend through a REST API. When the user creates an order (clicks the ‘buy’ button), they expect a result immediately. For both frontends, an API which models this user experience closely makes the most sense. This means that we want a more synchronous API, where we send a ‘create order’ request and immediately receive a response.

We implemented this using a small REST facade which translates our asynchronous communication in the backend to the synchronous communication for the frontend. This is a good use case for Spring 5’s reactive Webflux and Project Reactor. Using Project Reactor’s reactive API makes it possible to combine multiple asynchronous calls and operate on their result. Webflux handles the conversion of the reactive types (Mono, Flux) to REST responses. It optimizes the use of threads; by writing non-blocking code, we can reuse threads between asynchronous calls for handling other requests.

Diagram 1 gives us an overview of this approach.

Diagram 1

 

Implementation

Let’s have a more detailed look at the code for the create order example. Listing 1 shows the (slightly) simplified implementation of our REST controller method.

@PostMapping
public Mono&lt;ResponseEntity&lt;OrderResponse&gt;&gt; createOrder(CreateOrderRequest request) 
{
 CreateOrderCommand command = CreateOrderCommand.fromRequest(request); //1

 return this.commandGateway.send(command) //2
  .flatMap(id -&gt; queryGateway.send(new FindOrderSummaryQuery(id))) //3
  .retryWhen(errors -&gt; errors.delayElements(Duration.of(100, MILLIS)) //4
  .take(10)).concatWith(Mono.error(new RuntimeException())).next() //5
  .onErrorReturn(new OrderResponse(orderID, OrderStatus.CREATED)) //6
  .map(orderResponse -&gt; ResponseEntity.ok().body(orderResponse)); //7
}

Listing 1

We first create a command out of the REST request (line 1). A command is a message with the specific intent to change something in our domain. In this specific case, we want to create a new order.

After creating the command, the two asynchronous calls we make are:

Mono&lt;String&gt; id = this.commandGateway.send(command);

and:

Mono&lt;OrderResponse&gt; orderResponse = queryGateway.send(new FindOrderSummaryQuery(id));

Both calls return a single value by using a Mono. A Mono is a reactive type, comparable to the Java’s CompletableFuture. It has zero or one element and can represent an error. As with all reactive types, the value (or error) is delivered over time.

The second call takes the result of the first call as its input. We need the returned id of the command to query for the order. We use the flatMap operator to achieve this (line 3). The flatMap takes the asynchronous result of call 1 and passes this as a parameter to the lambda of call 2. The callback version can be seen in Listing 2: notice the nested lambda, which makes the code complex and less readable.

this.commandGateway.send(command, id -&gt; {
  queryGateway.send(new FindOrderSummaryQuery(id));
});

Listing 2

There is a delay between sending the command and being able to query the result. When the created order cannot be found (e.g. it isn’t create yet or something has gone wrong), an exception is thrown. In this chain, this is represented as a Mono.error(throwable). We use the retryWhen method to retry the query (line 4). We do this 10 times with a delay of 100 ms. When we still don’t get a result, we throw an error (line 5). We don’t expose the error to the client, but pass an OrderResponse with the id and status CREATED (line 6). The client can then query the status of the order later by using this id. This is a form of graceful degradation.

Finally we map the order response from the query to a response entity which can be returned by Spring. Spring actually subscribes to this whole chain and sends out the REST response for us.

Conclusion

Spring 5 and Project Reactor allow us to handle asynchronous communication with concise and readable code. We can do retries, error handling and the combination of multiple asynchronous calls in just a few lines.
The integration of Webflux with Project Reactor allows the use of reactive paradigms in a REST controller. Webflux uses an asynchronous approach. While we wait for a backend query to return, we don’t block the main thread. this allows it to be used for other requests.
Our specific use case is a good example of one of the applications of Spring 5 Webflux and Project Reactor.

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Posted in: Software Development | Spring

Refactoring from Elasticsearch version 1 with Java Transport client to version 6 with High Level REST client

9:00 on February 27th, 2018 by
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Every long running project accrues technical debt. It may be that the requirements today have evolved in a different direction from what was foreseen when the project was designed, or it may be that difficult infrastructure tasks have been put off in favor of new functionality. From time to time, you need to refactor your code to clean up this technical debt. I recently finished such a refactoring task for a customer, so in the category ‘from the trenches’, I would like to share the story here.

Elasticsearch exposes both a REST interface and the internal Java API, via the binary transport client, for connecting with the search engine. Just over a year ago, Elastic announced to the world that it plans to deprecate the transport client in favor of the high level REST client, “as soon as the REST client is feature complete and is mature enough to replace the Java API entirely”. The reasons for this are clearly explained in Luca Cavanna’s blogpost, but the most important disadvantage is that using the transport client, you introduce a tight coupling between your application and the exact major and minor release of your ES cluster. As long as Elasticsearch exposes its internal API, it has to worry about breaking thousands of applications all over the world that depend on it.

The “as soon as…” timetable sounds somewhat vague and long term, but there may be good reasons to migrate your search functionality now, rather than later. In the case of our customer, their reason is wanting to use the AWS Elasticsearch service. The entire codebase is already running in AWS, and for the past few years they have been managing their own Elasticsearch cluster running in EC2 instances. This turns out to be labor intensive when updates have to be applied to these VMs. It would be easier and probably cheaper to let Amazon manage the cluster. As the AWS Elasticsearch service only exposes the REST API, the dependence on the transport protocol will have to be removed.

Action plan

The starting situation was a dependency on Elasticsearch 1.4.5, using the Java API. The goal was the most recent Elasticsearch version available in the Amazon Elasticsearch Service, which at the time was 6.0.2, using the REST API.

In order to reduce the complexity of the refactoring operation, we decided early on, to reindex the data, rather than trying to convert the indices. Every Elasticsearch release comes with a handy list of breaking changes. Looking through this list, we tried to make a list of breaking changes that would likely affect the search implementation of our customer. There are more potential breaking changes than listed here, but these are the ones that an initial investigation suggested might have an impact:

1.x – 2.x:

  • Facets replaced by aggregations
  • Field names can’t contain dots

2.x – 5.x:

5.x – 6.0:

  • Support for indices with multiple mapping types dropped

The plan was first to convert the existing code to work with ES 6, and only then migrate from the transport client to the High Level REST client.

Implementation 

The entire search functionality, originally written by our former colleague Frans Flippo, was exhaustively covered by unit- and integration tests, so the first step was to update the maven dependency to the current version, run the tests, and see what broke. First there were compilation errors that were easily fixed. Some examples:

Replace FilterBuilder with QueryBuilder, RangeFilterBuilder with RangeQueryBuilder, TermsFilterBuilder with TermsQueryBuilder, PercolateRequestBuilder with PercolateQueryBuilder etc, switch to HighlightBuilder for highlighters, replace ‘fields’ with ‘storedFields’. The count API was removed in version 5.5, and its use had to be replaced by executing a search with size 0. Facets had already been replaced by aggregations by our colleague Attila Houtkooper, so we didn’t have to worry about that.

In ES 5, the suggest API was removed, and became part of the search API. This turned out not to have an impact on our project, because the original developer of the search functionality implemented a custom suggestions service based on aggregation queries. It looks like he wanted the suggestions to be ordered by the number of occurrences in a ‘bucket’, which couldn’t be implemented using the suggest API at the time. We decided that refactoring this to use Elasticsearch suggesters would be new functionality, and outside the scope of this upgrade, so we would continue to use aggregations for now.

Some updates were required to the index mappings. The most obvious one was replacing ‘string’ with either ‘text’ or ‘keyword’. Analyzer became search_analyzer, while index_analyzer became analyzer.

Syntax ES 1:

"fields": {
    "analyzed": {
        "type": "string",
        "analyzer" : "dutch",
        "index_analyzer": "default_min_word_length_2"
    },
    "not_analyzed": {
        "type": "string",
        "index": "not_analyzed"
    }
}

Syntax ES 6:

"fields": {
  "analyzed": {
    "type": "text",
    "search_analyzer": "dutch",
    "analyzer": "default_min_word_length_2"
  },
  "not_analyzed": {
    "type": "keyword",
    "index": true
  }
}

Document id’s were associated with a path:

"_id": {
    "path": "id"
},

The _id field is no longer configurable, so in order to have document ids in Elasticsearch match ids in the database, the id has to be set explicitly, or Elasticsearch will generate a random one.

All in all, it was roughly a day of work to get the project to compile and ready to run the unit tests. All of them were red.

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Posted in: Elasticsearch | From The Trenches | Software Development

Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing – Part II

17:36 on January 15th, 2018 by
1 Comment

Author – Wilder Rodrigues

Wilder continues his series about NLP.  This time he would like to bring you to the Deep Learning realm, exploring Deep Neural Networks for sentiment analysis.

If you are already familiar with those types of network and know why certain choices are made, you can skip the first section and go straight to the next one.

I promise the decisions I made in terms of train / validation / test split won’t disappoint you. As a matter of fact, training the same models with different sets got me a better result than those achieved by Dr. Jon Krohn, from untapt, in his Live Lessons.

From what I have seen in the last 2 years, I think we all have already been through a lot of explanations about shallow, intermediate and deep neural networks. So, to save us some time, I will avoid revisiting them here. We will dive straight into all the arsenal we will be using throughout this story. However, we won’t just follow a list of things, but instead, we will understand why those things are being used.
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Posted in: Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning

Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing – Part I

13:11 on January 3rd, 2018 by
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Author – Wilder Rodrigues

Nowadays, the task of natural language processing has been made easy with the advancements in neural networks. In the past 30 years, after the last AI Winter, amongst the many papers have been published, some have been in the area of NLP, focusing on a distributed word to vector representations.

The papers in question are listed below (including the famous back-propagation paper that brought life to Neural Networks as we know them):
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Posted in: Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning

How to manage Database Migrations with Flyway?

15:01 on December 5th, 2017 by
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Joris Kuipers, CTO at Trifork, presented a webinar on some usage patterns for Flyway. You can find the recording on our Trifork YouTube channel.

Tools like Flyway address a common concern for many people, which quickly leads to questions on how to pick a tool and then apply it in the best manner for one’s particular situation.

In this blog post, Joris has summarized the Q&A session – he provides the readers with his answers and ideas for managing database migrations.

1. How does Flyway compare to Liquibase?

When I was choosing a DB schema migration tool 4 or 5 years ago, I’ve looked at both Liquibase and Flyway. In general, I’d say that Flyway is a bit more light-weight: Liquibase addresses some requirements that Flyway explicitly chooses not to support. These include support to define migrations declaratively (e.g. in XML) and then generate the correct SQL DDL statements for your particular DBMS and the support to generate migration rollbacks (countering operations).
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Posted in: Software Development

Using Axon with PostgreSQL without TOAST

9:05 on October 9th, 2017 by
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The client I work for at this time is leveraging Axon 3. The events are stored in a PostgreSQL database. PostgreSQL uses a thing called TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique) to store large values.

From the PostgreSQL documentation:

“PostgreSQL uses a fixed page size (commonly 8 kB), and does not allow tuples to span multiple pages. Therefore, it is not possible to store very large field values directly. To overcome this limitation, large field values are compressed and/or broken up into multiple physical rows”

As it happens, in our setup using JPA (Hibernate) to store events, the DomainEventEntry entity has a @Lob annotation on the payload and the metaData fields (via extension of the AbstractEventEntry class):

For PostgreSQL this will result in events that are not easily readable:

SELECT payload FROM domainevententry;

| payload |
| 24153   |

The data type of the payload column of the domainevententry table is OID.

The PostgreSQL JDBC driver obviously knows how to deal with this. The real content is deTOASTed lazily. Using PL/pgSQL it is possible to store a value in a file. But this needs to be done value by value. But when you are debugging your application and want a quick look at the events of your application, this is not a fun route to take.

So we wanted to change the data type in our database to something more human readable. BYTEA for example. Able to store store large values in, yet still readable. As it turned out, a couple changes are needed to get it working.

It took me a while to get all the pieces I needed. Although the solution I present here works for us, perhaps this could not be the most elegant of even the best solution for everyone.
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Posted in: Java | Microservices

Kibana Histogram on Day of Week

11:25 on September 4th, 2017 by
Comments Off on Kibana Histogram on Day of Week

I keep track of my daily commutes to and from the office. One thing I want to know is how the different days of the week are affecting my travel duration. But when indexing all my commutes into Elasticsearch, I can not (out-of-the-box) create a histogram on the day of the week. My first visualization will look like this:

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Posted in: Elasticsearch

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