I was wondering how to set the replica parameter properly when start a TDengine cluster to balance the storage and high availability? According to documentation of TDengine, default value of replica is 1 which means no copies for each vnode (vGroup size should be 1 as well), and the replica can be dynamically changed to maintain a high avilability of the cluster. However, the extra vnode copies have to be generated physically when starting up multi-replica. So the problem rise up, how should a real company determine the value of replica to increase availability without taking up too much overhead(storage and performance) when using TDengine cluster?
replica means keeping a copy of the same data on multiple machines that are connected via a network. There are reasons you want to replicate data:
To keep data geographically close to your users (and thus reduce latency)
To allow the system to continue working even if some of its parts have failed (and thus increase availability)
To scale out the number of machines that can serve read queries (and thus increase read throughput)
referred from DDIA
Related
My setup:
two zoness: fast and slow with 5 nodes each.
fast nodes have ephemeral storage, whereas the slow nodes are NFS based.
Running Elasticsearch OSS v7.7.1. (I have no control over the version)
I have the following cluster setting: cluster.routing.allocation.awareness.attributes: zone
My index has 2 replicas, so 3 shard instances (1x primary, 2x replica)
I am trying to ensure the following:
1 of the 3 shard instances to be located in zone fast.
2 of the 3 shard instances to be located in zone slow (because it has persistent storage)
Queries to be run in shard in zone fast where available.
Inserts to only return as written once its written once its been replicated.
Is this setup possible?
Link to a related question: How do I control where my primary and replica shards are located?
EDIT to add extra information:
Both fast and slow nodes run on a PaaS offering where we are not in control of hardware restarts meaning there can technically be non-graceful shutdowns/restarts at any point.
I'm worried about unflushed data and/or index corruption so I am looking for multiple replicas to be on the slow zone nodes backed by NFS to reduce the likelihood of data loss, despite the fact that this will "overload" the slow zone with redundant data.
Due to cost restrictions, I only have the following types of machines at disposal for setting up an ES cluster.
Node A: Lean(w.r.t. CPU, RAM) Instance
Node B: Beefy(w.r.t. CPU,RAM) Instance
Node M: "Leaner than A"(w.r.t. CPU, RAM) Instance
Disk-wise, both A and B have the same size.
My plan is to set up Node A and Node B acting as Master Eligible, Data node and Node M as Master-Eligible Only node(no data storing).
Because the two data nodes are NOT identical, what would be the implications?
I am going to make it a cluster of 3 machines only for the possibility of Rolling Upgrades(current volume of data and expected growth for few years can be managed with vertical scaling and leaving the default no. of shards and replica would enable me to scale horizontally if there is a need)
There is absolutely no need for your machines to have the same specs. You will need 3 master-eligible nodes not just for rolling-upgrades, but for high availability in general.
If you want to scale horizontally you can do so by either creating more indices to hold your data, or configure your index to have multiple primary and or replica shards. Since version 7 the default for new indices is to get created with 1 primary and 1 replica shard. A single index like this does not really allow you to schedule horizontally.
Update:
With respect to load and shard allocation (where to put data), Elasticsearch by default will simply consider the amount of storage available. When you start up an instance of Elasticsearch, it introspects the hardware and configures its threadpools (number of threads & size of queue) for various tasks accordingly. So the number of available threads to process tasks can vary. If I‘m not mistaken the coordinating node (the node receiving the external request) will distribute indexing/write requests in a round-robin fashion, not taking a load into consideration. Depending on your version of Elasticsearch, this is different for search/read requests where the coordinating node will leverage adaptive replica selection, taking into account the load/response time of the various replicas when distributing requests.
Besides this, sizing and scaling is a too complex topic to be answered comprehensively in a simple response. It typically also involves testing to figure out the limits/boundaries of a single node.
BTW: the number of default primary shards got changed in v7.x of Elasticsearch, as too much oversharding was one of the most common issues Elasticsearch users were facing. A “reasonable” shard size is in the tens of Gigabytes.
I planning to launch three EC2 instance across Amazon hosting region. For say, Region-A,Region-B and Region-C.
Based on the above plan, Each region act as Cluster(Or Datacenter) and have one node.(Correct me if I am wrong).
Using this infrastructure, Can I attain below configuration?
Replication Factor : 2
Write and Read Level:QUORUM.
My basic intention to do these are to achieve "If two region are went down, I can be survive with remaining one region".
Please help me with your inputs.
Note: I am very new to cassandra, hence whatever your inputs you are given will be useful for me.
Thanks
If you have a replication factor of 2 and use CL of Quorum, you will not tolerate failure i.e. if a node goes down, and you only get 1 ack - thats not a majority of responses.
If you deploy across multiple regions, each region is, as you mention, a DC in your Cluster. Each individual DC is a complete replica of all your data i.e. it will hold all the data for your keyspace. If you read/write at a LOCAL_* consistency (eg. LOCAL_ONE, LOCAL_QUORUM) level within each region, then you can tolerate the loss of the other regions.
The number of replicas in each DC/Region and the consistency level you are using to read/write in that DC will determine how much failure you can tolerate. If you are using QUORUM - this is a cross-DC consistency level. It will require a majority of acks from ALL replicas in your cluster in all DCs. If you loose 2 regions then its unlikely that you will be getting a quorum of responses.
Also, its worth remembering that Cassandra can be made aware of the AZ's it is deployed on in the Region and can do its best to ensure replicas of your data are placed in multiple AZs. This will give you even better tolerance to failure.
If this was me and I didnt need to have a strong cross-DC consistency level (like QUORUM). I would have 4 nodes in each region, deployed across each AZ and then a replication factor of 3 in each region. I would then be reading/writing at LOCAL_QUORUM or LOCAL_ONE (preferably). If you go with LOCAL_ONE than you could have fewer replicas in each DC e.g a replication factor of 2 with LOCAL_ONE means you could tolerate the loss of 1 replica.
However, this would be more expensive than what your initially suggesting but (for me) that would be the minimum setup I would need if I wanted to be in multiple regions and tolerate the loss of 2. You could go with 3 nodes in each region if you wanted to really save costs.
I'm trying to think of ways to scale our elasticsearch setup. Do people use multiple node clients on an Elasticsearch cluster and put them in front of a load balancer/reverse proxy like Nginx. Other ideas would be great.
So I'd start with re-capping the three different kinds of nodes you can configure in Elasticsearch:
Data Node - node.data set to true and node.master set to false -
these are your core nodes of an elasticsearch cluster, where the data
is stored.
Dedicated Master Node - node.data is set to false and node.master is
set to true - these are responsible for managing the cluster state.
Client Node - node.data is set to false and node.master is set to
false - these respond to client data requests, querying for results
from the data nodes and gathering the data to return to the client.
By splitting the functions into 3 different base node types you have a great degree of granularity and control in managing the scale of your cluster. As each node type handles a more isolated set of responsibilities you are better able to tune each one and to scale appropriately.
For data nodes, it's a function of handling indexing and query responses, along with making certain you have enough storage allocated to each node. You'll want to monitor storage usage and disk thru-put for each node, along with cpu and memory usage. You want to avoid configurations where you run out of disk, or saturate disk thru-put, while still have substantial excess cpu and memory, or the reverse where memory and cpu max but you have lot's of disk available. The best way to determine this is thru some benchmarking of typical indexing and querying activities.
For master nodes, you should always have at least 3 and should always have an odd number. The quorum should be set to N/2 + 1 where is N is the number of master nodes. This way you don't run into split brain issues with your cluster. Dedicated master nodes tend not to be heavily loaded so that can be quite small.
For client nodes you can indeed put them behind a load balancer, or use dns entries to point to them. They are easily scaled up and down by just adding more to the cluster and should be added for both redundancy and as you see cpu and memory usage climb. Not much need for a lot of disk.
No matter what your configuration, in addition to benchmarking likely loads ahead of time I'd strongly advise close monitoring of cpu, memory and disk - ES is easy to start rolling out but it does need watching as you scale into larger numbers of transactions and more nodes. Dealing with a yellow or red status cluster due to node failures from memory or disk exhaustion is not a lot of fun.
I'd take a close read of this article for some background:
http://elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/modules-node.html
Plus this series of articles:
http://elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/distributed-cluster.html
There is a great tutorial elasticsearch on ec2 about configuring ES on Amazon EC2. I studied it and applied all recommendations.
Now I have AMI and can run any number of nodes in the cluster from this AMI. Auto-discovery is configured and the nodes join the cluster as they really should.
The question is How to configure cluster in way that I can automatically launch/terminate nodes depending on cluster load?
For example I want to have only 1 node running when we don't have any load and 12 nodes running on peak load. But wait, if I terminate 11 nodes in cluster what would happen with shards and replicas? How to make sure I don't lose any data in cluster if I terminate 11 nodes out of 12 nodes?
I might want to configure S3 Gateway for this. But all the gateways except for local are deprecated.
There is an article in the manual about shards allocation. May be I'm missing something very basic but I should admit I failed to figure out if it is possible to configure one node to always hold all the shards copies. My goal is to make sure that if this would be the only node running in the cluster we still don't lose any data.
The only solution I can imagine now is to configure index to have 12 shards and 12 replicas. Then when up to 12 nodes are launched every node would have copy of every shard. But I don't like this solution cause I would have to reconfigure cluster if I might want to have more then 12 nodes on peak load.
Auto scaling doesn't make a lot of sense with ElasticSearch.
Shard moving and re-allocation is not a light process, especially if you have a lot of data. It stresses IO and network, and can degrade the performance of ElasticSearch badly. (If you want to limit the effect you should throttle cluster recovery using settings like cluster.routing.allocation.cluster_concurrent_rebalance, indices.recovery.concurrent_streams, indices.recovery.max_size_per_sec . This will limit the impact but will also slow the re-balancing and recovery).
Also, if you care about your data you don't want to have only 1 node ever. You need your data to be replicated, so you will need at least 2 nodes (or more if you feel safer with a higher replication level).
Another thing to remember is that while you can change the number of replicas, you can't change the number of shards. This is configured when you create your index and cannot be changed (if you want more shards you need to create another index and reindex all your data). So your number of shards should take into account the data size and the cluster size, considering the higher number of nodes you want but also your minimal setup (can fewer nodes hold all the shards and serve the estimated traffic?).
So theoretically, if you want to have 2 nodes at low time and 12 nodes on peak, you can set your index to have 6 shards with 1 replica. So on low times you have 2 nodes that hold 6 shards each, and on peak you have 12 nodes that hold 1 shard each.
But again, I strongly suggest rethinking this and testing the impact of shard moving on your cluster performance.
In cases where the elasticity of your application is driven by a variable query load you could setup ES nodes configured to not store any data (node.data = false, http.enabled = true) and then put them in for auto scaling. These nodes could offload all the HTTP and result conflation processing from your main data nodes (freeing them up for more indexing and searching).
Since these nodes wouldn't have shards allocated to them bringing them up and down dynamically shouldn't be a problem and the auto-discovery should allow them to join the cluster.
I think this is a concern in general when it comes to employing auto-scalable architecture to meet temporary demands, but data still needs to be saved. I think there is a solution that leverages EBS
map shards to specific EBS volumes. Lets say we need 15 shards. We will need 15 EBS Volumes
amazon allows you to mount multiple volumes, so when we start we can start with few instances that have multiple volumes attached to them
as load increase, we can spin up additional instance - upto 15.
The above solution is only advised if you know your max capacity requirements.
I can give you an alternative approach using aws elastic search service(it will cost little bit more than normal ec2 elasticsearch).Write a simple script which continuously monitor the load (through api/cli)on the service and if the load goes beyond the threshold, programatically increase the nodes of your aws elasticsearch-service cluster.Here the advantage is aws will take care of the scaling(As per the documentation they are taking a snaphost and launching a completely new cluster).This will work for scale down also.
Regarding Auto-scaling approach there is some challenges like shard movement has an impact on the existing cluster, also we need to more vigilant while scaling down.You can find a good article on scaling down here which I have tested.If you can do some kind of intelligent automation of the steps in the above link through some scripting(python, shell) or through automation tools like Ansible, then the scaling in/out is achievable.But again you need to start the scaling up well before the normal limits since the scale up activities can have an impact on existing cluster.
Question: is possible to configure one node to always hold all the shards copies?
Answer: Yes,its possible by explicit shard routing.More details here
I would be tempted to suggest solving this a different way in AWS. I dont know what ES data this is or how its updated etc... Making a lot of assumptions I would put the ES instance behind a ALB (app load balancer) I would have a scheduled process that creates updated AMI's regularly (if you do it often then it will be quick to do), then based on load of your single server I would trigger more instances to be created from the latest instance you have available. Add the new instances to the ALB to share some of the load. As this quiet down I would trigger the termination of the temp instances. If you go this route here are a couple more things to consider
Use spot instances since they are cheaper and if it fits your use case
The "T" instances dont fit well here since they need time to build up credits
Use lambdas for the task of turning things on and off, if you want to be fancy you can trigger it based on a webhook to the aws gateway
Making more assumptions about your use case, consider putting a Varnish server in front of your ES machine so that you can more cheaply provide scale based on a cache strategy (lots of assumptions here) based on the stress you can dial in the right TTL for cache eviction. Check out the soft-purge feature for our ES stuff we have gotten a lot of good value from this.
if you do any of what i suggest here make sure to make your spawned ES instances report any logs back to a central addressable place on the persistent ES machine so you don't lose logs when the machines die