f2ecb4617e
This is how PhD explain the need for prevoting stage: One downside of Raft's leader election algorithm is that a server that has been partitioned from the cluster is likely to cause a disruption when it regains connectivity. When a server is partitioned, it will not receive heartbeats. It will soon increment its term to start an election, although it won't be able to collect enough votes to become leader. When the server regains connectivity sometime later, its larger term number will propagate to the rest of the cluster (either through the server's RequestVote requests or through its AppendEntries response). This will force the cluster leader to step down, and a new election will have to take place to select a new leader. Prevoting stage is addressing that. In the Prevote algorithm, a candidate only increments its term if it first learns from a majority of the cluster that they would be willing to grant the candidate their votes (if the candidate's log is sufficiently up-to-date, and the voters have not received heartbeats from a valid leader for at least a baseline election timeout). The Prevote algorithm solves the issue of a partitioned server disrupting the cluster when it rejoins. While a server is partitioned, it won't be able to increment its term, since it can't receive permission from a majority of the cluster. Then, when it rejoins the cluster, it still won't be able to increment its term, since the other servers will have been receiving regular heartbeats from the leader. Once the server receives a heartbeat from the leader itself, it will return to the follower state(in the same term). In our implementation we have "stable leader" extension that prevents spurious RequestVote to dispose an active leader, but AppendEntries with higher term will still do that, so prevoting extension is also required. * scylla-dev/raft-prevote-v5: raft: store leader and candidate state in state variant raft: add boost tests for prevoting raft: implement prevoting stage in leader election raft: reset the leader on entering candidate state raft: use modern unordered_set::contains instead of find in become_candidate
Scylla
What is Scylla?
Scylla is the real-time big data database that is API-compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB. Scylla embraces a shared-nothing approach that increases throughput and storage capacity to realize order-of-magnitude performance improvements and reduce hardware costs.
For more information, please see the ScyllaDB web site.
Build Prerequisites
Scylla is fairly fussy about its build environment, requiring very recent versions of the C++20 compiler and of many libraries to build. The document HACKING.md includes detailed information on building and developing Scylla, but to get Scylla building quickly on (almost) any build machine, Scylla offers a frozen toolchain, This is a pre-configured Docker image which includes recent versions of all the required compilers, libraries and build tools. Using the frozen toolchain allows you to avoid changing anything in your build machine to meet Scylla's requirements - you just need to meet the frozen toolchain's prerequisites (mostly, Docker or Podman being available).
Building Scylla
Building Scylla with the frozen toolchain dbuild is as easy as:
$ git submodule update --init --force --recursive
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ./configure.py
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ninja build/release/scylla
For further information, please see:
- Developer documentation for more information on building Scylla.
- Build documentation on how to build Scylla binaries, tests, and packages.
- Docker image build documentation for information on how to build Docker images.
Running Scylla
To start Scylla server, run:
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ./build/release/scylla --workdir tmp --smp 1 --developer-mode 1
This will start a Scylla node with one CPU core allocated to it and data files stored in the tmp directory.
The --developer-mode is needed to disable the various checks Scylla performs at startup to ensure the machine is configured for maximum performance (not relevant on development workstations).
Please note that you need to run Scylla with dbuild if you built it with the frozen toolchain.
For more run options, run:
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ./build/release/scylla --help
Testing
See test.py manual.
Scylla APIs and compatibility
By default, Scylla is compatible with Apache Cassandra and its APIs - CQL and Thrift. There is also support for the API of Amazon DynamoDB™, which needs to be enabled and configured in order to be used. For more information on how to enable the DynamoDB™ API in Scylla, and the current compatibility of this feature as well as Scylla-specific extensions, see Alternator and Getting started with Alternator.
Documentation
Documentation can be found here. Seastar documentation can be found here. User documentation can be found here.
Training
Training material and online courses can be found at Scylla University. The courses are free, self-paced and include hands-on examples. They cover a variety of topics including Scylla data modeling, administration, architecture, basic NoSQL concepts, using drivers for application development, Scylla setup, failover, compactions, multi-datacenters and how Scylla integrates with third-party applications.
Contributing to Scylla
If you want to report a bug or submit a pull request or a patch, please read the contribution guidelines.
If you are a developer working on Scylla, please read the developer guidelines.
Contact
- The users mailing list and Slack channel are for users to discuss configuration, management, and operations of the ScyllaDB open source.
- The developers mailing list is for developers and people interested in following the development of ScyllaDB to discuss technical topics.