The basic lessons that I have learned include:
a) EC2's biggest advantage after scaling and elasticity was conformity
of
configuration. Since you are bringing machines up and down all the
time,
they begin to act more like programs and you wind up with boot scripts
that
give you a very predictable environment. Nice.
b) EC2 interconnect has a lot more going on than in a dedicated VLAN.
That
can make the ZK servers appear a bit less connected. You have to plan
for
ConnectionLoss events.
c) for highest reliability, I switched to large instances. On
reflection,
I
think that was helpful, but less important than I thought at the time.
d) increasing and decreasing cluster size is nearly painless and is
easily
scriptable. To decrease, do a rolling update on the survivors to
update
their configuration. Then take down the instance you want to lose. To
increase, do a rolling update starting with the new instances to update
the
configuration to include all of the machines. The rolling update
should
bounce each ZK with several seconds between each bounce. Rescaling the
cluster takes less than a minute which makes it comparable to EC2
instance
boot time (about 30 seconds for the Alestic ubuntu instance that we
used
plus about 20 seconds for additional configuration).
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 4:45 AM, David Graf <david.g...@28msec.com>
wrote:
Hello
I wanna set up a zookeeper ensemble on amazon's ec2 service. In my
system,
zookeeper is used to run a locking service and to generate unique
id's.
Currently, for testing purposes, I am only running one instance. Now,
I
need
to set up an ensemble to protect my system against crashes.
The ec2 services has some differences to a normal server farm. E.g.
the
data saved on the file system of an ec2 instance is lost if the
instance
crashes. In the documentation of zookeeper, I have read that zookeeper
saves
snapshots of the in-memory data in the file system. Is that needed for
recovery? Logically, it would be much easier for me if this is not the
case.
Additionally, ec2 brings the advantage that serves can be switch on
and
off
dynamically dependent on the load, traffic, etc. Can this advantage be
utilized for a zookeeper ensemble? Is it possible to add a zookeeper
server
dynamically to an ensemble? E.g. dependent on the in-memory load?
David
