etcd/Documentation/clustering.md

Clustering

Example cluster of three machines

Let's explore the use of etcd clustering. We use Raft as the underlying distributed protocol which provides consistency and persistence of the data across all of the etcd instances.

Let start by creating 3 new etcd instances.

We use -peer-addr to specify server port and -addr to specify client port and -data-dir to specify the directory to store the log and info of the machine in the cluster:

./etcd -peer-addr 127.0.0.1:7001 -addr 127.0.0.1:4001 -data-dir machines/machine1 -name machine1

Note: If you want to run etcd on an external IP address and still have access locally, you'll need to add -bind-addr 0.0.0.0 so that it will listen on both external and localhost addresses. A similar argument -peer-bind-addr is used to setup the listening address for the server port.

Let's join two more machines to this cluster using the -peers argument:

./etcd -peer-addr 127.0.0.1:7002 -addr 127.0.0.1:4002 -peers 127.0.0.1:7001 -data-dir machines/machine2 -name machine2
./etcd -peer-addr 127.0.0.1:7003 -addr 127.0.0.1:4003 -peers 127.0.0.1:7001 -data-dir machines/machine3 -name machine3

We can retrieve a list of machines in the cluster using the HTTP API:

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4001/v2/machines

We should see there are three machines in the cluster

http://127.0.0.1:4001, http://127.0.0.1:4002, http://127.0.0.1:4003

The machine list is also available via the main key API:

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4001/v2/keys/_etcd/machines

{
    "action": "get",
    "node": {
        "createdIndex": 1,
        "dir": true,
        "key": "/_etcd/machines",
        "modifiedIndex": 1,
        "nodes": [
            {
                "createdIndex": 1,
                "key": "/_etcd/machines/machine1",
                "modifiedIndex": 1,
                "value": "raft=http://127.0.0.1:7001&etcd=http://127.0.0.1:4001"
            },
            {
                "createdIndex": 2,
                "key": "/_etcd/machines/machine2",
                "modifiedIndex": 2,
                "value": "raft=http://127.0.0.1:7002&etcd=http://127.0.0.1:4002"
            },
            {
                "createdIndex": 3,
                "key": "/_etcd/machines/machine3",
                "modifiedIndex": 3,
                "value": "raft=http://127.0.0.1:7003&etcd=http://127.0.0.1:4003"
            }
        ]
    }
}

We can also get the current leader in the cluster:

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4001/v2/leader

The first server we set up should still be the leader unless it has died during these commands.

http://127.0.0.1:7001

Now we can do normal SET and GET operations on keys as we explored earlier.

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4001/v2/keys/foo -XPUT -d value=bar

{
    "action": "set",
    "node": {
        "createdIndex": 4,
        "key": "/foo",
        "modifiedIndex": 4,
        "value": "bar"
    }
}

Killing Nodes in the Cluster

Now if we kill the leader of the cluster, we can get the value from one of the other two machines:

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4002/v2/keys/foo

We can also see that a new leader has been elected:

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4002/v2/leader

http://127.0.0.1:7002

or

http://127.0.0.1:7003

Testing Persistence

Next we'll kill all the machines to test persistence. Type CTRL-C on each terminal and then rerun the same command you used to start each machine.

Your request for the foo key will return the correct value:

curl -L http://127.0.0.1:4002/v2/keys/foo

{
    "action": "get",
    "node": {
        "createdIndex": 4,
        "key": "/foo",
        "modifiedIndex": 4,
        "value": "bar"
    }
}

Using HTTPS between servers

In the previous example we showed how to use SSL client certs for client-to-server communication. Etcd can also do internal server-to-server communication using SSL client certs. To do this just change the -*-file flags to -peer-*-file.

If you are using SSL for server-to-server communication, you must use it on all instances of etcd.

What size cluster should I use?

Every command the client sends to the master is broadcast to all of the followers. The command is not committed until the majority of the cluster peers receive that command.

Because of this majority voting property, the ideal cluster should be kept small to keep speed up and be made up of an odd number of peers.

Odd numbers are good because if you have 8 peers the majority will be 5 and if you have 9 peers the majority will still be 5. The result is that an 8 peer cluster can tolerate 3 peer failures and a 9 peer cluster can tolerate 4 machine failures. And in the best case when all 9 peers are responding the cluster will perform at the speed of the fastest 5 machines.