Data replication in Kudu

[#1]

Hi,

How is data replicated in Kudu? My understanding is that kudu has one replica of all data and 2 replicas with operational logs. From the apache docs i get this "Kudu does not replicate the on-disk storage of a tablet,
but rather just its operation log. The physical storage of each replica of a tablet is fully decoupled."

In case of a disk failure, if the disk contains the actual data and not operation log, how is it recovered??

[#2]

hi,adar:

    if both the WAL segments and the CFiles are copied duing a tablet copy,then the follower tablet will  alse flushing wal data to disk when growing up to 8M,in my opinion  there has no difference between master tablet and follower tablet during the reading and writing,is that right?

[#3]

Hi,

You can have multiple replicas of data stored in Kudu tables -- Kudu allows you to configure per-table replication factor when creating a table.  Replication factors of 3, 5, and 7 are available out of the box; for higher if you need to tweak the --max_num_replicas mater's flag.

Under the hood, every tablet (part of the table which corresponds to a partition) is a Raft cluster, where every transaction is considered committed only when it's replicated and acknowledged back to the leader replica by the majority of replicas in the tablet.

Replicas of one tablet are distributed among different tablet servers (it's not possible to run multiple replicas of one tablet at the same tablet server).  Unless the replication factor is set to 1 (i.e. no replication at all) or all tablet servers are run on the same machine (which is a bad idea), then for every tablet there should be at least one replica having the copy of the data once a disk on one server fails.

You can get more details at https://kudu.apache.org/overview.html#distribution-and-fault-tolerance

and https://github.com/apache/kudu/blob/master/docs/design-docs/consensus.md

I hope this helps. 

[#4]

Hi @Alexey1c @awong

Thanks for the information but sorry i couldn't understand. Do you mean we have different replication policies for tables and tablets??

[#5]

Right, the replication factor is specified per table, so you could have
different tables with different replication factors. Every tablet in a
table will honor its table's replication factor.

[#6]

Hi @awong

Thanks for the details. So below is the conclusion.

Table: has replication specified at creation and all are complete replicas.

Tablet: has only operational log.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

Somewhat. Take a look here for more details about the relationship between tablets and tablets: https://kudu.apache.org/docs/schema_design.html

There's an important distinction to be made: a tablet is a logical concept (it's a chunk of a table); a replica is a copy of a single tablet. There may be many replicas of a single tablet, depending on the user-specified properties of the table.

E.g. say I have "Table 1" with replication factor 3. This means that every tablet belonging to "Table 1" will always try to maintain 3 replicas/copies. Say "Table 1" has two tablets, "A" and "B", each will have three replicas. A replica of "A" could fail due to a server failure or somesuch, in which case "A" will try to replicate back up to having 3 healthy replicas. This is completely orthogonal to "B".

So yes, a tablet maintains its operational log, but also all of the data associated with it, because it is just a chunk of a table.

Hope this helped!

[#8]

@awong

That was great. Thanks for the details.