What is Helix?
It used for the automatic management of partitioned, replicated and distributed resources hosted on a cluster of nodes. Helix automates reassignment of resources in the face of node failure and recovery, cluster expansion, and reconfiguration. Modeling a distributed system as a state machine with constraints on states and transitions.
Terminologies
- Node : A single machine
- Cluster: Set of Nodes
- Resource : A logical entry (e.g. database, index, task)
- Partition: Subset of the resource (Each subtask is referred to as a partition)
- Replica: Copy of a Partition State (e.g Master, Slave). It increase the availability of the system
- State: Describes the role of a replica (Each node in the cluster has its own Current State)
- State Machine and Transitions: An action that allows a replica to move from one state to another, thus changing its role. ( e.g Slave --> Master )
- spectators: the external clients. Helix provides an External View that is an aggregated view of the current state across all nodes.
- Current State: represents resource's actual state at a participating node.
- INSTANCE_NAME: Unique name representing the process
- SESSION_ID: ID that is automatically assigned every time a process joins the cluster - Rebalancer: The core component of Helix is the Controller which runs the Rebalance algorithm on every cluster event.
- Dynamic Ideal State: Helix powerful is that Ideal State can be changed dynamically. It is adjusting the ideal state. Whenever a cluster event occurs, Helix can operate in one of three modes
- FULL_AUTO
- SEMI_AUTO
- CUSTOMIZED
Cluster events can be one of the following:
- Nodes start and/or stop
- Nodes experience soft and/or hard failures
- New nodes are added/removed
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