Rafter is not production ready. It hasn't been tested or run in any production environments. Furthermore, the log is entirely my own creation. It's possible that it isn't as safe or efficient as many other log structured backends like leveldb or rocksdb. The protocol is solid and well tested, and it works as expected in most cases. However, support is not fully guaranteed as I don't have a current use case for rafter and am not actively developing it. I will however do my best to respond to reports and fix bugs in an efficient manner.
Rafter is more than just an erlang implementation of the raft consensus protocol. It aims to take the pain away from building Consistent(2F+1 CP) distributed systems, as well as act as a library for leader election and routing. A main goal is to keep a very small user api that automatically handles the problems of the everyday Erlang distributed systems developer. It is hopefully your libPaxos.dll for erlang.
Rafter is meant to be used as a library application on an already created erlang
cluster of 3, 5, or 7 nodes. rafter peers are uniquely identified by atoms in a
local setup and {Name, Node} tuples when using distributed erlang.
Configuration is dynamic and reconfiguration can be achieved without taking the
system down.
For use cases such as implementing distributed databases, a replicated log can be used internally to provide strong consistency. Operations are serialized and written to log files in the same order on each node. Once the operation is committed by a node it is applied to the state machine backend. In the case of a distributed database, the operation would probably be to create or update an item in the database. The leader will not return success to the client until the operation is safely replicated. It is clear that applying these types of deterministic operations in the same order will produce the same output each time, and hence if one machine crashes, others can still be accessed without any data loss. These serialized operations can continue as long as a majority of the nodes can communicate. If the majority of nodes cannot agree then the system rejects requests for both reads and writes. In mathematical terms, a cluster of 2f+1 nodes can handle f failures. The most common cluster sizes are 3 nodes, which can handle 1 failure and still work, and 5 which can handle two failures.
It is important to note, that because operations are logged before they are executed by the state machine, they cannot be allowed to fail arbitrarily (without bringing down the peer), or exhibit other non-deterministic behavior when executed by the state machine. If this were allowed, there would be no way to guarantee that each replica had the same state after the state machine transformation, nor could you tell which replica had the correct data! In other words, state machine operations should be pure functions and the state machine must be deterministic. Each replay of the in-order operations on each node must result in the exact same output state or else you cannot use the safety properties given to you by replicated logs. Note lastly, that operations that base their output state on the current time of day are inherently non-deterministic in distributed systems and should not be allowed in the state machines.
An additional benefit of having a deterministic state machine is that it allows snapshotting of the current state to disk and truncating the already applied operations in the log after the state machine output is successfully snapshotted. This is known as compaction and provides output durability for the state machine itself which allows faster restarts on failed nodes, since the entire log no longer needs to be replayed. You can read more about compaction here.
Rafter is currently under development and not quite ready for production use. However, it is easy to get started playing with rafter on your local machine. The following will describe the easiest way to get a development cluster of 3 nodes running. Note that you must have a version of Erlang >= R16B01 in order for rafter to work.
Since consensus is really only important across nodes, previous descriptions of running on a single node have been removed. Furthermore, there are implementation details in the ets backend that only allow it to run one instance of rafter on a VM at a time. That will be changed in future releases.
git clone git@github.com:andrewjstone/rafter.git
cd rafter
make deps
make
mkdir data ## this directory will store the rafter log and metadata for your 3 nodes
Open three new terminals on your machine. In each of the following terminals run the following:
cd rafter
bin/start-node peerX
The above starts up an erlang VM with appropriate cookie and code path, and
starts a rafter peer utilizing the rafter_ets_backend. The node name, in
this case PeerX (X=1|2|3), should be unique for each node.
These three nodes can now be operated on by the rafter client API. They all have empty logs at this point and no configuration. Note that all operations on rafter should be performed via the client API in rafter.erl.
Rafter clusters support reconfiguration while the system is running. However, they start out blank and the first entry in any log must be a configuration entry which you set at initial cluster start time. Note that the operation will fail with a timeout if a majority of nodes are not reachable. However, once those peers become reachable, the command will be replicated and the cluster will be configured.
Go to the first erlang shell, where peer1 is running. We're just arbitrarily
choosing a node to be the first leader here. Ensure it is running with
sys:get_state(peer1).
You should see something similar to the following, which is the state of
rafter_consensus_fsm.
(peer1@127.0.0.1)1> rr(rafter_consensus_fsm).
[append_entries,append_entries_rpy,client_req,config,meta,
rafter_entry,rafter_opts,request_vote,state,vote]
(peer1@127.0.0.1)2> sys:get_state(peer1).
{follower,#state{leader = undefined,term = 0,
voted_for = undefined,commit_index = 0,
init_config = undefined,timer =#Ref<0.0.0.284>,
followers = {dict,0,16,16,8,80,48,
{[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],...},
{{[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],...}}},
responses = {dict,0,16,16,8,80,48,
{[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],...},
{{[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],...}}},
send_clock = 0,
send_clock_responses = {dict,0,16,16,8,80,48,
{[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],...},
{{[],[],[],[],[],[],...}}},
client_reqs = [],read_reqs = [],
me = {peer1,'peer1@127.0.0.1'},
config = #config{state = blank, oldservers = [],
newservers = []},
state_machine = rafter_backend_ets,
backend_state = {state,{peer1,'peer1@127.0.0.1'}}}}
Set the config for the cluster. Note that because we are talking to a
process, peer1, registered locally on the node peer1@127.0.0.1, we
don't need to use the fully qualified name when talking to it via the shell on
peer1.
Peers = [{peer1, 'peer1@127.0.0.1'},
{peer2, 'peer2@127.0.0.1'},
{peer3, 'peer3@127.0.0.1'}],
rafter:set_config(peer1, Peers).Write operations are written to the log before being fed to the backend state machine. In general multiple statemachine backends can implement the same backend protocol. Operations are opaque to rafter and depend on what is provided by the backend state machine. The following operations are available when the ets backend is in use. It is anticipated that this API will grow to include multi-key and potentially global transactions.
%% Create a new ets table
rafter:op(peer1, {new, sometable}).
%% Store an erlang term in that table
rafter:op(peer1, {put, sometable, somekey, someval}).
%% Delete a term from the table
rafter:op(peer1, {delete, sometable, somekey}).
%% Delete a table
rafter:op(peer1, {delete, sometable}).Read Operations don't need to be written to the persistent log, however they still need to get a quorum from the peers and still need to read from the rafter backend. The ets backend provides the following read operations.
%% Read an erlang term
rafter:read_op(peer1, {get, Table, Key}).
%% list tables
rafter:read_op(peer1, list_tables).
%% list keys
rafter:read_op(peer1, {list_keys, Table}).rr(rafter_log),
sys:get_state(peer1_log).
Tests require erlang quickcheck currently. Unfortunately this is not free and the trial version may or may not be a supported version.
make test
- Automatically forward requests to the leader instead of returning a redirect
- Add transactions to ets backend
- Add multi-key and multi-table query support to ets backend
- Compaction
- start with snapshotting assuming data is
smallas described in section 2 here
- start with snapshotting assuming data is
- Client interface
- Client Sequence number for idempotent counters?
- Redis like text-based interface ?
- HTTP ?
- parallel eqc tests
- Anti-Entropy
- Write AAE info into snapshot file during snapshotting