62 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
62 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
layout: post
|
|
title: "Redis Sentinel & Redis Cluster - what?"
|
|
date: 01.06.2015 23:20
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
In the last week there were several questions regarding Redis Sentinel and Redis Cluster, if one or the other will go away or if they need to be used in combination.
|
|
This post tries to give a _short_ and _precise_ info about both and what they are used for.
|
|
|
|
## Redis Sentinel
|
|
|
|
Redis Sentinel was [born in 2012](https://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/6b5daa2df2a0711a25746cb025927dc3deb7717e) and first released when Redis 2.4 was stable.
|
|
It is a system designed to help managing Redis instances.
|
|
|
|
It will **monitor** your master & slave instances, **notify** you about changed
|
|
behaviour, handle **automatic failover** in case a master is down and act as a
|
|
**configuration provider**, so your clients can find the current master
|
|
instance.
|
|
|
|
Redis Sentinel runs as a seperate program.
|
|
You should have atleast 3 Sentinel instances monitoring a master instance and its slaves.
|
|
Sentinel instances try to find consensus when doing a failover and only an odd number of instances will prevent most problems, 3 being the minimum.
|
|
In this case one of the Sentinel instances can go down and a failover will still work as (hopefully) the other two instances reach consensus which slave to promote.
|
|
|
|
One thing about the configurable quorum: this is only the number of Sentinel who have to agree a master is down.
|
|
You still need `N/2 + 1` Sentinels to vote for a slave to be promoted (that `N` is the total number of all Sentinels ever seen for this pod).
|
|
|
|
A pod of Sentinels can monitor multiple Redis master & slave nodes. Just make sure you don't mix up names, add slaves to the right master and so on.
|
|
|
|
[Full documentation for Sentinel](http://redis.io/topics/sentinel).
|
|
|
|
## Redis Cluster
|
|
|
|
If we go by [first commit](https://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/ecc9109434002d4667cd01a3b7c067a508c876eb),
|
|
then Cluster is even older than Sentinel, dating back to 2011.
|
|
There's a bit more info in [antirez' blog](http://antirez.com/news/79).
|
|
It's released as stable with version 3.0 as of April 1st, 2015.
|
|
|
|
Redis Cluster is a **data sharding** solution with **automatic management**, **handling failover** and **replication**.
|
|
|
|
With Redis Cluster your data is split across multiple nodes, each one holding a subset of the full data.
|
|
Slave instances replicate a single master and act as fallback instances.
|
|
In case a master instance will become unavailable due to network splits or software/hardware crashes,
|
|
the remaining Master nodes in the Cluster will register this and will reach a state triggering a failover.
|
|
A suitable Slave of the unavailable Master node will then step up and will be promoted to takeover as a new Master.
|
|
|
|
You don't need additional failover handling when using Redis Cluster and you should definitely not point Sentinel instances at any of the Cluster nodes.
|
|
You also want to use a *smart* client library that knows about Redis Cluster, so it can automatically redirect you to the right nodes when accessing data.
|
|
|
|
[Redis Cluster specification][spec] and [Redis Cluster Tutorial][tutorial].
|
|
I gave a talk about Redis Cluster at the [PHPUGDUS meeting][phpugdus] last month, my slides are [on slidr.io][slides].
|
|
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
Want to hear more about Redis, Redis Sentinel or Redis Cluster? [Just invite me!](mailto:janerik@fnordig.de)
|
|
|
|
|
|
[spec]: http://redis.io/topics/cluster-spec
|
|
[tutorial]: http://redis.io/topics/cluster-tutorial
|
|
[slides]: http://slidr.io/badboy/redis-cluster
|
|
[phpugdus]: http://www.meetup.com/PHP-Usergroup-Duesseldorf/
|