Introducing the Anchored Keys module
Infinispan version 11 introduces an experimental module that allows scaling up a cluster and adding new nodes without expensive state transfer. The work was done in the context of the CloudButton project, which aims to build a serverless platform for quickly deploying workloads to the cloud, but the advantages are available to everyone using Infinispan!
Background
For background, the preferred way to scale up the storage capacity of a Infinispan cluster
is to use distributed caches.
A distributed cache stores each key/value pair on num-owners nodes,
and each node can compute the location of a key (aka the key owners) directly.
Infinispan achieves this by statically mapping cache keys to num-segments consistent hash segments,
and then dynamically mapping segments to nodes based on the cache’s topology
(roughly the current plus the historical membership of the cache).
Whenever a new node joins the cluster, the cache is rebalanced, and the new node replaces an existing node
as the owner of some segments.
The key/value pairs in those segments are copied to the new node and removed from the no-longer-owner node
via state transfer.
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Note
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Because the allocation of segments to nodes is based on random UUIDs generated at start time, it is common (though less so after ISPN-11679 ), for segments to also move from one old node to another old node. |
Architecture
The basic idea is to skip the static mapping of keys to segments and to map keys directly to nodes.
When a key/value pair is inserted into the cache, the newest member becomes the anchor owner of that key, and the only node storing the actual value. In order to make the anchor location available without an extra remote lookup, all the other nodes store a reference to the anchor owner.
That way, when another node joins, it only needs to receive the location information from the existing nodes, and values can stay on the anchor owner, minimizing the amount of traffic.
Limitations
- Only one node can be added at a time
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An external actor (e.g. a Kubernetes/OpenShift operator, or a human administrator) must monitor the load on the current nodes, and add a new node whenever the newest node is close to "full".
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Note
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Because the anchor owner information is replicated on all the nodes, and values are never moved off a node, the memory usage of each node will keep growing as new entries and nodes are added. |
- There is no redundancy
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Every value is stored on a single node. When a node crashes or even stops gracefully, the values stored on that node are lost.
- Transactions are not supported
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A later version may add transaction support, but the fact that any node stop or crash loses entries makes transactions a lot less valuable compared to a distributed cache.
- Hot Rod clients do not know the anchor owner
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Hot Rod clients cannot use the topology information from the servers to locate the anchor owner. Instead, the server receiving a Hot Rod get request must make an additional request to the anchor owner in order to retrieve the value.
Configuration
The module is still very young and does not yet support many Infinispan features.
Eventually, if it proves useful, it may become another cache mode, just like scattered caches.
For now, configuring a cache with anchored keys requires a replicated cache with a custom element anchored-keys:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<infinispan
xmlns="urn:infinispan:config:11.0"
xmlns:anchored="urn:infinispan:config:anchored:11.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="urn:infinispan:config:11.0
https://infinispan.org/schemas/infinispan-config-11.0.xsd
urn:infinispan:config:anchored:11.0
https://infinispan.org/schemas/infinispan-anchored-config-11.0.xsd">
<cache-container default-cache="default">
<transport/>
<replicated-cache name="default">
<anchored:anchored-keys/>
</replicated-cache>
</cache-container>
</infinispan>When the <anchored-keys/> element is present, the module automatically enables anchored keys
and makes some required configuration changes:
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Disables
await-initial-transfer -
Enables conflict resolution with the equivalent of
<partition-handling when-split="ALLOW_READ_WRITES" merge-policy="PREFER_NON_NULL"/>
The cache will fail to start if these attributes are explicitly set to other values, if state transfer is disabled, or if transactions are enabled.
Implementation status
Basic operations are implemented: put, putIfAbsent, get, replace, remove, putAll, getAll.
Functional commands
The FunctionalMap API is not implemented.
Other operations that rely on the functional API’s implementation do not work either: merge, compute,
computeIfPresent, computeIfAbsent.
Partition handling
When a node crashes, surviving nodes do not remove anchor references pointing to that node.
In theory, this could allow merges to skip conflict resolution, but currently the PREFERRED_NON_NULL
merge policy is configured automatically and cannot be changed.
Listeners
Cluster listeners and client listeners are implemented and receive the correct notifications.
Non-clustered embedded listeners currently receive notifications on all the nodes, not just the node where the value is stored.
Performance considerations
Client/Server Latency
The client always contacts the primary owner, so any read has a
(N-1)/N probability of requiring a unicast RPC from the primary to the anchor owner.
Writes require the primary to send the value to one node and the anchor address
to all the other nodes, which is currently done with N-1 unicast RPCs.
In theory we could send in parallel one unicast RPC for the value and one multicast RPC for the address, but that would need additional logic to ignore the address on the anchor owner and with TCP multicast RPCs are implemented as parallel unicasts anyway.
Memory overhead
Compared to a distributed cache with one owner, an anchored-keys cache contains copies of all the keys and their locations, plus the overhead of the cache itself.
Therefore, a node with anchored-keys caches should stop accepting new entries when it has less than
(<key size> + <per-key overhead>) * <number of entries not yet inserted> bytes available.
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Note
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The number of entries not yet inserted is obviously very hard to estimate. In the future we may provide a way to limit the overhead of key location information, e.g. by using a distributed cache. |
The per-key overhead is lowest for off-heap storage, around 63 bytes:
8 bytes for the entry reference in MemoryAddressHash.memory,
29 bytes for the off-heap entry header,
and 26 bytes for the serialized RemoteMetadata with the owner’s address.
The per-key overhead of the ConcurrentHashMap-based on-heap cache,
assuming a 64-bit JVM with compressed OOPS, would be around 92 bytes:
32 bytes for ConcurrentHashMap.Node, 32 bytes for MetadataImmortalCacheEntry,
24 bytes for RemoteMetadata, and 4 bytes in the ConcurrentHashMap.table array.
State transfer
State transfer does not transfer the actual values, but it still needs to transfer all the keys and the anchor owner information.
Assuming that the values are much bigger compared to the keys, the anchor cache’s state transfer should also be much faster compared to the state transfer of a distributed cache of a similar size. But for small values, there may not be a visible improvement.
The initial state transfer does not block a joiner from starting,
because it will just ask another node for the anchor owner.
However, the remote lookups can be expensive, especially in embedded mode,
but also in server mode, if the client is not HASH_DISTRIBUTION_AWARE.
Get it, Use it, Ask us!
We’re hard at work on new features, improvements and fixes, so watch this space for more announcements!Please, download and test the latest release.
The source code is hosted on GitHub. If you need to report a bug or request a new feature, look for a similar one on our GitHub issues tracker. If you don’t find any, create a new issue.
If you have questions, are experiencing a bug or want advice on using Infinispan, you can use GitHub discussions. We will do our best to answer you as soon as we can.
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