Awesome

bknr.cluster

A Highly Available replicated cluster of bknr.datastores. Currently only supported on Lispworks, but it's probably not too hard to add support for other implementations.

Context

bknr.datastore is a really fantastic datastore to prototype and build new applications.

But bknr.datastore is a single isolated process running on single machine. That said, with modern tools you can achieve a reasonable availability quite easily: e.g., on EC2 if you use EBS io2, or EFS, if your machine goes down EC2 will just recreate it.

So you'll lose a few minutes. That's perfectly fine for a small startup.

However, eventually you get a customer that requires five 9s of reliability and then that's just not going to cut it.

Also, relying on EC2's restarts for availability is hard to test. Each time you test your failover you're going to have a few minutes of downtime, which in practice means you'll almost never test your failover.

bknr.cluster attempts to solve this problem by replicating your transaction logs across multiple machines in real time.

Raft, braft

This library is built on the shoulder of giants. For one, bknr.datastore.

But also, the Raft Consensus Protocol

I attempted building Raft from scratch in Lisp. But while it's not that impossible, it seemed like more effort than I wanted to. Plus, there's a big issue with GC pauses: A CL GC pause might make it look like a leader is unavailable, which might make a switch happen, and we want to avoid leader switches as much as possible.

So we settled on the absolutely fantastic braft library from Baidu. This is a C++ library. It's not lightweight, but it does live up to its promise of being Industrial Grade from what I've seen so far.

Other niceness

Braft is better than plain bknr.datastore at maintain data integrity. For instance bknr.datastore doesn't checksum transactions (but it's easy to add). If bknr.datastore crashes during a snapshot, you have to manually recover things (bugs that need fixing).

But also, Braft supports asynchronous snapshots. Obviously, this needs some additional changes to bknr-datastore (and to any subsystem you're using), but that's something we plan to add.

Installation

bknr.cluster absolutely needs a fork of bknr.datastore: https://github.com/tdrhq/bknr-datastore.

In particular, the fork ensures that transactions are only committed after being applied to a majority of replicas.

bknr.cluster also needs braft, which is a pretty heavy dependency. (For this reason, it's unlikely that you'll find bknr.cluster in Quicklisp any time soon.)

First install brpc: https://github.com/apache/brpc Then install braft: https://github.com/baidu/braft

And then the hope is you'll be able to load bknr.cluster with quick-patch:

    (ql:quickload :quick-patch)
    (quick-patch:register "https://github.com/tdrhq/bknr.cluster" "main")
    (quick-patch:checkout-all "build/")

But at this point, I suspect things will be buggy.

You can create a cluster of stores like so:

(make-instance 'my-test-store
 :election-timeout-ms 100
 :directory dir
 :group "MyGroup"
 :config "127.0.0.1:<port1>:0,127.0.0.1:<port2>:0,127.0.0.1:<port3>:0",
 :port <portN>)

You can use the braft_cli tool to change the configuration of servers without downtime.

Migration

We provide a mixin backward-compatibility-mixin. Add this as a superclass to your store class and we'll try to keep the store backward compatible.

What this means is the following:

When you load this store, if there's not Raft data, it'll load the snapshot from the old location.
As you write data, it'll keep appending logs to the old transaction log.

Keep in mind that snapshots will not be propagated to the old format. It will always have the old snapshot with a long appended log file. So you probably want to be reasonably sure that you want to make the switch before you do.

Administration

TODO

Production use

We have been successfully using bknr.cluster in our production services for Screenshotbot, including for our Enterprise installs which gets a lot of use.

So far, it has been super reliable.

Failover/failback strategies

At Screenshotbot.io, this is how we set up failover:

We have three machines replicating with bknr.cluster.
Only the leader responds to queries. (In the future, if we need to optimize CPU usage, we could make replicas respond to read queries.)
To achieve this, we expose an endpoint /raft-state, which returns 200 if it's a leader, and use a AWS Load Balancer to mark only the leader as healthy.
The above set up is good enough. But it might have a minute or so downtime if the leader goes down. To do even better:
we have an nginx server running on each of the servers, and these servers are set up to use the other servers in the cluster as a backup if it receives a 502.
If one of the CL services gets a request, and it finds out it's not a leader, then it responds with a 502, so that the nginx server will just try the next server.

With this complete setup, our downtime goes does to less than 0.5s, but we have some tricks up our sleeve to remove even that 0.5s downtime.

In addition to this, we store blobs in EFS, which is essentially a highly available NFS.