Linear scalability

• macOS
• Linux
• Docker
• Kubernetes

With YugabyteDB, you can add nodes to scale your cluster up very efficiently and reliably in order to achieve more read and write IOPS (input/output operations per second). In this tutorial, you will look at how YugabyteDB can scale while a workload is running. You will run a read-write workload using the prepackaged YugabyteDB workload generator against a 3-node local cluster with a replication factor of 3, and add nodes to it while the workload is running. Next, you can observe how the cluster scales out by verifying that the number of read and write IOPS are evenly distributed across all the nodes at all times.

This tutorial uses the yb-ctl local cluster management utility.

Note: Verify that you have the required extra loopback addresses by reviewing the Quick Start section.

1. Create universe

If you have a previously running local universe, destroy it using the yb-ctl destroy command.

$ ./bin/yb-ctl destroy

Start a new 3-node cluster with a replication factor (RF) of 3 and set the number of shards (aka tablets) per table per YB-TServer to 4 so that you can better observe the load balancing during scale-up and scale-down.

$ ./bin/yb-ctl create --rf 3 --num_shards_per_tserver 4

Each table now has four tablet-leaders in each YB-TServer and with a replication factor (RF) of 3, there are two tablet-followers for each tablet-leader distributed in the two other YB-TServers. So each YB-TServer has 12 tablets (that is, the sum of 4 tablet-leaders plus 8 tablet-followers) per table.

2. Run the YugabyteDB workload generator

Download the YugabyteDB workload generator JAR file (yb-sample-apps.jar).

$ wget https://github.com/yugabyte/yb-sample-apps/releases/download/1.3.1/yb-sample-apps.jar?raw=true -O yb-sample-apps.jar

Run the SqlInserts workload app against the local universe by running the following command.

$ java -jar ./yb-sample-apps.jar --workload SqlInserts \
                                    --nodes 127.0.0.1:5433 \
                                    --num_threads_write 1 \
                                    --num_threads_read 4

The workload application prints some stats while running, an example is shown here. You can read more details about the output of the sample applications here.

2018-05-10 09:10:19,538 [INFO|...] Read: 8988.22 ops/sec (0.44 ms/op), 818159 total ops  |  Write: 1095.77 ops/sec (0.91 ms/op), 97120 total ops  | ... 
2018-05-10 09:10:24,539 [INFO|...] Read: 9110.92 ops/sec (0.44 ms/op), 863720 total ops  |  Write: 1034.06 ops/sec (0.97 ms/op), 102291 total ops  | ...

3. Observe IOPS per node

You can check a lot of the per-node stats by browsing to the tablet-servers page. It should look like this. The total read and write IOPS per node are highlighted in the screenshot below. Note that both the reads and the writes are roughly the same across all the nodes indicating uniform usage across the nodes.

4. Add node and observe linear scaling

Add a node to the universe.

$ ./bin/yb-ctl --num_shards_per_tserver 4 add_node

Now you should have 4 nodes. Refresh the tablet-servers page to see the statistics update. Shortly, you should see the new node performing a comparable number of reads and writes as the other nodes. The 36 tablets will now get distributed evenly across all the 4 nodes, leading to each node having 9 tablets.

The YugabyteDB universe automatically lets the client know to use the newly added node for serving queries. This scaling out of client queries is completely transparent to the application logic, allowing the application to scale linearly for both reads and writes.

5. Remove node and observe linear scale in

Remove the recently added node from the universe.

$ ./bin/yb-ctl remove_node 4

Refresh the tablet-servers page to see the stats update. The Time since heartbeat value for that node will keep increasing. Once that number reaches 60s (i.e. 1 minute), YugabyteDB will change the status of that node from ALIVE to DEAD. Note that at this time the universe is running in an under-replicated state for some subset of tablets.

• After 300 seconds (5 minutes), YugabyteDB's remaining nodes will re-spawn new tablets that were lost with the loss of node 4. Each remaining node's tablet count will increase from 9 to 12, thus getting back to the original state of 36 total tablets.

6. Clean up (optional)

Optionally, you can shutdown the local cluster created in Step 1.

$ ./bin/yb-ctl destroy