Untangling cluster management with Helix

Abstract

Distributed data systems systems are used in a variety of settings like online serving, offline analytics, data transport, and search, among other use cases. They let organizations scale out their workloads using cost-effective commodity hardware, while retaining key properties like fault tolerance and scalability. At LinkedIn we have built a number of such systems. A key pattern we observe is that even though they may serve different purposes, they tend to have a lot of common functionality, and tend to use common building blocks in their architectures. One such building block that is just beginning to receive attention is cluster management, which addresses the complexity of handling a dynamic, large-scale system with many servers. Such systems must handle software and hardware failures, setup tasks such as bootstrapping data, and operational issues such as data placement, load balancing, planned upgrades, and cluster expansion.