Cluster is a set a nodes comprising of servers, brokers, controllers and minions.

Pinot leverages Apache Helix for cluster management. Helix is a cluster management framework to manage replicated, partitioned resources in a distributed system. Helix uses Zookeeper to store cluster state and metadata.

Cluster components

Briefly, Helix divides nodes into three logical components based on their responsibilities

Participant

The nodes that host distributed, partitioned resources

Spectator

The nodes that observe the current state of each Participant and use that information to access the resources. Spectators are notified of state changes in the cluster (state of a participant, or that of a partition in a participant).

Controller

The node that observes and controls the Participant nodes. It is responsible for coordinating all transitions in the cluster and ensuring that state constraints are satisfied while maintaining cluster stability.

Pinot Servers are modeled as Participants, more details about server nodes can be found in Server. Pinot Brokers are modeled as Spectators, more details about broker nodes can be found in Broker. Pinot Controllers are modeled as Controllers, more details about controller nodes can be found in Controller.

Logical view

Another way to visualize the cluster is a logical view, wherein a cluster contains tenants, tenants contain tables, and tables contain segments.

Setup a Pinot Cluster

Typically, there is only cluster per environment/data center. There is no needed to create multiple Pinot clusters since Pinot supports the concept of tenants. At LinkedIn, the largest Pinot cluster consists of 1000+ nodes.

To setup a Pinot cluster, we need to first start Zookeeper.

docker network create -d bridge pinot-demo

docker run \
    --network=pinot-demo \
    --name pinot-zookeeper \
    --restart always \
    -p 2181:2181 \
    -d zookeeper:3.5.6

docker run \
    --network pinot-demo --name=zkui \
    -p 9090:9090 \
    -e ZK_SERVER=pinot-zookeeper:2181 \
    -d qnib/plain-zkui:latest

bin/pinot-admin.sh StartZookeeper -zkPort 2181

Once we've started Zookeeper, we can start other components to join this cluster. If you're using docker, pull the latest apachepinot/pinot image.

export PINOT_VERSION=0.3.0-SNAPSHOT
export PINOT_IMAGE=apachepinot/pinot:${PINOT_VERSION}
docker pull ${PINOT_IMAGE}

To start other components to join the cluster

1. Start Controller

2. Start Broker

3. Start Server

Explore your cluster via Pinot Data Explorer

This section is a reference for the definition of major components and logical abstractions used in Pinot. Please visit the Basic Concepts section to get a general overview that ties together all of the reference material in this section.

Operator reference

Developer reference