Rebalance Servers

The rebalance operation is used to recompute the assignment of brokers or servers in the cluster. This is not a single command, but rather a series of steps that need to be taken.

In the case of servers, rebalance operation is used to balance the distribution of the segments amongst the servers being used by a Pinot table. This is typically done after capacity changes or config changes such as replication or segment assignment strategies or table migration to a different tenant.

Changes that require a rebalance

Below are changes that need to be followed by a rebalance.

  1. Capacity changes

  2. Increasing/decreasing replication for a table

  3. Changing segment assignment for a table

  4. Moving table from one tenant to a different tenant

Capacity changes

These are typically done when downsizing/uplifting a cluster or replacing nodes of a cluster.

Tenants and tags

Every server added to the Pinot cluster has tags associated with it. A group of servers with the same tag forms a server tenant.

By default, a server in the cluster gets added to the DefaultTenant i.e. gets tagged as DefaultTenant_OFFLINE and DefaultTenant_REALTIME.

Below is an example of how this looks in the znode, as seen in ZooInspector.

A Pinot table config has a tenants section, to define the tenant to be used by the table. The Pinot table will use all the servers which belong to the tenant as described in this config. For more details about this, see the Tenants section.

 {   
    "tableName": "myTable_OFFLINE",
    "tenants" : {
      "broker":"DefaultTenant",
      "server":"DefaultTenant"
    }
  }

Updating tags

0.6.0 onwards

In order to change the server tags, use the following API.

PUT /instances/{instanceName}/updateTags?tags=<comma separated tags>

0.5.0 and prior

UpdateTags API is not available in 0.5.0 and prior. Instead, use this API to update the Instance.

PUT /instances/{instanceName}

For example,

curl -X PUT "http://localhost:9000/instances/Server_10.1.10.51_7000" 
    -H "accept: application/json" 
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" 
    -d "{ \"host\": \"10.1.10.51\", \"port\": \"7000\", \"type\": \"SERVER\", \"tags\": [ \"newName_OFFLINE\", \"DefaultTenant_REALTIME\" ]}"

NOTE

The output of GET and input of PUT don't match for this API. Make sure to use the right payload as shown in example above. Particularly, notice that the instance name "Server_host_port" gets split up into separate fields in this PUT API.

When upsizing/downsizing a cluster, you will need to make sure that the host names of servers are consistent. You can do this by setting the following config parameter:

pinot.set.instance.id.to.hostname=true

Replication changes

In order to change the replication factor of a table, update the table config as follows:

OFFLINE table - update the replication field

REALTIME table - update the replicasPerPartition field

Segment Assignment changes

The most common segment assignment change is moving from the default segment assignment to replica group segment assignment. Discussing the details of the segment assignment is beyond the scope of this page. More details can be found in Routing and in this FAQ question.

Table Migration to a different tenant

In a scenario where you need to move table across tenants, for e.g table was assigned earlier to a different Pinot tenant and now you want to move it to a separate one, then you need to call the rebalance API with reassignInstances set to true.

Rebalance Algorithms

Currently, two rebalance algorithms are supported; one is the default algorithm and the other one is minimal data movement algorithm.

The Default Algorithm

This algorithm is used for most of the cases. When reassignInstances parameter is set to true, the final lists of instance assignment will be re-computed, and the list of instances is sorted per partition per replica group. Whenever the table rebalance is run, segment assignment will respect the sequence in the sorted list and pick up the relevant instances.

Minimal Data Movement Algorithm

This algorithm focuses more on minimizing the data movement during table rebalance. When reassignInstances parameter is set to true and this algorithm gets enabled, the position of instances which are still alive remains the same, and vacant seats are filled with newly added instances or last instances in the existing alive instance candidate. So only the instances which change the position will involve in data movement.

In order to switch to this table rebalance algorithm, just simply set the following config to the table config before triggering table rebalance:

"instanceAssignmentConfigMap": {
  ...
  "OFFLINE": {
    ...
    "replicaGroupPartitionConfig": {
      ...
      "minimizeDataMovement": true,
      ...
    },
    ...
  },
  ...
}

When instanceAssignmentConfigMap is not explicitly configured, minimizeDataMovement flag can also be set into the segmentsConfig:

"segmentsConfig": {
    ...
    "minimizeDataMovement": true,
    ...
}

Running a Rebalance

After any of the above described changes are done, a rebalance is needed to make those changes take effect.

To run a rebalance, use the following API.

POST /tables/{tableName}/rebalance?type=<OFFLINE/REALTIME>

This API has a lot of parameters to control its behavior. Make sure to go over them and change the defaults as needed.

Note

Typically, the flags that need to be changed from the default values are

includeConsuming=true for REALTIME

downtime=true if you have only 1 replica, or prefer a faster rebalance at the cost of a momentary downtime

Checking status

The following API is used to check the progress of a rebalance Job. The API takes the jobId of the rebalance job. The API to see the jobIds of rebalance Jobs for a table is shown next.

Note that rebalanceStatus API is available from this commit

curl -X GET "https://localhost:9000/rebalanceStatus/ffb38717-81cf-40a3-8f29-9f35892b01f9" -H "accept: application/json"
{"tableRebalanceProgressStats": {
    "startTimeMs": 1679073157779,
    "status": "DONE", // IN_PROGRESS/DONE/FAILED    
    "timeToFinishInSeconds": 0, // Time it took for the rebalance job after it completes/fails 
    "completionStatusMsg": "Finished rebalancing table: airlineStats_OFFLINE with minAvailableReplicas: 1, enableStrictReplicaGroup: false, bestEfforts: false in 44 ms."
     
     // The total amount of work required for rebalance 
    "initialToTargetStateConvergence": {
      "_segmentsMissing": 0, // Number of segments missing in the current state but present in the target state
      "_segmentsToRebalance": 31, // Number of segments that needs to be assigned to hosts so that the current state can get to the target state.
      "_percentSegmentsToRebalance": 100, // Total number of replicas that needs to be assigned to hosts so that the current state can get to the target state.
      "_replicasToRebalance": 279 // Remaining work to be done in %
    },
    
    // The pending work for rebalance
    "externalViewToIdealStateConvergence": {
      "_segmentsMissing": 0,
      "_segmentsToRebalance": 0,
      "_percentSegmentsToRebalance": 0,
      "_replicasToRebalance": 0
    },
    
    // Additional work to catch up with the new ideal state, when the ideal 
    // state shifts since rebalance started. 
    "currentToTargetConvergence": {
      "_segmentsMissing": 0,
      "_segmentsToRebalance": 0,
      "_percentSegmentsToRebalance": 0,
      "_replicasToRebalance": 0
    },
  },
  "timeElapsedSinceStartInSeconds": 28 // If rebalance is IN_PROGRESS, this gives the time elapsed since it started
  }

Below is the API to get the jobIds of rebalance jobs for a given table. The API takes the table name and jobType which is TABLE_REBALANCE.

curl -X GET "https://localhost:9000/table/airlineStats_OFFLINE/jobstype=OFFLINE&jobTypes=TABLE_REBALANCE" -H "accept: application/json"
 "ffb38717-81cf-40a3-8f29-9f35892b01f9": {
    "jobId": "ffb38717-81cf-40a3-8f29-9f35892b01f9",
    "submissionTimeMs": "1679073157804",
    "jobType": "TABLE_REBALANCE",
    "REBALANCE_PROGRESS_STATS": "{\"initialToTargetStateConvergence\":{\"_segmentsMissing\":0,\"_segmentsToRebalance\":31,\"_percentSegmentsToRebalance\":100.0,\"_replicasToRebalance\":279},\"externalViewToIdealStateConvergence\":{\"_segmentsMissing\":0,\"_segmentsToRebalance\":0,\"_percentSegmentsToRebalance\":0.0,\"_replicasToRebalance\":0},\"currentToTargetConvergence\":{\"_segmentsMissing\":0,\"_segmentsToRebalance\":0,\"_percentSegmentsToRebalance\":0.0,\"_replicasToRebalance\":0},\"startTimeMs\":1679073157779,\"status\":\"DONE\",\"timeToFinishInSeconds\":0,\"completionStatusMsg\":\"Finished rebalancing table: airlineStats_OFFLINE with minAvailableReplicas: 1, enableStrictReplicaGroup: false, bestEfforts: false in 44 ms.\"}",
    "tableName": "airlineStats_OFFLINE"