Cluster

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 . Pinot Brokers are modeled as Spectators, more details about broker nodes can be found in . Pinot Controllers are modeled as Controllers, more details about controller nodes can be found in .

Logical view

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

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 . At LinkedIn, the largest Pinot cluster consists of 1000+ nodes.

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

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.

To start other components to join the cluster

Explore your cluster via