Binary Less Replication in AEM - aem

As per my understanding when we want to share the particular part of author and publish,we use binary less replication. But what can be the use case,where i should use binary less replication.
I want to know the best practices of binary less replication.

Binaryless replication or shared data store works on the basis that binaries are not copied across datastores. Only the metadata is replicated or transferred between the instances. The setup can be applied between authors and publishers. Alternatively data store can be shared between author instances also in a cold standby setup. It has 3 major use cases:
When you are dealing with very large DAM assets (high res images or videos), any replication involving binary copies over network is very costly. Binaryless is shared data store so binaries are not copied and you save on internal network traffic. It saves time and cost for some setup.
When you have lots of publishers, binary copy can bottleneck your author network. This reduces the load of that transfer and publishers can be scaled without impacting network usage exponentially.
TarMK cold standby has a limit of 2GB binary sync transfer across primary and standby standalone data stores. Binaryless (or shared datastore) is the only workaround for this limit.
For very large datastores you also save time in backups and restores as there is only one store as opposed to 2 stores for author and publishers.

Related

How to reliably shard data across multiple servers

I am currently reading up on some distributed systems design patterns. One of the designs patterns when you have to deal with a lot of data (billions of entires or multiple peta bytes) would be to spread it out across multiple servers or storage units.
One of the solutions for this is to use a Consistent hash. This should result in an even spread across all servers in the hash.
The concept is rather simple: we can just add new servers and only the servers in the range would be affected, and if you loose servers the remaining servers in the consistent hash would take over. This is when all servers in the hash have the same data (in memory, disk or database).
My question is how do we handle adding and removing servers from a consistent hash where there are so much data that it can't be stored on a single host. How do they figure out what data to store and what not too?
Example:
Let say that we have 2 machines running, "0" and "1". They are starting to reach 60% of their maximum capacity, so we decide to add an additional machine "2". Now a large part the data on machine 0 has to be migrated to machine 2.
How would we automate so this will happen without downtime and while being reliable.
My own suggested approach would be that the service hosing consistent hash and the machines would have be aware of how to transfer data between each other. When a new machine is added, will the consistent hash service calculate the affected hash ranges. Then inform the affect machine
of the affected hash range and that they need to transfer affected data to machine 2. Once the affected machines are done transferring their data, they would ACK back to the consistent hash service. Once all affected services are done transferring data, the consistent hash service would start sending data to machine 2, and inform the affected machine that they can remove their transferred data now. If we have peta bytes on each server can this process take a long time. We there for need to keep track of what entires where changes during the transfer so we can ensure to sync them after, or we can submit the write/updates to both machine 0 and 2 during the transfer.
My approach would work, but i feel it is a little risky with all the backs and forth, so i would like to hear if there is a better way.
How would we automate so this will happen without downtime and while being reliable?
It depends on the technology used to store your data, but for example in Cassandra, there is no "central" entity that governs the process and it is done like almost everything else; by having nodes gossiping with each other. There is no downtime when a new node joins the cluster (performance might be slightly impacted though).
The process is as follow:
The new node joining the cluster is defined as an empty node without system tables or data.
When a new node joins the cluster using the auto bootstrap feature, it will perform the following operations
- Contact the seed nodes to learn about gossip state.
- Transition to Up and Joining state (to indicate it is joining the cluster; represented by UJ in the nodetool status).
- Contact the seed nodes to ensure schema agreement.
- Calculate the tokens that it will become responsible for.
- Stream replica data associated with the tokens it is responsible for from the former owners.
- Transition to Up and Normal state once streaming is complete (to indicate it is now part of the cluster; represented by UN in the nodetool status).
Taken from https://thelastpickle.com/blog/2017/05/23/auto-bootstrapping-part1.html
So when the joining node is in the Joining State, it is receiving data from other nodes but not ready for reads until the process is complete (Up status).
DataStax also has some material on this https://academy.datastax.com/units/2017-ring-dse-foundations-apache-cassandra?path=developer&resource=ds201-datastax-enterprise-6-foundations-of-apache-cassandra

NAS to store Firebird database

I read this blog saying that it is not recommended to use NAS as a firebird data media. Is there an experience that you use NAS as firebird data storage?
I plan to buy NAS synology to store the firebird database.
http://www.ibexpert.net/ibe/index.php?n=Doc.FirebirdPerformanceRecommendations
NAS in fact is a file server that uses network protocols for data exchange.
Firebird uses intensive small block reads/writes file operations at different offsets.
Some network protocols like FTP, FTPS, SFTP works at file level, meaning they are incompatible with Firebird.
Other network protocols like SMB, NFS supports file block level operations. But their problem is low latency, which will result in poor performance, due to multiple layers and long chain of involved components compared to a local/direct storage and low guarantee that your database keep its logical integrity and atomicity due to network communication, multiple caches and power failures.
Recent protocol versions SMBv3, NFSv4 have added many improvements and optimizations working with small blocks, decreased latency, RDMA support and accordingly network cards that support it, using 10Gbps+ bandwidth, ethernet/or fiber channel. Devices with persistent cache or even not NAS but SAN solutions. But they cost a lot and are used now mainly at Enterprise level.
Concluding, better to keep databases near to your Firebird server, using direct file access.

Are all distributed database designed to process data in parallel?

I am learning about the characteristics of distributed database and I came across this website that describes some of the advantages of distributed database:
https://www.atlantic.net/cloud-hosting/about-distributed-databases-and-distributed-data-systems/
According to that site, the advantages of distributed database are listed below:
Reliability – Building an infrastructure is similar to investing: diversify to reduce your chances of loss. Specifically, if a failure occurs in one area of the distribution, the entire database does not experience a setback.
Security – You can give permissions to single sections of the overall database, for better internal and external protection.
Cost-effective – Bandwidth prices go down because users are accessing remote data less frequently.
Local access – Similarly to #1 above, if there is a failure in the umbrella network, you can still get access to your portion of the database.
Growth – If you add a new location to your business, it’s simple to create an additional node within the database, making distribution highly scalable.
Speed & resource efficiency – Most requests and other interactivity with the database are performed at a local level, also decreasing remote traffic.
Responsibility & containment – Because any glitches or failures occur locally, the issue is contained and can potentially be handled by the IT staff designated to handle that piece of the company.
However, parallelism (I mean not concurrent write, but processing data in parallel in each node) is not on the list. This makes me wonder: are all distributed databases (i.e. Mongo DB, Cassandra, HBase) designed to process data in parallel? If this is false, which distributed databases support parallel processing and which ones don't?
To find out what I mean by Parallel Processing (not concurrent write), please see: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/190719/the-difference-between-concurrent-and-parallel-execution

Performance benchmarks for attaching read-only disks to google compute engine

Has anyone benchmarked the performance of attaching a singular, read-only disk to multiple Google Compute Engine instances (i.e., the same disk in read-only mode)?
The Google documentation ( https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/persistent-disks#use_multi_instances ) indicates that it is OK to attach multiple instances to the same disk, and personal experience has shown it to work at a small scale (5 to 10 instances), but soon we will be running a job across 500+ machines (GCE instances). We would like to know how performance scales out as the number of parallel attachments grows, and as the bandwidth of those attachments grows. We currently pull down large blocks of data (read-only) from Google Cloud Storage Buckets, and are wondering about the merits of switching to a Standard Persistent Disk configuration. This involves Terabytes of data, so we don't want to change course, willy-nilly.
One important consideration: It is likely that code on each of the 500+ machines will try to access the same file (400MB) at the same time. How do buckets and attached drives compare in that case? Maybe the answer is obvious - and it would save having to set up a rigorous benchmarking system (across 500 machines) ourselves. Thanks.
Persistent disks on GCE should have consistent performance. Currently that is 12MB/s and 30IOPS per 100GB of volume size for a standard persistent disk:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/persistent-disks#pdperformance
Using it on multiple instances should not change the disk's overall performance. It will however make it easier to use those limits since you don't need to worry about using the instance's maximum read speed. However, accessing the same data many times at once might. I do know how either persistent disks or GCS handle contention.
If it is only a 400MB file that are in contention, it may make sense to just benchmark the fastest method to deliver this separately. One possible solution is to make duplicates of your critical file and pick which one you access at random. This should cause less nodes to contend for each file.
Duplicating the critical file means a bigger disk and therefore also contributes to your IO performance. If you already intended to increase your volume size for better performance, the copies are free.

Do NoSQL datacenter aware features enable fast reads and writes when nodes are distributed across high-latency connections?

We have a data system in which writes and reads can be made in a couple of geographic locations which have high network latency between them (crossing a few continents, but not this slow). We can live with 'last write wins' conflict resolution, especially since edits can't be meaningfully merged.
I'd ideally like to use a distributed system that allows fast, local reads and writes, and copes with the replication and write propagation over the slow connection in the background. Do the datacenter-aware features in e.g. Voldemort or Cassandra deliver this?
It's either this, or we roll our own, probably based on collecting writes using something like
rsync and sorting out the conflict resolution ourselves.
You should be able to get the behavior you're looking for using Voldemort. (I can't speak to Cassandra, but imagine that it's similarly possible using it.)
The key settings in the configuration will be:
replication-factor — This is the total number of times the data is stored. Each put or delete operation must eventually hit this many nodes. A replication factor of n means it can be possible to tolerate up to n - 1 node failures without data loss.
required-reads — The least number of reads that can succeed without throwing an exception.
required-writes — The least number of writes that can succeed without the client getting back an exception.
So for your situation, the replication would be set to whatever number made sense for your redundancy requirements, while both required-reads and required-writes would be set to 1. Reads and writes would return quickly, with a concomitant risk of stale or lost data, and the data would only be replicated to the other nodes afterwards.
I have no experience with Voldemort, so I can only comment on Cassandra.
You can deploy Cassandra to multiple datacenters with an inter-DC latency higher than a few milliseconds (see http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/04/cassandra-fact-vs-fiction.html).
To ensure fast local reads, you can configure the cluster to replicate your data to a certain number of nodes in each datacenter (see "Network Topology Strategy"). For example, you specify that there should always be two replica in each data center. So even when you lose a node in a data center, you will still be able to read your data locally.
Write requests can be sent to any node in a Cassandra cluster. So for fast writes, your clients would always speak to a local node. The node receiving the request (the "coordinator") will replicate the data to other nodes (in other datacenters) in the background. If nodes are down, the write request will still succeed and the coordinator will replicate the data to the failed nodes at a later time ("hinted handoff").
Conflict resolution is based on a client-supplied timestamp.
If you need more than eventual consistency, Cassandra offers several consistency options (including datacenter-aware options).