[infinispan-dev] Infinispan "mitosis"

[Gustavo Fernandes]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 1:08 PM, Sanne Grinovero <sanne at infinispan.org>
wrote:

> Just throwing out an idea I just had while thinking of Hibernate OGM
> user needs for data migration.
>
> For people using databases & related frameworks, it's common to have a
> staging database which contains not just the staging "schema" but also
> data. When legally possible, it's often preferable to have snapshot
> from production data.
>
> For example last time I worked with a SQL database, each week I'd take
> a production backup and restore it on both our staging environment and
> on the developer's instances so that everyone could run tests on it -
> without needing access to the real production.
>
> Interestingly, while we don't have an easy tool get a fully consistent
> snapshot from a live Infinispan grid, "replicating" should be a
> familiar concept here?
>

We do have a way to "copy" data from a grid, which is part of the Rolling
Upgrade process [1], which is
supposed to migrate data from one cluster to another with no downtime for
clients. Both clusters
are independent and can have incompatible Infinispan version, like 8.x and
9.x.

Re-using some parts of the Rolling Upgrade from [1], it'd be possible to
extract a tool that simply grabs data from a
running cluster and save it to another without the clients accessing the
source cluster being aware of it. Although
not technically a snapshot, it fits the use case of pre-production
environment provisioning.

[1]
http://infinispan.org/docs/dev/user_guide/user_guide.html#rolling_upgrades_for_infinispan_servers


>
> Infinispan could have a "mitosis" feature, like cell reproduction, in
> which the user connects a pristine grid instance of N nodes and these
> N nodes automatically become non-primary owners for the full set of
> segments - this could happen via a custom hash which makes them all
> backup replicas (no main owners) and then Infinispan would be able to
> tell when state transfer is completed, and initiate some some
> coordination to sever the link without triggering re-hash on the
> original "production" grid.
>
> Incidentally, while this happens the child datagrid would be kept up
> to date with in-flight changes, so we could envision either a very
> short lock on changes to guarantee a fully consistent snapshot, or not
> have any lock at all but minimise the inconsistencies to those which
> might happen during the link decoupling.
>
> Maybe this would satisfy also the people who've been asking for the
> snapshot feature? I don't think people want a snapshot for the sake of
> it, but to replicate the grid..
>
> I realise it's not a 1 day of work and the idea is not fully fleshed
> out, but I think this would be a very well received feature.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Sanne
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