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Two Availability Zones in One Region Deployment

This document introduces the deployment mode of two availability zones (AZs) in one region, including the architecture, configuration, how to enable this deployment mode, and how to use replicas in this mode.

The term "region" in this document refers to a geographic area, while the capitalized "Region" refers to a basic unit of data storage in TiKV. "AZ" refers to an isolated location within a region, and each region has multiple AZs. The solution described in this document also applies to the scenario where multiple data centers are located in a single city.

Introduction

TiDB usually adopts the multi-AZ deployment solution to ensure high availability and disaster recovery capability. The multi-AZ deployment solution includes multiple deployment modes, such as multiple AZs in one region and multiple AZs in two regions. This document introduces the deployment mode of two AZs in one region. Deployed in this mode, TiDB can also meet the requirements of high availability and disaster recovery, with a lower cost. This deployment solution adopts Data Replication Auto Synchronous mode, or the DR Auto-Sync mode.

Under the mode of two AZs in one region, the two AZs are less than 50 kilometers apart. They are usually located in the same region or in two adjacent regions. The network latency between the two AZs is lower than 1.5 milliseconds and the bandwidth is higher than 10 Gbps.

Deployment architecture

This section takes the example of a region where two availability zones AZ1 and AZ2 are located respectively in the east and west. AZ1 is the primary AZ and AZ2 is the disaster recovery (DR) AZ.

The architecture of the cluster deployment is as follows:

The cluster has six replicas: three Voter replicas in AZ1, and two Voter replicas along with one Learner replica in AZ2. For the TiKV component, each rack has a proper label.
The Raft protocol is adopted to ensure consistency and high availability of data, which is transparent to users.

2-AZ-in-1-region architecture

This deployment solution defines three statuses to control and identify the replication status of the cluster, which restricts the replication mode of TiKV. The replication mode of the cluster can automatically and adaptively switch between the three statuses. For details, see the Status switch section.

sync: Synchronous replication mode. In this mode, at least one replica in the disaster recovery AZ synchronizes with the primary AZ. The Raft algorithm ensures that each log is replicated to the DR based on the label.
async: Asynchronous replication mode. In this mode, the disaster recovery AZ is not fully synchronized with the primary AZ. The Raft algorithm follows the majority protocol to replicate logs.
sync-recover: Synchronous recovery mode. In this mode, the disaster recovery AZ is not fully synchronized with the primary AZ. Raft gradually switches to the label replication mode and then reports the label information to PD.

Configuration

Example

The following tiup topology.yaml example file is a typical topology configuration for the two availability zones in one region deployment mode:

# # Global variables are applied to all deployments and used as the default value of
# # the deployments if a specific deployment value is missing.
global:
  user: "tidb"
  ssh_port: 22
  deploy_dir: "/data/tidb_cluster/tidb-deploy"
  data_dir: "/data/tidb_cluster/tidb-data"
server_configs:
  pd:
    replication.location-labels: ["az","rack","host"]
pd_servers:
  - host: 10.63.10.10
    name: "pd-10"
  - host: 10.63.10.11
    name: "pd-11"
  - host: 10.63.10.12
    name: "pd-12"
tidb_servers:
  - host: 10.63.10.10
  - host: 10.63.10.11
  - host: 10.63.10.12
tikv_servers:
  - host: 10.63.10.30
    config:
      server.labels: { az: "east", rack: "east-1", host: "30" }
  - host: 10.63.10.31
    config:
      server.labels: { az: "east", rack: "east-2", host: "31" }
  - host: 10.63.10.32
    config:
      server.labels: { az: "east", rack: "east-3", host: "32" }
  - host: 10.63.10.33
    config:
      server.labels: { az: "west", rack: "west-1", host: "33" }
  - host: 10.63.10.34
    config:
      server.labels: { az: "west", rack: "west-2", host: "34" }
  - host: 10.63.10.35
    config:
      server.labels: { az: "west", rack: "west-3", host: "35" }
monitoring_servers:
  - host: 10.63.10.60
grafana_servers:
  - host: 10.63.10.60
alertmanager_servers:
  - host: 10.63.10.60

Placement Rules

To deploy a cluster based on the planned topology, you need to use Placement Rules to determine the locations of the cluster replicas. Taking the deployment of four replicas (two Voter replicas are at the primary AZ, one Voter replica, and one Learner replica are at the disaster recovery AZ) as an example, you can use the Placement Rules to configure the replicas as follows:

cat rule.json
[
  {
    "group_id": "pd",
    "group_index": 0,
    "group_override": false,
    "rules": [
      {
        "group_id": "pd",
        "id": "az-east",
        "start_key": "",
        "end_key": "",
        "role": "voter",
        "count": 3,
        "label_constraints": [
          {
            "key": "az",
            "op": "in",
            "values": [
              "east"
            ]
          }
        ],
        "location_labels": [
          "az",
          "rack",
          "host"
        ]
      },
      {
        "group_id": "pd",
        "id": "az-west-1",
        "start_key": "",
        "end_key": "",
        "role": "follower",
        "count": 2,
        "label_constraints": [
          {
            "key": "az",
            "op": "in",
            "values": [
              "west"
            ]
          }
        ],
        "location_labels": [
          "az",
          "rack",
          "host"
        ]
      },
      {
        "group_id": "pd",
        "id": "az-west-2",
        "start_key": "",
        "end_key": "",
        "role": "learner",
        "count": 1,
        "label_constraints": [
          {
            "key": "az",
            "op": "in",
            "values": [
              "west"
            ]
          }
        ],
        "location_labels": [
          "az",
          "rack",
          "host"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
]

To use the configurations in rule.json, run the following command to back up the existing configuration to the default.json file and overwrite the existing configuration with rule.json:

pd-ctl config placement-rules rule-bundle load --out="default.json"
pd-ctl config placement-rules rule-bundle save --in="rule.json"

If you need to roll back to the previous configuration, you can restore the backup file default.json or write the following JSON file manually and overwrite the current configuration with this JSON file:

cat default.json
[
  {
    "group_id": "pd",
    "group_index": 0,
    "group_override": false,
    "rules": [
      {
        "group_id": "pd",
        "id": "default",
        "start_key": "",
        "end_key": "",
        "role": "voter",
        "count": 5
      }
    ]
  }
]

Enable the DR Auto-Sync mode

The replication mode is controlled by PD. You can configure the replication mode in the PD configuration file using one of the following methods:

Method 1: Configure the PD configuration file, and then deploy a cluster.

[replication-mode]
replication-mode = "dr-auto-sync"
[replication-mode.dr-auto-sync]
label-key = "az"
primary = "east"
dr = "west"
primary-replicas = 3
dr-replicas = 2
wait-store-timeout = "1m"
wait-recover-timeout = "0s"
pause-region-split = false

Method 2: If you have deployed a cluster, use pd-ctl commands to modify the configurations of PD.

config set replication-mode dr-auto-sync
config set replication-mode dr-auto-sync label-key az
config set replication-mode dr-auto-sync primary east
config set replication-mode dr-auto-sync dr west
config set replication-mode dr-auto-sync primary-replicas 3
config set replication-mode dr-auto-sync dr-replicas 2

Descriptions of configuration items:

replication-mode is the replication mode to be enabled. In the preceding example, it is set to dr-auto-sync. By default, the majority protocol is used.
label-key is used to distinguish different AZs and needs to match Placement Rules. In this example, the primary AZ is "east" and the disaster recovery AZ is "west".
primary-replicas is the number of Voter replicas in the primary AZ.
dr-replicas is the number of Voter replicas in the disaster recovery (DR) AZ.
wait-store-timeout is the waiting time for switching to asynchronous replication mode when network isolation or failure occurs. If the time of network failure exceeds the waiting time, asynchronous replication mode is enabled. The default waiting time is 60 seconds.
wait-recover-timeout is the waiting time for switching back to the sync-recover status after the network recovers. The default value is 0 seconds.
pause-region-split controls whether to pause Region split operations in the async_wait and async statuses. Pausing Region split can prevent temporary partial data loss in the DR AZ when synchronizing data in the sync-recover status. The default value is false.

To check the current replication status of the cluster, use the following API:

curl http://pd_ip:pd_port/pd/api/v1/replication_mode/status

{
  "mode": "dr-auto-sync",
  "dr-auto-sync": {
    "label-key": "az",
    "state": "sync"
  }
}

Status switch

The replication mode of a cluster can automatically and adaptively switch between three statuses:

When the cluster is normal, the synchronous replication mode is enabled to maximize the data integrity of the disaster recovery AZ.
When the network connection between the two AZs fails or the disaster recovery AZ breaks down, after a pre-set protective interval, the cluster enables the asynchronous replication mode to ensure the availability of the application.
When the network reconnects or the disaster recovery AZ recovers, the TiKV node joins the cluster again and gradually replicates the data. Finally, the cluster switches to the synchronous replication mode.

The details for the status switch are as follows:

Initialization: At the initialization stage, the cluster is in the synchronous replication mode. PD sends the status information to TiKV, and all TiKV nodes strictly follow the synchronous replication mode to work.
Switch from sync to async: PD regularly checks the heartbeat information of TiKV to judge whether the TiKV node fails or is disconnected. If the number of failed nodes exceeds the number of replicas of the primary AZ (primary-replicas) and the disaster recovery AZ (dr-replicas), the synchronous replication mode can no longer serve the data replication and it is necessary to switch the status. When the failure or disconnect time exceeds the time set by wait-store-timeout, PD switches the status of the cluster to the async mode. Then PD sends the status of async to all TiKV nodes, and the replication mode for TiKV switches from two-availability-zone replication to the native Raft majority.
Switch from async to sync: PD regularly checks the heartbeat information of TiKV to judge whether the TiKV node is reconnected. If the number of failed nodes is less than the number of replicas of the primary AZ (primary-replicas) and the disaster recovery AZ (dr-replicas), the synchronous replication mode can be enabled again. PD first switches the status of the cluster to sync-recover and sends the status information to all TiKV nodes. All Regions of TiKV gradually switch to the two-availability-zone synchronous replication mode and then report the heartbeat information to PD. PD records the status of TiKV Regions and calculates the recovery progress. When all TiKV Regions finish the switching, PD switches the replication mode to sync.

Disaster recovery

This section introduces the disaster recovery solution of the two AZs in one region deployment.

When a disaster occurs to a cluster in the synchronous replication mode, you can perform data recovery with RPO = 0:

If the primary AZ fails and most of the Voter replicas are lost, but complete data exists in the disaster recovery AZ, the lost data can be recovered from the disaster recovery AZ. At this time, manual intervention is required with professional tools. You can get support from PingCAP or the community for a recovery solution.
If the disaster recovery AZ fails and a few Voter replicas are lost, the cluster automatically switches to the asynchronous replication mode.

When a disaster occurs to a cluster that is not in the synchronous replication mode and you cannot perform data recovery with RPO = 0:

If most of the Voter replicas are lost, manual intervention is required with professional tools. You can get support from PingCAP or the community for a recovery solution.