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Provide option to allow writes when master is down #60605

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merged 9 commits into from
Aug 12, 2020

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ywelsch
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@ywelsch ywelsch commented Aug 3, 2020

Elasticsearch currently blocks writes by default when a master is unavailable. The cluster.no_master_block setting allows a user to change this behavior to also block reads when a master is unavailable. This PR introduces a way to now also still allow writes when a master is offline. Writes will continue to work as long as routing table changes are not needed (as those require the master for consistency), or if dynamic mapping updates are not required (as again, these require the master for consistency).

Eventually we should switch the default of cluster.no_master_block to this new mode.

@ywelsch ywelsch added >enhancement :Distributed Coordination/Cluster Coordination Cluster formation and cluster state publication, including cluster membership and fault detection. v8.0.0 v7.10.0 labels Aug 3, 2020
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Pinging @elastic/es-distributed (:Distributed/Cluster Coordination)

@elasticmachine elasticmachine added the Team:Distributed Meta label for distributed team (obsolete) label Aug 3, 2020
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When indexing with the block in place, we would previously timeout the entire shard or bulk request after the timeout provided (defaulting to 1 minute).

With the new metadata_write block, the write will go through (which is fine), but in case of a shard failure, it will block the request indefinitely instead.

I think this has two potential bad effects:

  1. We could build up lots of shard failed requests waiting for this.
  2. When a master comes back, we could have a burst of those sent to master.

I guess the byte based limiting also puts a limit to 1 and the shard failed deduplication solves 2 so this is likely not an issue, but thought I would mention anyway in case it makes others worried.

Otherwise looking good to me.

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ywelsch commented Aug 12, 2020

As you pointed out, the previous behavior was to unconditionally time out these write requests in the Reroute stage after a minute. The new behavior will proceed in the reroute phase, but keep the requests in a "stuck" state until a master is back. As a lot of requests can be piling up on a node within a minute (more than the node has memory), I think this should not introduce new unseen behavior. The byte-based memory limit for indexing is of help not only with this new block, but also with the old blocks. With the write block active (i.e. the current default), many requests can start piling up, with no bound at all (each one is turned into a ClusterStateObserver, waiting up to a minute for cluster state updates).

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LGTM.

@ywelsch ywelsch merged commit 0b517dd into elastic:master Aug 12, 2020
ywelsch added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 12, 2020
Elasticsearch currently blocks writes by default when a master is unavailable. The cluster.no_master_block setting allows
a user to change this behavior to also block reads when a master is unavailable. This PR introduces a way to now also still
allow writes when a master is offline. Writes will continue to work as long as routing table changes are not needed (as
those require the master for consistency), or if dynamic mapping updates are not required (as again, these require the
master for consistency).

Eventually we should switch the default of cluster.no_master_block to this new mode.
ywelsch added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 13, 2020
We can't assert on the specific exception, unfortunately.
ywelsch added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 13, 2020
We can't assert on the specific exception, unfortunately.
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4 participants