MongoDb regional replica set - primary node in each region?

Question

Given an application with regional users (regions being North America, Europe, Aisa), how do you create a replica set that allows HK users to write to the nearest nodes?

The goal is that users in HK read and write to their local nodes and not suffer latencies writing to the US. My assumption was that I could set up an application stack in each region, share data between all regions through the replica set and users could connect to their closest provider (global load balancing).

The problem is that a replica set has exactly one primary node and all writes must go to that node. Reading data is straight-forward with secondaries and NEAREST hint, but I can't figure out a solution for writing.

This seems like a pretty solid use case and that it should be handled but cannot make any headway. Solutions, Ideas, Pointers to some source?

Answer 1

Thanks @avanti, @MarkusWMalhberg - pondering how to respond to the comments pushed me in the right direction. This took a bit to pull together so I will be a bit verbose explaining the config.

Overview

Focusing on user experience, we want to create a Mongo database configuration that allows reads and writes to occur closest to the user.

Assumptions

• Users almost always read and write documents in their region and don't mind if infrequent reads to other region's data are slower.
• Each document contains a key that indicates their region (for simplicity/clarity)

Much of the sharding documentation focuses on HA/DR. With user experience and regional compliance the focus is on locality instead of load distribution.

This example will completely ignore HA/DR, read preferences, and write concerns but these need to be addressed if the POC is matured. The example ignores these in favor of clarity meeting the goal: local reads/writes.

References

• Operational Segmentation
• Managing Shard Tags
• ReplicaSet Configuration
• Different mongos config db errors

Tricks

We know

• We want one application database so all data is available
• We want users to read/write locally so we need a database near each user group; we need a replica set
• Writes can only be made to primary replica set nodes so, to get primary nodes next to each user group, we need multiple replica; a sharded cluster

Within standard ReplicaSet and Sharding knowledge, there are 2 keys to this configuration:

• Assign a priority to the regionally local ReplicaSet node to ensure it becomes primary.
• Use location aware shard key tagging to ensure data is written to local shards

Shard keys can be anything: we are only concerned with users being able to read/write locally in contrast to effective load sharing.

Each collection will have to be sharded, or writes will go to shard zero.

Desired configuration

The configuration

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo ">>> Clean up processes and files from previous runs"
echo ">>> killAll mongod mongos"
killall mongod mongos

echo ">>> Remove db files and logs"
rm -rf data
rm -rf log

# Create the common log directory
mkdir log

echo ">>> Start replica set for shard US-East"
mkdir -p data/shard-US-East/rsMemberEast data/shard-US-East/rsMemberWest
mongod --replSet shard-US-East --logpath "log/shard-US-East-rsMemberEast.log" --dbpath data/shard-US-East/rsMemberEast --port 37017 --fork --shardsvr --smallfiles
mongod --replSet shard-US-East --logpath "log/shard-US-East-rsMemberWest.log" --dbpath data/shard-US-East/rsMemberWest --port 37018 --fork --shardsvr --smallfiles

echo ">>> Sleep 15s to allow US-East replica set to start"
sleep 15

# The US-East replica set member is assigned priority 2 so that it becomes primary
echo ">>> Configure replica set for shard US-East"
mongo --port 37017 << 'EOF'
config = { _id: "shard-US-East", members:[
         { _id : 0, host : "localhost:37017", priority: 2 },
         { _id : 1, host : "localhost:37018" }]};
rs.initiate(config)
EOF

echo ">>> Start replica set for shard-US-West"
mkdir -p data/shard-US-West/rsMemberEast data/shard-US-West/rsMemberWest
mongod --replSet shard-US-West --logpath "log/shard-US-West-rsMemberEast.log" --dbpath data/shard-US-West/rsMemberEast --port 47017 --fork --shardsvr --smallfiles
mongod --replSet shard-US-West --logpath "log/shard-US-West-rsMemberWest.log" --dbpath data/shard-US-West/rsMemberWest --port 47018 --fork --shardsvr --smallfiles

echo ">>> Sleep 15s to allow US-West replica set to start"
sleep 15

# The US-West replica set member is assigned priority 2 so that it becomes primary
echo ">>> Configure replica set for shard-US-West"
mongo --port 47017 << 'EOF'
config = { _id: "shard-US-West", members:[
         { _id : 0, host : "localhost:47017" },
         { _id : 1, host : "localhost:47018", priority: 2 }]};
rs.initiate(config)
EOF

# Shard config servers: should be 3 and all must be up to deploy a shard cluster
# These are the mongos backing store for routing information
echo ">>> Start config servers"
mkdir -p data/config/config-us-east data/config/config-us-west data/config/config-redundant
mongod --logpath "log/cfg-us-east.log"   --dbpath data/config/config-us-east   --port 57040 --fork --configsvr --smallfiles
mongod --logpath "log/cfg-us-west.log"   --dbpath data/config/config-us-west   --port 57041 --fork --configsvr --smallfiles
mongod --logpath "log/cfg-redundant.log" --dbpath data/config/config-redundant --port 57042 --fork --configsvr --smallfiles

echo ">>> Sleep 5 to allow config servers to start and stabilize"
sleep 5

# All mongos's must point at the same config server, a coordinator dispatches writes to each
echo ">>> Start mongos"
mongos --logpath "log/mongos-us-east.log" --configdb localhost:57040,localhost:57041,localhost:57042 --port 27017 --fork
mongos --logpath "log/mongos-us-west.log" --configdb localhost:57040,localhost:57041,localhost:57042 --port 27018 --fork

echo ">>> Wait 60 seconds for the replica sets to stabilize"
sleep 60

# Enable sharding on the 'sales' database and 'sales.users' collection
# Every collection in 'sales' must be sharded or the writes will go to shard 0
# Add a shard tag so we can associate shard keys with the tag (region)
# Shard tag range main and max cannot be the same so we use a region id for US-East = 1
# and US-West = 2. sh.addTagRange() is inclusive of minKey and exclusive of maxKey.
# We only need to configure one mongos - config will be propogated to all mongos through
# the config server
echo ">>> Add shards to mongos"
mongo --port 27017 <<'EOF'
db.adminCommand( { addshard : "shard-US-East/"+"localhost:37017" } );
db.adminCommand( { addshard : "shard-US-West/"+"localhost:47017" } );

db.adminCommand({enableSharding: "sales"})
db.adminCommand({shardCollection: "sales.users", key: {region:1}});

sh.addShardTag("shard-US-East", "US-East")
sh.addShardTag("shard-US-West", "US-West")
sh.addTagRange("sales.users", { region: 1 }, { region: 2 }, "US-East")
sh.addTagRange("sales.users", { region: 2 }, { region: 3 }, "US-West")
EOF

Testing

Verify our configuration is correct with sh.status(). Note shards are correctly assigned and tags, and regional shard keys are correctly assigned.

[starver@rakshasa RegionalSharding 14:38:50]$ mongo --port 27017 sales
...
rakshasa(mongos-3.0.5)[mongos] sales> sh.status()
  sharding version: {
    "_id": 1,
    "minCompatibleVersion": 5,
    "currentVersion": 6,
    "clusterId": ObjectId("55fdddc5746e30dc3651cda4")
  }
  shards:
    {  "_id": "shard-US-East",  "host": "shard-US-East/localhost:37017,localhost:37018",  "tags": [   "US-East" ] }
    {  "_id": "shard-US-West",  "host": "shard-US-West/localhost:47017,localhost:47018",  "tags": [   "US-West" ] }
  balancer:
    Currently enabled:  yes
    Currently running:  no
    Failed balancer rounds in last 5 attempts:  0
    Migration Results for the last 24 hours: 
        1 : Success
  databases:
    {  "_id": "admin",  "partitioned": false,  "primary": "config" }
    {  "_id": "test",  "partitioned": false,  "primary": "shard-US-East" }
    {  "_id": "sales",  "partitioned": true,  "primary": "shard-US-East" }
    sales.users
      shard key: { "region": 1 }
      chunks:
        shard-US-East: 2
        shard-US-West: 1
        { "region": { "$minKey" : 1 } } -> { "region": 1 } on: shard-US-East Timestamp(2, 1) 
        { "region": 1 } -> { "region": 2 } on: shard-US-East Timestamp(1, 3) 
        { "region": 2 } -> { "region": { "$maxKey" : 1 } } on: shard-US-West Timestamp(2, 0) 
        tag: US-East  {
  "region": 1
} -> {
  "region": 2
}
        tag: US-West  {
  "region": 2
} -> {
  "region": 3
}

Verify writes are made to the right shard and primary. Create a record in each region

db.users.insert({region:1, name:"us east user"})
db.users.insert({region:2, name:"us west user"})

You can log on to each member of each replica set and see the east user only on the US-East shard and the west user only on the US-West shard.