Communication within the Cluster

As noted, the nodes communicate with the Cluster Coordinator via heartbeats. When a Cluster Coordinator is elected, it updates a well-known ZNode in Apache ZooKeeper with its connection information so that nodes understand where to send heartbeats. If one of the nodes goes down, the other nodes in the cluster will not automatically pick up the load of the missing node. It is possible for the DFM to configure the dataflow for failover contingencies; however, this is dependent on the dataflow design and does not happen automatically.

When the DFM makes changes to the dataflow, the node that receives the request to change the flow communicates those changes to all nodes and waits for each node to respond, indicating that it has made the change on its local flow.