RDBMS High Availability Support
Various Cloudera components rely on backing RDBMS services as critical infrastructure. You may require Cloudera components to support deployment in environments where RDBMS services are made highly-available. High availability (HA) solutions for RDBMS are implementation-specific, and can create constraints or behavioral changes in Cloudera components.
This section clarifies the support state and identifies known issues and limitations for HA deployments.
High Availability vs. Load Balancing
Understanding the difference between HA and load balancing is important for Cloudera components, which are designed to assume services are provided by a single RDBMS instance. Load balancing distributes operations across multiple RDBMS services in parallel, while HA focuses on service continuity. Load balanced deployments are often used as part of HA strategies to overcome demands of monitoring and failover management in an HA environment. While less easier to implement, load-balanced deployments require applications tailored to the behavior and limitations of the particular technology.
Support Statement: Cloudera components are not designed for and do not support load balanced deployments of any kind. Any HA strategy involving multiple active RDBMS services must ensure all connections are routed to a single RDBMS service at any given time, regardless of vendor or HA implementation/technology.
General High Availability Support
Cloudera supports various RDBMS options, each of which have multiple possible strategies to implement HA. Cloudera cannot reasonably test and certify on each strategy for each RDBMS. Cloudera expects HA solutions for RDBMS to be transparent to Cloudera software, and therefore are not supported and debugged by Cloudera. It is the responsibility of the customer to provision, configure, and manage the RDBMS HA deployment, so that Cloudera software behaves as it would when interfacing with a single, non-HA service. Cloudera will support and help customers troubleshoot issues when a cluster has HA enabled. While diagnosing database-related problems in Cloudera components, customers may be required to temporarily disable or bypass HA mechanisms for troubleshooting purposes. If an HA-related issue is found, it is the responsibility of the customer to engage with the database vendor so that a solution to that issue can be found.
Support Statement: Cloudera Support may require customers to temporarily bypass HA layers and connect directly to supported RDBMS back-ends to troubleshoot issues. Issues observed only when connected through HA layers are the responsibility of the customer DBA staff to resolve.