Active Failover Administration

For a general introduction to the ArangoDB Active Failover setup, please referto the Active Failoverchapter.

The Active Failover setup requires almost no manual administration.

You may still need to replace, upgrade or remove individual nodesin an Active Failover setup.

It is possible to determine the leader by asking any of the involved single-serverinstances. Just send a request to the REST API.

Followers in the active-failover setup are in a read-only mode. It is possible to read from thesefollowers by adding a header on each request. Responses will then automaticallycontain the X-Arango-Potential-Dirty-Read header so that clients can reject accidental dirty reads.

Depending on the driver support for your specific programming language, you should be able to enable this option.

A Leader is the active server which can receive all read and write operationsin an Active-Failover setup.

Upgrading or removing a Leader can be a little tricky, because as soon as youstop the leader’s process you will trigger a failover situation. This can be intendedhere, but you will probably want to halt all writes to the leader for a certainamount of time to allow the follower to catch up on all operations.

Once you upgraded the local server via the option,you can add it again to the Active Failover setup. The server will resync automaticallywith the new Leader and become a Follower.

A Follower is the passive server which tries to mirror all the data stored inthe Leader.

To upgrade a follower you only need to stop the process and start itwith —database.auto-upgrade. The server process will automatically resyncwith the master after a restart.

The clean way of removing a Follower is to first start a replacement Follower(otherwise you will lose resiliency). To start a Follower please have a lookinto our .After you have your replacement ready you can just kill the process and remove it.