upstream-seaweedfs/note/slides/seaweedfs-production-setup.md

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SeaweedFS Production Setup

A walkthrough of the recommended deployment topology

• Storage layer
• File access layer
• Backend operations
• Erasure coding for durability

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Storage Layer

3 Masters + Volume Servers

• Masters (run 3)

  • Form a Raft quorum; tolerate 1 failure
  • Track volume locations and cluster topology
  • Lightweight; not on the data path for reads/writes after lookup

• Volume Servers (scale out)

  • Hold the actual needle data on local disks
  • Add more servers for capacity and throughput
  • Heartbeat to masters; clients talk to them directly for I/O

Rule of thumb: start with 3 masters, then grow volume servers with data.

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File Access Layer

Filer + DB for metadata

• Filer serves POSIX-like directory and file metadata
• Metadata store options: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, TiKV, etc.
• Run 3 filers for HA
• Filers are stateless relative to each other — state lives in the DB

S3 Servers

• Expose the S3 API on top of the filer
• Scale the count based on throughput requirements
• Can be co-located with filers or run independently

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Backend Operations

1 Admin Server + a few Workers

• Admin server (1 is enough)

  • Coordinates background jobs: balancing, EC encoding, vacuum, replication fixes
  • Not on the data path — a restart does not affect object store reads/writes
  • No HA required for normal operation

• Workers (a few)

  • Execute long-running tasks issued by the admin server
  • Horizontally scalable based on maintenance workload

Keeps housekeeping off the hot path.

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Production Topology Summary

Component	Count	Role
Master	3	Raft quorum, topology, volume map
Volume Server	N (scale out)	Stores data needles
Filer	3	Metadata gateway
Metadata DB	HA cluster	Persists filer metadata
S3 Server	N (by throughput)	S3 API frontend
Admin	1	Background job coordinator
Worker	A few	Executes admin-scheduled tasks

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Erasure Coding for Durability

Prefer many volume servers so EC shards spread across failure domains.

Example: 8 volume servers, EC 5+3

• Each volume becomes 5 data shards + 3 parity shards
• Shards are placed on 8 distinct volume servers
• Tolerates up to 3 simultaneous volume server failures
• Storage overhead: 1.6x vs 3x for full replication

Volume -> [D1][D2][D3][D4][D5] + [P1][P2][P3]
           |   |   |   |   |     |   |   |
          VS1 VS2 VS3 VS4 VS5  VS6 VS7 VS8

More volume servers = more EC layouts available (e.g. 10+4, 6+3).

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Getting Started Checklist

1. Provision 3 master nodes (small boxes are fine)
2. Provision volume servers sized to your data footprint
3. Stand up an HA metadata DB, then 3 filers pointing at it
4. Add S3 servers sized to required throughput
5. Run 1 admin + a few workers for background maintenance
6. Once you have enough volume servers, enable EC (e.g. 5+3 on 8 servers)

Scale each layer independently as usage grows.