Outage recovery

8min
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Nomad

Don't panic. This is a critical first step.

Depending on your deployment configuration, it may take only a single server failure for cluster unavailability. Recovery requires an operator to intervene, but the process is straightforward.

This tutorial is for recovery from a Nomad outage due to a majority of server nodes in a datacenter being lost. If you are looking to add or remove servers, consult the bootstrapping guide.

Failure of a single server cluster

If you had only a single server and it has failed, try to restore operation by restarting it. A single server configuration requires the -bootstrap-expect=1 flag. If the server cannot be recovered, you need to bring up a new server. Consult the bootstrapping guide for more detail.

In the case of an unrecoverable server failure in a single server cluster, data loss is inevitable since data was not replicated to any other servers. This is why a single server deploy is never recommended.

Failure of a server in a multi-server cluster

If you think the failed server is recoverable, the easiest option is to bring it back online and have it rejoin the cluster with the same IP address. This will return the cluster to a fully healthy state. Similarly, even if you need to rebuild a new Nomad server to replace the failed node, you may wish to do that immediately. Keep in mind that the rebuilt server needs to have the same IP address as the failed server. Again, once this server is online and has rejoined, the cluster will return to a fully healthy state.

Both of these strategies involve a potentially lengthy time to reboot or rebuild a failed server. If this is impractical or if building a new server with the same IP isn't an option, you need to remove the failed server. Usually, you can issue a nomad server force-leave command to remove the failed server if it is still a member of the cluster.

Note

Your raft cluster will need to have a quorum of nodes available to perform any online modifications to the Raft peer information. Membership changes are written to the Raft log, and all Raft log writes require quorum. If this is impossible, continue to Failure of Multiple Servers in a Multi-Server Cluster

If, for some reason, the Raft configuration continues to show any stale members, you can use the nomad operator raft remove-peer command to remove the stale peer server on the fly with no downtime.

Once you have made the membership changes necessary, you should verify the current Raft state with the nomad operator raft list-peers command:

$ nomad operator raft list-peers
Node                   ID               Address          State     Voter
nomad-server01.global  10.10.11.5:4647  10.10.11.5:4647  follower  true
nomad-server02.global  10.10.11.6:4647  10.10.11.6:4647  leader    true
nomad-server03.global  10.10.11.7:4647  10.10.11.7:4647  follower  true

Failure of multiple servers in a multi-server cluster

In the event that multiple servers are lost, causing a loss of quorum and a complete outage, partial recovery is possible using data on the remaining servers in the cluster. There may be data loss in this situation because multiple servers were lost, so information about what's committed could be incomplete. The recovery process implicitly commits all outstanding Raft log entries, so it's also possible to commit data that was uncommitted before the failure.

The section below contains the details of the recovery procedure. You will include the remaining servers in the raft/peers.json recovery file. The cluster should be able to elect a leader once the remaining servers are all restarted with an identical raft/peers.json configuration.

Any new servers you introduce later can be fresh with totally clean data directories and joined using Nomad's server join command.

In extreme cases, it should be possible to recover with only a single remaining server by starting that single server with itself as the only peer in the raft/peers.json recovery file.

The raft/peers.json recovery file is final, and a snapshot is taken after it is ingested, so you are guaranteed to start with your recovered configuration. This does implicitly commit all Raft log entries, so should only be used to recover from an outage, but it should allow recovery from any situation where there's some cluster data available.

Manual recovery using peers.json

To begin, stop all remaining servers. You can attempt a graceful leave, but it will not work in most cases. Do not worry if the leave exits with an error. The cluster is in an unhealthy state, so this is expected.

The peers.json file is not present by default and is only used when performing recovery. This file will be deleted after Nomad starts and ingests this file. Nomad uses an automatically- created raft/peers.info file to avoid ingesting the raft/peers.json file on the first start after upgrading. Be sure to leave raft/peers.info in place for proper operation.

Using raft/peers.json for recovery can cause uncommitted Raft log entries to be implicitly committed, so this should only be used after an outage where no other option is available to recover a lost server. Make sure you don't have any automated processes that will put the peers file in place on a periodic basis.

The next step is to go to the -data-dir of each Nomad server. Inside that directory, there will be a raft/ sub-directory. Create a raft/peers.json file. Its contents will depend on the raft protocol version of your cluster.

Raft protocol 3 peers.json specification

[
  {
    "id": "adf4238a-882b-9ddc-4a9d-5b6758e4159e",
    "address": "10.1.0.1:4647",
    "non_voter": false
  },
  {
    "id": "8b6dda82-3103-11e7-93ae-92361f002671",
    "address": "10.1.0.2:4647",
    "non_voter": false
  },
  {
    "id": "97e17742-3103-11e7-93ae-92361f002671",
    "address": "10.1.0.3:4647",
    "non_voter": false
  }
]

id (string: **required**) - Specifies the node ID of the server. This can be found in the logs when the server starts up, and it can also be found inside the node-id file in the server's data directory.
address (string: **required**) - Specifies the IP and port of the server in ip:port format. The port is the server's RPC port used for cluster communications, typically 4647.
non_voter (bool: _false_) - This controls whether the server is a non-voter, which is used in some advanced Autopilot configurations. If omitted, it will default to false, which is typical for most clusters.

You can use this jq filter to create a peers.json file with the list of alive servers. Check the generated output and make any necessary changes.

$ nomad server members -json | jq '[ .[] | select(.Status == "alive") | {id: .Tags.id, address: "\(.Tags.rpc_addr):\(.Tags.port)", non_voter: false} ]'

Raft protocol 2 peers.json specification

["10.0.1.8:4647", "10.0.1.6:4647", "10.0.1.7:4647"]

Raft protocol version 2 peers.json files contain a list of IP:Port addresses for each server. Note that the port should refer to the RPC port and not the HTTP API port.

Deploy peers.json to all server nodes

Create entries for all remaining servers. You must confirm that servers you do not include here have indeed failed and will not later rejoin the cluster.

Deploy this file is the same across all remaining server nodes.

Verify keyring on server nodes

Warning

Prior to Nomad 1.9.0, key material was never stored in Raft. This meant that the nomad agent snapshot save command and snapshot agent did not save Nomad's keyring. If you are using versions prior to Nomad 1.9.0, you should make sure you have backed up the keyring of at least one server.

Go to the -data-dir of each Nomad server. Inside that directory, there will be a keystore/ sub-directory with .nks.json files. Ensure that these files exist on at least one server before continuing.

Restart cluster nodes

At this point, you can restart all the remaining servers. Log lines will be emitted as the servers ingest the recovery file:

...
2016/08/16 14:39:20 [INFO] nomad: found peers.json file, recovering Raft configuration...
2016/08/16 14:39:20 [INFO] nomad.fsm: snapshot created in 12.484µs
2016/08/16 14:39:20 [INFO] snapshot: Creating new snapshot at /tmp/peers/raft/snapshots/2-5-1471383560779.tmp
2016/08/16 14:39:20 [INFO] nomad: deleted peers.json file after successful recovery
2016/08/16 14:39:20 [INFO] raft: Restored from snapshot 2-5-1471383560779
2016/08/16 14:39:20 [INFO] raft: Initial configuration (index=1): [{Suffrage:Voter ID:10.212.15.121:4647 Address:10.212.15.121:4647}]
...

If any servers managed to perform a graceful leave, you may need to have them rejoin the cluster using the server join command:

$ nomad server join <Node Address>
Successfully joined cluster by contacting 1 nodes.

It should be noted that any existing member can be used to rejoin the cluster as the gossip protocol will take care of discovering the server nodes.

At this point, the cluster should be in an operable state again. One of the nodes should claim leadership and emit a log like:

[INFO] nomad: cluster leadership acquired

You can use the nomad operator raft list-peers command to inspect the Raft configuration:

$ nomad operator raft list-peers
Node                   ID               Address          State     Voter
nomad-server01.global  10.10.11.5:4647  10.10.11.5:4647  follower  true
nomad-server02.global  10.10.11.6:4647  10.10.11.6:4647  leader    true
nomad-server03.global  10.10.11.7:4647  10.10.11.7:4647  follower  true

Workload migration

Metrics with Prometheus