Achieving fault tolerance
Fault tolerance is the ability to continue to operate even in the case of a system, network, or storage failure. This feature is critical to avoid data loss and for the continuity of your business. Whenever a node goes down or becomes incommunicado, the cluster automatically rebalances the number of replicas among remaining active nodes and continues to serve read and write traffic.
It is important to understand how many node failures you want to withstand, as based on that, you must decide how many nodes should be in your cluster. For example, in a cluster of three nodes, the cluster can withstand one node failure when the replication factor is three. In a cluster of seven nodes, the cluster can withstand two node failures when the replication factor is five.
Next, we will learn about having fault tolerance at the storage layer. After that, we will go over an example to understand fault tolerance using a six-node CockroachDB cluster. Finally, we will...