7 replies

Gremlin Driver and frequently changing servers

In a containerised environment, hosts are frequently replaced and their IP address can change several times a day.

As far as I can tell, Gremlin Driver was designed for long-lived hosts given that:
(1) Contact Points are resolved on startup and a connection pool is assigned to them at that time - this makes varying contact points over time not possible I think?
(2) Unavailable hosts are retried but the list of hosts is not refreshed - wouldn't it make more sense to give up on hosts after a few retries and refresh the list of contact points?

I was wondering if the community had any guidance for containerised environments, if handling such cases within Gremlin Driver made sense, and if it'd be worth filing a JIRA ticket.

Thanks!

Solution

yes, this is a bit of an issue in some cases like the one you describe. a similar issue occurs for Neptune where it would be helpful if the drivers knew the cluster topology. you're basically left to periodically recreate the

Cluster

Cluster

object and updating the contact points. Neptune has a special client that wraps the TinkerPop driver to do just that: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/load-balance-graph-queries-using-the-amazon-neptune-gremlin-client/ i've always thought it would be nice if the TinkerPop drivers (all of them) were smarter about this sort of things. i think we'd be open to ideas an improvements in this area. cc/ @kennh

Amazon Web Services

Load balance graph queries using the Amazon Neptune Gremlin Client ...

[Updated August 2021] The Gremlin Client for Amazon Neptune is now available from Maven Central. Some APIs have changed since this article was published. Please review the demo code in the GitHub repository for the latest examples of how to use the APIs. Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that makes it easy ...