Master/Slave Failover for Camel Routes

One way to implement a master/slave failover pattern is to have a cluster of instances of an application where one instance (the master) is currently active and the other instances (the slaves) are on standby, ready to take over whenever the master fails. Some projects provide this kind of master/slave support out of the box:
Creating a failover deployment for Apache Karaf is straight forward: we start two or more Karaf instances and let them point to the same lock (file system or database). Then the first instance that starts gets the lock and becomes the master while the other instances will be waiting to get the lock before starting the bundles. In addition Karaf offers hot standby functionality where some bundles are started even in the slave instances and other bundles wait for to get the lock.

Apache ActiveMQ offers couple of ways for creating master/slave configurations but the simplest is to start two or more instances of ActiveMQ pointing to the same datasource(file or database) where the first broker gets the lock and becomes the master and the second and other brokers become slaves, waiting for the lock. Simple.

What about Camel? How can we have multiple routes (in one or separate containers) where one is the master (in running state) and the other routes are waiting to take over as soon as the master route stops ensuring high availability at route level? There are couple of components providing such a capability and all of the them rely on having some kind of centralized external system used as a lock.

1. Camel Quartz component has clustering support.
- If you are using quartz consumers, in clustered mode, you can have only one of the routes triggered at a time.
- Or if a quartz based CronScheduledRoutePolicy is used, in clustered mode, only one of the routes will be started/stopped.
Both of these options rely on having quartz to be configured with a datasource that is shared among all the routes in the cluster. This usage is not exactly master/slave but will have the same effect at the end.

2. Camel Zookeeper component offers a RoutePolicy that can start/stop routes in master/slave fashion. The first route that gets the lock will be started where the remaining routes will be waiting to get the lock. One advantage of this component is that it can be configured to have more than one master running.

3. Camel JGroups component also has master/slave capability using JGroupsFilters.

4. JBoss Fuse Master component is probably the easiest way to have master/slave setup in a Fuse environment. Internally it relies on Zookeeper's znode capability similarly to zookeeper component above.

5. This is not implemented yet but in theory it is possible to implement a RoutePolicy using ActiveMQ's exclusive consumers feature that provides a distributed lock. Do let me know if you implement this ;)

6. Use database as a lock. Christian Schneider has demonstrated how to have "Standby failover for Apache Camel routes" using a database here.

Posted in: Camel,FUSE,Master/Slave