The m12p5 idle-readiness work converged on an idle cluster, but the real
T4 1M/1536 scale-up over mTLS still failed to admit new pods. Three real
blockers, all invisible to the plaintext in-process tests:
- CryptoProvider crash-loop: the seed-join/reseed boot path builds a
blocking reqwest (rustls) HTTPS client on a dedicated boot thread BEFORE
GrpcTransport::new installs the process-wide provider, so every TLS joiner
panicked. Install it at the top of main(); ensure_crypto_provider() is now
pub, idempotent, harmless on the plaintext standalone path.
- Wrong seed scheme + target: peer_url honors an explicit URL scheme
verbatim, so http:// dialed plaintext at the TLS :9500 port. Seed is now
https:// AND points at the ready-only client Service (ClusterIP VIP), not
the headless peers Service — so a joiner never round-robins onto a
not-ready pod (incl. itself) and burns the 120s discovery window.
- Too-tight poll budget: a cold status poll pays a full rustls handshake on
top of DNS+TCP; under CPU contention that alone blew the 500ms budget, so
the joiner timed out every poll for the whole window despite the peer being
reachable. Status-poll timeout is now 5s (env: TIDAL_SEED_STATUS_TIMEOUT_MS)
with a separate 2s connect timeout (dead seeds still fail fast) and
debug-level logging on every discovery failure mode.
Refactors riding along:
- on_heartbeat takes a HeartbeatContext struct (additive fields, no silent
u64 transposition) across tidal-net, election_driver, and both test hooks.
- ShardReplica::applied_for_leader_shard centralizes per-source-shard keying
(BUG 1) shared by the readiness drive and local_status.
- idle-readiness test now asserts convergence within ½ budget — a slow-path
regression (periodic self-heal / status-poll dependency) the binary budget
check would otherwise wave through.
New k8s T4 manifests: cluster-t4-kind kustomization + single-group topology
patch; tidal-stress t4 seed/load Jobs.
End the "replicated XOR sharded" split: S shard groups, each a
replication group at RF with its own elected leader, leaders balanced
across nodes; any gateway hash-routes.
- One unified write surface: /items,/embeddings,/signals hash-route to
the owning shard group's leader (ShardRouter FNV-1a) AND replicate at
RF. x-tidal-ack/x-tidal-seq, quorum await, NotLeader/QuorumTimeout are
per-group; NotLeader names the group.
- Rebalance verbs (L3): POST /cluster/shards/{id}/transfer (fenced
leadership move) + /cluster/shards/{id}/replicas (add/remove replica).
A ?shard= selector threads through every per-shard admin verb and is
propagated on intra-group forwards (ShardReplica::admin_path). S=1 is
byte-for-byte (no selector, no shard in NotLeader body).
- Tier-3 exit gate (cluster_sharding.rs): 3 nodes × 3 shards × RF=3 over
real OS processes — SIGKILL a node under ack=quorum load → only its
shard-leaderships re-elect, reads never stop, zero acked loss across
random kill points; plus a rebalance-verb test. Harness:
MultiProcCluster::start_sharded.
- tidal-stress drives the single path (WritePath::Leader|Sharded gone),
spreading writes round-robin across gateways or pinning --leader-url.
- Throughput: local 3×3 sustains 3,000 quorum signal-writes/s @ 0% err,
~30% CPU, lag ~0 (generator-bound). ≥5,000/s + ≥2.5× scaling is Ref-A.
Known follow-up (tracked): per-group-aware node readiness and cross-node
read fan-out under PARTIAL placement.
Kind-3 term markers in the WAL stream, STREAM-relative vote frontiers,
heartbeat-only divergence detection + quarantine, and fenced promote.
Elections converge in 0.6–1.0s; zero acked-write loss across all kill points.
Closes G5 (leaderless recovery) from the v0.9 wave.
WAL segment format: 8-byte TSEG header (magic + version byte + 3 reserved)
prepended to every new segment. Legacy headerless segments (m0-m11p3) read
as implicit v0 — no migration. Unknown magic/version surfaces as
WalError::SegmentFormatUnknown at open time; foreign files are never
repaired or truncated (fixes the silent data-loss path from the p3 rollout
incident where torn-tail repair zeroed a follower's unreadable segments).
Catch-up transport: FAILED_PRECONDITION ("snapshot required") and stream
errors that skip the shard now arm a timer retry (re-arm-on-skip is the
load-bearing liveness fix — without it a skipped pull never re-fires and
the follower stays permanently behind). Single retry pending per shard;
CatchupRunner owns the Arc'd state shared between the retry tasks and the
transport. Test: tidal-net/tests/catchup_retry.rs covers the retry path.
Stress: k8s stress-job-t2a/t2b yaml + ops/stress-test-p3-t2 runbook.
ack=quorum gates replicated writes on a majority of the replica set durably
holding them: followers push their durably-applied frontier (ReportApplied,
once per apply round, decoupled from ship acks), the leader folds frontier
reports + ship-ack hints + heal resumes into a leadership-scoped CommitIndex
(k-th-largest durable mark), and handlers await it through an async
watch-channel bridge (zero parked threads per waiter). Honest timeouts:
retryable 503 naming the laggards; x-tidal-seq on every cluster write.
Follower blob applies are batched under group-commit fsyncs (22x seeding).
Exit gate: 167/167 leader-SIGKILL kill points, zero acked-write loss.
Seven-dimension review pass (all confirmed findings fixed):
- WAL blob drain now ABORTS on the first write failure instead of reusing
the failed seqno mid-drain (a torn record buried mid-segment would
truncate every later acked record on replay)
- apply_replicated_blobs waits every staged append even after a mid-batch
failure, parses metadata once, and moves records into Arcs shared with
the WAL writer (no deep clone per record on the follower apply path)
- CommitIndex: zero-peer fast path now respects demotion (active checked
under lock before the single-replica return), k-th-largest uses
select_nth over a reused scratch buffer
- await_quorum: re-reads the index once after the deadline fires (no false
503 for a write that committed in the race window), warns when the
commit-watch bridge dies outside shutdown, zero-peer path checks active
- notify_applied report failures: WARN on the first failure of a streak,
INFO on recovery (a silently stalling frontier reads as unexplained
quorum 503s); receiver skips re-notifying unadvanced frontiers
- x-tidal-deduplicated: 1 marks dedup-suppressed signal writes (relayed
through forwards) so durability cursors can tell dedup from no-seqno
- docs: 167/167 kill-point record corrected in CHANGELOG; rolling-upgrade
order (leader first — a pre-m11p3 leader silently downgrades quorum
requests to leader-ack) in CHANGELOG + runbook §8; monitoring note for
report-loss diagnosis on the quorum-timeout alert
Verified: workspace clippy -D warnings (incl. cluster-e2e targets), full
tidaldb/tidal-net/tidal-server/tidalctl suites green, tier-3 multi-process
quorum suite green (8/8 kill points, zero acked loss, partition gate/recover).
m11p1 — decoupled ack/ship path: staged writes (seqno+WAL+relay-push,
microseconds) separate from group-commit fsync; ShipQueue batches+windows
outbound segments; receiver coalesces inbound chunks before applying.
Adds first tidaldb_cluster_* metrics.
m11p2 — leader WAL is now THE replicated log: fsynced batches feed a
bounded WalShipFeed and ship byte-identical to followers; WAL seqnos
survive restarts (relay-reset hazard gone). Item metadata and embeddings
journal kind-1/2 blob records on the same stream as signals; the m8p10
HTTP broadcast is deleted. StreamSegments catch-up is follower-pulled via
server-streaming RPC, triggered on gap detection, follower boot, and
leader heal nudge. Promote carries a stream baseline so peers skip
pre-stream history.
Splits monolithic cluster.rs into tidal-server/src/cluster/ modules. Adds redeliver-missed
relay, bounded HLC drift, lag tracking, and reconcile idempotence. Five new tier-3 test suites
(chaos, lifecycle, multiproc, region, routes, runbook) all green. Docs, CHANGELOG, and ROADMAP
updated with G4/G5/G6 known gaps.
- Extract redeliver_missed(tx, db, log) helper into cluster_transport.rs
- heal_region now removes partition then immediately ships any missed
batch-log entries to the healed follower's channel
- await_convergence refactored to call the same helper (no logic change)
- tidal-server: reload_text_index before search in cluster mode
- tidal-server: write_signal returns Result instead of panicking on unknown signal
- tidal-server: leader shows lag_events=0 (writes directly, no receiver thread)
- tidal-server: fix cluster mode error propagation (ServerError::from)
- docs/runbooks/cluster.md: add full cluster operations runbook
- docker/: add Dockerfile for containerised cluster deployment
- README.md: add tidal-server HTTP API getting-started section
- Split oversized source files per CODING_GUIDELINES §9
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
