Users familiar with YugabyteDB’s architecture know that it is based on two servers where cluster metadata storage and administrative operations are managed by a YB-Master metadata server that is independent from the YB-TServer database server. The end result is that the YB-Master server can be configured and tuned (in a manner that is completely isolated from YB-TServer) to achieve higher performance and faster resilience than a single-server architecture. However, the need for these two servers to come together in a cluster increases the mental burden on a new user who wants to experience the database’s benefits in the shortest time possible. Utilities such as yb-ctl have gone a long way to address this challenge in the context of a local cluster that runs only on a single host machine. However, the two-server challenge comes to the forefront when multi-node clusters need to be deployed across multiple host machines especially involving manual deployments that do not use a cluster orchestrator like Kubernetes Helm or Terraform.

We are excited to announce the availability of yugabyted, a native server that acts as a parent server across the YB-TServer and YB-Master servers. yugabyted’s immediate goal is to remove the day-1 learning curve that can be daunting for new users. Over the next few releases, we intend to make yugabyted the standard way of interacting with YugabyteDB, even for complex day-2 scenarios. Similar to mysqld, the d in yugabyted stands for daemon that acts as a single point of entry into the database cluster and can be easily managed as an always-on service.

Create a single-node cluster

Download and untar yugabytedb tar.gz

wget https://downloads.yugabyte.com/yugabyte-2.2.0.0-darwin.tar.gz
tar xvfz yugabyte-2.2.0.0-darwin.tar.gz && cd yugabyte-2.2.0.0/

You can download yugabytedb for other OS platforms from https://download.yugabyte.com/

Additionally, add a few loopback IP addresses that will allow us to simulate a multi-node YugabyteDB cluster on our laptop.

sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.2
sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.3
sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.4

Start node 1

Starting a single-node cluster is simple. Given that there is only one node, the Replication Factor of the cluster is set to be 1. In other words, every tablet (aka shard) has only one copy stored in the cluster.

./bin/yugabyted start

The output for a successful run on the above command should look like the following. The cluster has been started with a single node listening at 127.0.0.1. The data directory for this node is located at /var/data and the logs directory is located at /var/logs.

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