SeaweedFS Production Setup

A walkthrough of the recommended deployment topology

• Storage layer
• File access layer
• Backend operations
• Erasure coding for durability

Storage Layer

3 Masters + Volume Servers

• Masters (run 3)

  • Form a Raft quorum; tolerate 1 failure
  • Track volume locations and cluster topology
  • Lightweight; not on the data path for reads/writes after lookup

• Volume Servers (scale out)

  • Hold the actual needle data on local disks
  • Add more servers for capacity and throughput
  • Heartbeat to masters; clients talk to them directly for I/O

Rule of thumb: start with 3 masters, then grow volume servers with data.

File Access Layer

Filer + DB for metadata

• Filer serves POSIX-like directory and file metadata
• Metadata store options: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, TiKV, etc.
• Run 3 filers for HA
• Filers are stateless relative to each other — state lives in the DB

S3 Servers

• Expose the S3 API on top of the filer
• Scale the count based on throughput requirements
• Can be co-located with filers or run independently

Backend Operations

1 Admin Server + a few Workers

• Admin server (1 is enough)

  • Coordinates background jobs: balancing, EC encoding, vacuum, replication fixes
  • Not on the data path — a restart does not affect object store reads/writes
  • No HA required for normal operation

• Workers (a few)

  • Execute long-running tasks issued by the admin server
  • Horizontally scalable based on maintenance workload

Keeps housekeeping off the hot path.

Production Topology Summary

Erasure Coding for Durability

Prefer many volume servers so EC shards spread across failure domains.

Example: 8 volume servers, EC 5+3

• Each volume becomes 5 data shards + 3 parity shards
• Shards are placed on 8 distinct volume servers
• Tolerates up to 3 simultaneous volume server failures
• Storage overhead: 1.6x vs 3x for full replication

Volume -> [D1][D2][D3][D4][D5] + [P1][P2][P3]
           |   |   |   |   |     |   |   |
          VS1 VS2 VS3 VS4 VS5  VS6 VS7 VS8

More volume servers = more EC layouts available (e.g. 10+4, 6+3).

Getting Started Checklist

1. Provision 3 master nodes (small boxes are fine)
2. Provision volume servers sized to your data footprint
3. Stand up an HA metadata DB, then 3 filers pointing at it
4. Add S3 servers sized to required throughput
5. Run 1 admin + a few workers for background maintenance
6. Once you have enough volume servers, enable EC (e.g. 5+3 on 8 servers)

Scale each layer independently as usage grows.