Clusters are one of the very first concepts you run into when getting started with Materialize — you need compute resources to run your queries, right? We’ve simplified how clusters and their dedicated resources (aka replicas) are exposed, so they’re more intuitive to manage.
To create a new cluster, you can now simply specify its SIZE and REPLICATION FACTOR, instead of thinking about individual replicas for provisioning and
replication. Here’s a quick tour of how cluster management works from hereon:
-- Create a cluster with provisioned resources
CREATE CLUSTER demo SIZE = '3xsmall';
--Resize the cluster
ALTER CLUSTER demo SET (SIZE = 'small');
--Increase the replication factor for fault tolerance
ALTER CLUSTER demo SET (REPLICATION FACTOR=2);
-- Turn off the cluster for the night, to save $$!
ALTER CLUSTER demo SET (REPLICATION FACTOR=0);You can still choose to manage the replicas in a cluster manually, for example to gracefully resize it without downtime, but the bottom line is: you shouldn’t have to! We’ll continue working on improving cluster management, and are eyeing features like zero-downtime resizing, autoscaling, and automatic rebalancing across availability zones for future releases. Head over to the documentation for the full rundown!