Cluster management (revisited)

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!