DEV Community

Rob Reid
Rob Reid

Posted on • Originally published at robreid.io

CockroachDB Demo Locations

The cockroach demo command is my current favourite dev tool. It's instant access to an N-node CockroachDB cluster, allowing you to get up and running with an enterprise cluster straight from your dev environment, reducing feedback loops massively by giving you all the features you need to create with confidence.

If you start a cluster with cockroach demo, and don't provide any arguments for --demo-locality, you'll get the default values that are provided by the demo code.

--nodes Regions
1 us-east1 x1
2 us-east1 x2
3 us-east1 x3
4 us-east1 x3 + us-west1 x1
5 us-east1 x3 + us-west1 x2
6 us-east1 x3 + us-west1 x3
7 us-east1 x3 + us-west1 x3 + europe-west1 x1
8 us-east1 x3 + us-west1 x3 + europe-west1 x2
9 us-east1 x3 + us-west1 x3 + europe-west1 x3



The increase is cyclical, with every additional node for the first 3 additional nodes, adding to the us-east1 region and so on.

Currently, only the us-east1, us-west1, and europe-west1 regions have locations configured, so if you'd like spin up nodes in other regions and have them represented in the cluster map, it's a very simple two-step process:

Step 1 - create your cluster with custom regions

The following spins up a 10-node cluster across 3 regions; us-central1 (4 AZs), asia-northeast1 (3 AZs), and europe-west1 (3 AZs):

cockroach demo \
--empty \
--nodes 10 \
--demo-locality=region=us-central1,az=a:region=us-central1,az=b:region=us-central1,az=c:region=us-central1,az=f:region=asia-northeast1,az=a:region=asia-northeast1,az=b:region=asia-northeast1,az=c:region=europe-west1,az=a:region=europe-west1,az=b:region=europe-west1,az=c
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If you open the cluster map in the web UI now, you'll see a message that explains that not all of your regions have been assigned locations. In the knowledge that only a handful of regions come pre-loaded with location information, we can infer that the asia-northeast1 region needs to be given a location.

This can be confirmed by running the following SQL in your console session:

select * from system.locations;
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
localityKey localityValue latitude longitude
region europe-west1 50.448160000000000 3.818860000000000
region us-central1 42.032974000000000 -93.581543000000000
region us-east1 33.836082000000000 -81.163727000000000
region us-east4 37.478397000000000 -76.453077000000000
region us-west1 43.804133000000000 -120.554201000000000

Helpfully, the cluster map provides a link to docs that will help you assign locations to your regions. You can follow the docs, or continue to read to find out how this can be done.

Step 2 - assign localities to custom regions

Insert location information for the asia-northeast1 region by running the following SQL in your console session:

INSERT into system.locations VALUES ('region', 'asia-northeast1', 35.689487, 139.691706);
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If you refresh your node map now, you'll see a 9-node cluster, with 3 regions configured in the locations you've configured.

Top comments (0)