How does Hazelcast autodiscovery work?

Question

I would like to know how the Hazelcast autodiscovery works. How do nodes find other nodes in the network? And how do they know when a node is dead?

Answer 1

There are 3 different forms of discovery:

• multicast. So we shout around on the network and try to find other members
• tcp/ip: we need to have a few well known members. If one or more of these well known members is online, other members can form a cluster.
• aws: we just log into aws, read out all the instances within a given region, apply some filtering, and what we remains are well known members. From that point on we rely on tcp/ip based clustering.

So this is in short how auto discovery works.

Detection node failure is done based on heart beats. So every x seconds we send a message to a all members in the clusters, the ones that can't reply, are eventually declared dead.