Hi Team, I have a SaaS service which will keep data globally with data owners across regions. I want to keep their data in respective regions to comply with Data Privacy Laws & Regulations. But I have to run queries globally to do analytics across regions. According to me, there are two ways to do it. 1. Have multi-region Pinot setup with real-time/offline servers localized to specific region. And brokers from across regions will call servers to run queries. 2. Have region wise multiple Pinot setups. Do querying and aggregating result at application level. Any other approach possible ? Which approach looks more feasible and easier to implement ? Thanks !

I think you will end up paying for a lot of egress if you do scatter gather queries across regions, so I would lean towards option 2 because it will probably lead to smaller amounts of data crossing regions

Will you have any requirements to aggregate across the two regions?

We have requirement of aggregation also across regions.

how does privacy work in that case?

Various compliance forbid to store data in their geographic boundary but not while reading data.

got it

@Richard Startin, option 2 will require designing and development at application level. We will not be able to leverage broker for aggregation. Can prestodb be another option ?

yes, you can control the assignment based on partition

Any documentation referring how to do it ?

prestodb is a good workaround for option 2 but that will still incur the cost assuming prestodb spans across the regions

For option 1, costing is due to network only or any other factor for costing ?

My requirement is to keep a partition and it's replica limited to specific region's servers. I couldn't find how to do it in above documentation.

I believe the requirement is to do partition assignment across multiple clusters. That has to be controlled on the client side by pushing different segments to different cluster

@Jackie this is for option 1 - Have multi-region Pinot setup with real-time/offline servers localized to specific region. And brokers from across regions will call servers to run queries.

Understood, but the segment assignment can only be applied to single cluster. It cannot assign segments across multiple clusters

Can we setup single multi-region cluster ?

@Jackie I think there's just one Pinot cluster, but servers are located in different regions. Also, the requirement (if I am reading correctly) is that servers on a specific region host specific segments

The potential problem of having one cross region cluster is the latency between controllers and instances in other region, also the ZK

Yeah, there will be some latency and egress cost. but barring that, if we use partition based segment assignment such that data for a region goes to servers for that region, isn't that what we need here?

Yes, that is the requirement.

The segment and instance assignment doc you just posted

Need little direction here, how to set

InstancePartitions

? Can I set any configuration or need to do something else ?

@Jackie ^^

Here is the rest api signature:

@PUT
  @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
  @Path("/tables/{tableName}/instancePartitions")
  @Authenticate(AccessType.UPDATE)
  @ApiOperation(value = "Create/update the instance partitions")
  public Map<InstancePartitionsType, InstancePartitions> setInstancePartitions(
      @ApiParam(value = "Name of the table") @PathParam("tableName") String tableName, String instancePartitionsStr)

You may check the

InstancePartitions.java

for details

Thanks @Jackie! I will look into this.