Neo4j: How to setup failover in community edition

Question

How to set up the following in neo4j community edition version 2.x

failover

master-slave setup

cluster

Is HA (high availability) is different from cluster setup in neo4j?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 7697

Answer 1

Yatendra, your understanding is not correct, so let me explain.

You can use Neo4j Community Edition freely for a web application, but then you don't get the features you need for a performant 24x7 application, which are: clustering, high-performance cache, enterprise lock manager, hot backups, and advanced monitoring. To get those features, you'll want Neo4j Enterprise Edition. Our philosophy with Enterprise follows the "fair trade" concept that Stefan mentioned. Community Edition has few strings attached for the end user: you can use it to make money, and we're very happy with you doing that for free. Enterprise Edition on the other hand has a company fully supporting it, i.e. standing behind it contractually, doing all sorts of quality testing, maintaining a separate stack of operational features, and providing support. Enterprise is something that we license commercially (i.e. for money). That said, we also love open source. So if you want to be generous and offer up your app for the world by contributing it to the open source commons, then that contribution will suffice. If you want to keep your app for yourself (hey, sometimes you need to focus on making money too) then you can keep it closed source. Licensing Neo4j commercially from Neo Tech will give you a separate commercial license which exempts you from the AGPL requirement, allowing you to keep your app closed source. (To be clear: a web-facing app using Neo4j Enterprise without a commercial license from Neo Tech will need to be open sourced under the AGPL.) Either way you are sharing: source code with the world, or a financial contribution to help make Neo4j possible. (Neo4j exists thanks largely to its sponsor Neo Technology, which for better or worse needs to employ people etc., which costs money, etc.)

A commercial license for Enterprise gives you access to a cluster of 3 machines. (You can always license more, but 3 will get you a very long way - it's a different mindset from other NoSQL technologies where you might need 10 or 100 machines.) You're a startup, so the good news is that we have a couple special programs made just for startups, with some mild restrictions, since we love startups and understand what it is to be a startup:

• "Three people in a garage" startups that have no outside funding can benefit from a "Personal License", which is free (yes, free). You don't get support with this, but it exempts you from the AGPL requirement until you are big enough to walk on your own two feet. There are some small marketing requirements such as agreeing to let Neo your logo or provide a quote - but that publicity is often desirable for startups, and there are enough options to make it a win-win in nearly all cases.
• For larger startups (up to 10M in funding and 3M in revenue - see Neo's site for further details) Neo has a special program that includes support (as well as the license, allowing closed-source use) for 12k annually for a cluster of three. For a 24x7 web app, the idea is that the Enterprise features combined with Support create a lot of value, also giving you someone to reach out to when things go wrong, which can be huge.

Hope this helps! I would invite you to have a conversation with the Neo Tech account manager for India, whom you can reach through the Contact Us form on the Neo4j.com site.

Answer 2

HA, failover and clustering are only available in Neo4j's enterprise edition. For detailed documentation please refer to http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/ha.html

Neo4j enterprise edition is licensed open source via AGPL or via commercial licensing provided by Neo Technology. The commercial licenses come with support as well. Since I'm working for Neo Technology please reach out to me directly in case you want to know more about the commercial side.