slavemultimaster

Slavemultimaster is a class of distributed system configurations in which a set of master controllers coordinate with a group of slave nodes. In such architectures, multiple masters can issue commands and participate in coordinating state changes across the slaves. The primary goals are high availability, fault tolerance, and load distribution, achieved by distributing leadership and control rather than relying on a single master.

In operation, slaves maintain replicated state by applying updates from masters. Masters either elect a de facto primary for a given operation, or operate as active participants in a consensus group. Communication is typically mediated by a replication protocol and a fault-tolerant messaging layer. Consistency guarantees vary: some implementations provide strong consistency using consensus protocols such as Paxos or Raft, while others opt for eventual consistency and application-layer conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution: In multi-master writes, concurrent updates can lead to conflicts. Strategies include last-writer-wins, mergeable data types with CRDTs, or application-defined reconciliation. Some architectures separate control commands from data modifications and use versioning to coordinate.

Use cases: Slavemultimaster is used in distributed databases, real-time analytics, messaging systems, and automation platforms where downtime must be minimized or where locality of writes is beneficial. It is contrasted with single-master replication approaches that simplify consistency but reduce availability.

History and alternatives: The multi-master pattern extends earlier master-slave replication. Due to complexity, some projects prefer primary-replica setups or opt for leaderless designs with distributed consensus. The term itself may appear in different projects with varying specifics; consult project documentation for exact behavior.