Typical Architecture
- Last Updated: April 14, 2026
- 2 minute read
- MarkLogic Server
- Version 11.0
- Documentation
This section describes some of the typical configurations of a MarkLogic cluster in an AWS environment.
As described in the Scalability, Availability, and Failover Guide, Evaluator Nodes (E-Nodes) perform data processing operations including aggregates, computations (including user defined functions). Data Nodes (D-Nodes) manage the forest data operations. E-Nodes can be grouped separately from D-Nodes in a security group, which might be preferable for some deployments.
End-user or app-level queries should be routed to the E-Nodes through a load balancer. You can add E-Nodes to scale up a cluster to handle more queries, more users and more computation.
To ensure high availability, place D-Nodes in different availability zones in the same region and configure them for local-disk failover to ensure each transaction is written to one or more replicas. Put configured D-Nodes in different zones from the masters, protecting against zone failure. In AWS, the latency between zones in the same region is low (approximately two milliseconds). For optimum availability, D-Nodes and E-Nodes should be split evenly between three availability zones. For disaster recovery, you can place D-Nodes in different regions and use database replication between the D-Nodes in each region, protecting against region failure. The MarkLogic cluster in the different region should be similarly configured for high availability across the availability zones of that region.
Warning:
Two clusters can work in the same region (with or without DR). As a best practice for setting up DR for a typical architecture, they should be in different regions. Only then can they serve the purpose of protection against a region failure.
Note:
Use high availability to protect against zone failure, and use disaster recovery to protect against region failure.
The recommended storage resources are EBS volumes for forests and S3 for backups. All volumes should be formatted with 16K blocks. This is optimized for MarkLogic's sequential IO profile. Each instance of MarkLogic Server should be configured with a small number of forests (2-4) per volume. Volumes should have a minimum of 3,000 IOPS (gp3 volume of any size or gp2 volume of 1 TB or larger).