Create a Cluster

This guide shows you how to create an M3 cluster of 3 nodes, designed to run locally on the same machine. It is designed to show you how M3 and Kubernetes can work together, but not as a production example. This guide assumes you have read the quickstart, and builds upon the concepts in that guide. We recommend you use our Kubernetes operator to deploy M3 to a cluster. It is a more streamlined setup that uses custom resource definitions to automatically handle operations such as managing cluster placements.

This guide shows you the steps involved in creating an M3 cluster using M3 binaries, typically you would automate this with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or Kubernetes. This guide assumes you have read the quickstart, and builds upon the concepts in that guide. M3 Architecture Node types An M3 deployment typically has two main node types: Storage nodes (m3dbnode) are the workhorses of M3, they store data and serve reads and writes.