Deployment overview

This chapter describes how to deploy, upgrade, and downgrade a StarRocks cluster in a production environment.

Deployment procedure

A summary of the deployment procedure is as follows and later topics provide the details.

The deployment of StarRocks generally follows the steps outlined here:

1. Confirm the hardware and software requirements for your StarRocks deployment.

   Check the prerequisites that your servers must meet before deploying StarRocks, including CPU, memory, storage, network, operating system, and dependencies.

2. Plan your cluster size.

   Plan the number of FE nodes and BE nodes in your cluster, and the hardware specifications of the servers.

3. Check environment configurations.

   When your servers are ready, you need to check and modify some environment configurations before deploying StarRocks on them.

4. Prepare deployment files.

   • If you want to deploy StarRocks on x86 architecture, you can directly download and extract the software package provided on our official website.
   • If you want to deploy StarRocks on ARM architecture, you need to prepare the deployment files from the StarRocks Docker image.
   • If you want to deploy StarRocks on Kubernetes, you can skip this step.

5. Deploy StarRocks.

   • If you want to deploy a shared-data StarRocks cluster, which features a disaggregated storage and compute architecture, see Deploy and use shared-data StarRocks for instructions.

   • If you want to deploy a shared-nothing StarRocks cluster, which uses local storage, you have the following options:

     • Deploy StarRocks manually.
     • Deploy StarRocks on Kubernetes with operator.
     • Deploy StarRocks on Kubernetes with Helm.

6. Perform necessary post-deployment setup measures.

   Further setup measures are needed before your StarRocks cluster is put into production. These measures include securing the initial account and setting some performance-related system variables.

Upgrade and downgrade

If you plan to upgrade an existing StarRocks cluster to a later version rather than install StarRocks for the first time, see Upgrade StarRocks for information about upgrade procedures and issues that you should consider before upgrading.

For instructions to downgrade your StarRocks cluster, see Downgrade StarRocks.