Architecture overview¶

Nebula Graph consists of three services: the Graph Service, the Storage Service, and the Meta Service.

Each service has its executable binaries and processes launched from the binaries. You can deploy a Nebula Graph cluster on a single machine or multiple machines using these binaries.

The following figure shows the architecture of a typical Nebula Graph cluster.

The Meta Service¶

The Meta Service in the Nebula Graph architecture is run by the nebula-metad processes. It is responsible for metadata management, such as schema operations, cluster administration, and user privilege management.

For details on the Meta Service, see Meta Service.

The Graph Service and the Storage Service¶

Nebula Graph applies a disaggregated storage and compute architecture. The Graph Service is responsible for querying. The Storage Service is responsible for storage. And they run on different processes, i.e., nebula-graphd and nebula-storaged. The benefits of disaggregated storage and compute are as follows:

• Great scalability. A disaggregated structure makes both the Graph Service and the Storage Service flexible and easy to scale in or out.
• High availability. If part of the Graph Service fails, the data stored by the Storage Service suffers no loss. And if the rest part of the Graph Service is still able to serve the clients, service recovery can be performed quickly, or even unfelt by the users.
• Cost-effective. The separation of computing and storage provides a higher resource utilization rate, and it enables you to manage the cost flexibly according to business demands. The cost savings can be more significant if you use the Nebula Graph Cloud service.
• Open to more possibilities. With the ability to run separately, the Graph Service may work with multiple types of storage engines, and the Storage Service may serve more types of computing engines.

For details on the Graph Service and the Storage Service, see Graph Service and Storage Service.