Remote Connectors

The Fusion connector architecture is designed to be scalable. Depending on whether the connector is a V1 or a V2 (SDK) connector, jobs can be scaled by adding new instances of just the connector. The fetching process for these connectors also supports distributed fetching, so that many instances can contribute to the same job.

SDK connectors can be hosted within Fusion Server, or can run remotely. In the hosted case, these connectors are cluster aware. This means that when a new instance of Fusion starts up, the connectors on other Fusion nodes become aware of the new connector, and vice versa. This makes scaling connector jobs simple.

In the remote case, a connector becomes a client of Fusion. This remote client runs a lightweight process and communicates to Fusion using an efficient messaging format. This option makes it possible to put the connector wherever the data lives. This can be done for performance reasons, or for security or access reasons.

The default SDK connector service is connectors-rpc. By default, connectors-rpc runs on port 8771. This service handles connector registration, configuration management, job management, and cluster coordination. Like other Fusion services, it also provides access to non-connector clients.