[HBASE-17453] add Ping into HBase server for deprecated GetProtocolVersion

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Later
• Affects Version/s: 1.2.2
• Component/s: regionserver
• Assignee: Tianying Chang
• Reporter: Tianying Chang
• Created: 12/Jan/17 01:14
• Updated: 02/Jul/17 17:31
• Resolved: 02/Jul/17 17:31

Description

Our HBase service is hosted in AWS. We saw cases where the connection between the client (Asynchbase in our case) and server stop working but did not throw any exception, therefore traffic stuck. So we added a "Ping" feature in AsyncHBase 1.5 by utilizing the GetProtocolVersion() API provided at RS side, if no traffic for given time, we send the "Ping", if no response back for "Ping", we assume the connect is bad and reconnect.

Now we are upgrading cluster from 94 to 1.2. However, GetProtocolVersion() is deprecated. To be able to support same detect/reconnect feature, we added Ping() in our internal HBase 1.2 branch, and also patched accordingly in Asynchbase 1.7.

We would like to open source this feature since it is useful for use case in AWS environment.