From the version 2.4.0, Apache Ignite introduced a new way to connect to the Ignite cluster, which allows communication with the Ignite cluster without starting an Ignite client node. Historically, Apache Ignite provides two notions of client and server nodes. Ignite client node is intended as lightweight mode, which does not store data (however, it can store near cache) and does not execute any compute tasks. Mainly, the client node is used to communicate with the server remotely and allows manipulating the Ignite Caches using the whole set of Ignite API’s. There are two main downsides with the Ignite Client node:
- Whenever Ignite client node connects to the Ignite cluster, it becomes the part of the cluster topology. The bigger the topology is, the harder it is for maintaining.
- In the client mode, Apache Ignite node consumes a lot of resources for performing cache operations
To solve the above problems, Apache Ignite provides a new binary client protocol for implementing thin Ignite client in any programming language or platforms.