Initial support for Morio clusters

We are happy to report that initial support for distributed Morio deployments has been merged into the code base. In other words, deploying a highly available Morio cluster is now possible.

There are certainly still some sharp edges — and probably a bunch of bugs too — but the groundwork for clustered deployments is in place.

We intend to support 3, 5, 7, and 9-node cluster deployments, even though for the time being we have only tested 3-node deployments. We hope to be able to test the other sizes as well as set up automated test environments so we can deploy with confidence.

We are capping the cluster size at maximum 9 broker nodes for now. We do not expect this limit to be a problem any time soon, but it is worth pointing out that you can add flanking nodes to the cluster to further horizontally scale out any stream processing activities. These flanking nodes do not count towards the 9-node cluster limit.

Please keep in mind that while this is a big step for Morio, the project is still in alpha.
If you want to get involved, do not hesitate to leave your feedback.