The first goal of Karaf Cellar is to synchronize the status of several Karaf instances (named nodes).

Cellar provides dedicated shell commands and JMX MBeans to manage the cluster, and manipulate the resources on the cluster.

It’s also possible to enable local resources listeners: these listeners broadcast local resource changes as cluster events. Please note that this behavior is disabled by default as it can have side effects (especially when a node is stopped). Enabling listeners is at your own risk.

The nodes list could be discovered (using unicast or multicast), or "static" defined (using a couple hostname or IP and port list).

Cellar is able to synchronize:

Optionally, Cellar also support synchronization of OSGi EventAdmin, OBR (URLs and bundles).

The second goal is to provide a Distributed OSGi runtime. It means that using Cellar, you are able to call an OSGi service located on a remote instance. See the transport and DOSGi section of the user guide.

Finally, Cellar also provides "runtime clustering" by providing dedicated feature like:

This is the default Cellar topology. Cellar is installed on all nodes, each node has the same function.

It means that you can perform actions on any node, it will be broadcasted to all others nodes.

In this topology, if Cellar is installed on all nodes, you perform actions only on one specific node (the "manager").

To do that, the "manager" is a standard Cellar node, and the event producing is disable on all others nodes (cluster:producer-stop on all "managed" nodes).

Like this, only the "manager" will send event to the nodes (which are able to consumer and handle), but no event can be produced on the nodes.