You should only ever need the router node if you have a Druid cluster well into the terabyte range. The router node can be used to route queries to different broker nodes. By default, the broker routes queries based on how [Rules](Rules.html) are set up. For example, if 1 month of recent data is loaded into a `hot` cluster, queries that fall within the recent month can be routed to a dedicated set of brokers. Queries outside this range are routed to another set of brokers. This set up provides query isolation such that queries for more important data are not impacted by queries for less important data.
In this example, we have two tiers in our production cluster: `hot` and `_default_tier`. Queries for the `hot` tier are routed through the `broker-hot` set of brokers, and queries for the `_default_tier` are routed through the `broker-cold` set of brokers. If any exceptions or network problems occur, queries are routed to the `broker-cold` set of brokers. In our example, we are running with a c3.2xlarge EC2 node.
|`druid.router.defaultBrokerServiceName`|Any string.|The default broker to connect to in case service discovery fails.|"". Must be set.|
|`druid.router.tierToBrokerMap`|An ordered JSON map of tiers to broker names. The priority of brokers is based on the ordering.|Queries for a certain tier of data are routed to their appropriate broker.|{"_default": "<defaultBrokerServiceName>"}|
The router has a configurable list of strategies for how it selects which brokers to route queries to. The order of the strategies matter because as soon as a strategy condition is matched, a broker is selected.
Queries with a priority set to less than minPriority are routed to the lowest priority broker. Queries with priority set to greater than maxPriority are routed to the highest priority broker. By default, minPriority is 0 and maxPriority is 1. Using these default values, if a query with priority 0 (the default query priority is 0) is sent, the query skips the priority selection logic.