Prerequisites and Sizing Guidelines for Installing a Cloudify Manager

Before you install the Cloudify Manager, please review the following prerequisites and make sure that your environment is ready to support the Cloudify Manager.

Cloudify All-in-One

All-in-One (AIO) deployment is based on a single Cloudify box (single VM/Container) running all the Cloudify components, mainly the manager, the database and the messaging queue. An AIO deployment is recommended for non-mission critical use when High-availability is not required and the scale is not extreme. Cloudify AIO is typically used for development and testing systems, but also common in production for smaller-scale areas.

Recommended Resources

• The minimum requirements are enough for a manager running just a few compute instances, typically for developer use, POC, or a small edge site.
• The recommended spec was certified with 500K deployments and an average rate of over 1000 workflows per hour.
• Adding more resources has proven to be successful for higher loads.

Cloudify Compact cluster (3 nodes)

The Cloudify compact cluster deployment is based on 3 servers, each running all of the Cloudify services, where the services are deployed in an active-active approach with a high-availability setup. A Compact cluster provides an enterprise grade Cloudify deployment suitable to almost any organization, with a performance and scale equivelent to a fully distributed cluster containing 3 managers and with the option offurther scaling using higher form factor hardware. The compact cluster is designed for mission critical use.

Recommended Resources for each of the 3 nodes:

• The recommended spec was certified with 1M deployments and an average rate of over 2500 workflows per hour.
• Adding more resources has proven to be successful for higher loads.

Cloudify fully distributed cluster

A Cloudify cluster consists of 3 main services: Cloudify Manager, Database, and Messaging queue. Cloudify cluster topology assures high availability and should be leveraged for mission-critical deployments. Learn more about the Cloudify cluster

Cloudify Manager server

For a highly available setup at lease two managers are required, 3 are recommended.

Recommended resources per manager server

• The recommended spec is for average use of 1000-2000 workflows per hour and was certified with 1M deployments.
• Scaling to higher volume can be achieved via
  • Additional Cloudify Managers - an almost linear scaling was verified leveraging 3-6 managers.
  • Higher hardware spec - a linear scaling was verified with stronger hardware
• The equivalent AWS instance is c5.xlarge
• Customized sizing and tunning may further improve the supported scale. Over 2M deployed nodes and over 5000 workflows per hour were tested in some scenarios.

Database (PostgreSQL) server

For a highly available setup, 3 database servers are required.

Recommended resources per database server

• The recommended spec is for average use of 1000-2000 workflows per hour and was certified with 1M deployments.
• Scaling to higher volume can be achieved via
  • Higher hardware spec - a linear scaling was verified with stronger hardware
• The equivalent AWS instance is r5.large

Messaging queue (RabbitMQ) server

For a highly available setup, 3 messaging queue servers are required.

Recommended resources per messaging queue server

• The recommended spec is for average use of 1000-2000 workflows per hour and was certified with 1M deployments.
• Scaling to higher volume can be achieved via
  • Higher hardware spec - a linear scaling was verified with stronger hardware
• The equivalent AWS instance is c5.large

Sizing Guidelines

Defining the exact sizing of a Cloudify manager is tricky because there are many variants in the equation. That said, here are some guidelines and insights to how such sizing can be determined.

Tenants

Up to 1000 tenants may be defined in a Cloudify manager/cluster.

Users

There is virtually no limit to the number of users defined in the system. The max number of concurrent users interacting with the manager is 200 (based on the recommended spec above.

Blueprints

There is no limit on the number of blueprints other than their size. Blueprints are stored in on the manager hard drive and in the database and are relatively small entities. A very large blueprint may consume 1M of disk space and similar size in the DB. most will require much less than that. Cloudify recommends allocating 50GB of storage to the manager which should suffice for most customers.

Plugins

There is no limit on the number of plugins other than their size. Plugins are stored in the manager hard drive. A typical plugin consumes approximately 5M. Very large plugins consume 20M of storage.

Deployments

A single Cloudify manager/manager cluster can maintain up to 500K deployed nodes. Deployments are very light and consume very little space in the DB/hard drive. A typical deployment size would be up to 10K of disk size and consume very few entries in the DB.

Workflows

A Cloudify manager/cluster can operate up to 100 concurrent workflows. This threshold is enforced by the system. Note: This threshold may be modified in the configuration, however, Cloudify recommends keeping the default.

Secrets

There is virtually no limit to the number of secrets.

Agents

Up to 2000 agents may be deployed per single Cloudify manager/manager cluster.

UI/CLI/API requests per second

The REST API performance varies depending on multiple factors, but as a guideline, you should expect the Cloudify manager to support up to 10 requests per second with the above-recommended spec.

Events

The system can run and track up to 100 events per second with the above-recommended spec.

Logs, events and metrics

You must have enough storage to store the logs, events and metrics sent from the hosts. You can configure log rotation to reduce the amount of storage space required.

Architecture and OS

Cloudify Manager is supported for installation on a 64-bit host with RHEL/CentOS 7.6.

Cloudify Images for OpenStack and Docker

You can also create a Cloudify Manager with the OpenStack or Docker images available at Cloudify downloads.

Network

Network Interfaces

The Cloudify Manager requires at least 2 network interfaces with configured IP addresses:

• Private - This interface is dedicated for communication with other Cloudify components, including agents and cluster members.
• Public - This interface is dedicated for connections to the Cloudify Manager via the Cloudify CLI and Cloudify Management Console.

Connectivity requirements These are the minimal requirements for production systems. * Internal communication - between Cloudify management cluster entities - at least 1Gbps connection with a latency of 1msec or less. * Cloudify agent to manager communication - at least 100Mbps connection with a latency of 50ms or less.

Network Ports The Cloudify Manager listens on the following ports:

Additionally, when Cloudify is deployed in a cluster topology, the following ports should be allowed:

Database nodes access to each other:

Manager access to database servers:

Messaging queue (RabbitMQ) nodes access to each other:

Manager access to messaging queue servers:

Manager to manager access:

All ports are TCP unless noted otherwise.

Reverse DNS lookup

Reverse DNS lookup must be available for the RabbitMQ nodes.

Prerequisite Packages

Software requirements

These are specific packages that are commonly included in RHEL/CentOS. You must have these packages installed before you install the Cloudify Manager:

Interoperability

The Cloudify manager is a complete application. As such, it contains several installed dependencies such as PostgreSQL, NGINX, RabbitMQ, and others. It is required that you install Cloudify manager on a standalone VM or container and do not co-locate any other applications on that machine or container (beyond possible monitoring or logging software). You must install the Cloudify manager as described in the installation instructions in this guide.