Compact
Cloudify Compact Cluster
Cloudify’s clustering architecture is based on an active-active model, and on service separation, allowing Cloudify to offer a high availability architecture while keeping the flexibility to leverage a managed external PostgreSQL database service or RabbitMQ messaging queue. The separation of services approach was introduced in v5.0.5 and improved the scaling ability and the robustness of the failover mechanism thanks to the active-active approach and to the usage of industry-standard replication and synchronization concepts.
When using the complete high availability cluster a minimal number of 9 VMs is required. Some organizations are seeking a more compact model leveraging just 3 VMs for ease of maintenance and control. The 3 nodes cluster topology was designed to answer this. A 3 VM compact model still offers an active-active approach and complete high availability, yet leveraging just 3 VMs for simplified management and operational flows. In this model, each of the VMs is running all of the Cloudify services, namely the Cloudify Manager, the PostgreSQL database, and the Rabbit messaging queue.
Note: While all services are running on each of the VMs, it does not necessarily mean that communication is always internal in the VM. For example, the database’s high availability setup is such that at any given time one node is active while the other nodes are in synchronous replica and async replica. That means that all the managers will be communicating with the active database node regardless if it is a local or a remote one.