VM Single Instance
While an active-active cluster enables you to achieve four or five nines uptime, you may want to consider a single VM instance if simplicity of operation trumps availability. If you do a good job at monitoring, and can restore from backup quickly, it's certainly possible to meet an SLA of 99.9% availability using just one server.
Janssen has Linux packages available for SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu. One
operational consideration is that you should hold the version
of Jans Auth Server, to avoid update during the normal package update process.
As many applications may rely on a central IDP, you want to plan updates and
have a rollback plan if something goes wrong. An automated, unattended update
process for the IDP is too risky.
An important security tradeoff when you run Janssen on a single VM is that
services which you want to control access to are running on a server with
an Internet-facing ethernet interface: the Config API, database, and SCIM
server. Even though these services are running on localhost, if the Internet
facing interface is compromised, network protection could be bypassed.
The main advantage of running a single VM is simplicity. Your sys admins won't need any special training. And it will be easy to install, backup, monitor, and configure your deployment. If you have many autonomous domains, each with its own brand and user identity management process, the simplicity of running a single IDP might be the best solution. If three nines are acceptable to your business, the expense of deploying and operating a cluster may not be justified.
Created: 2022-07-21
