Scaling/availability

Blueriq services

• For the development versions, we support a single instance of each component described in the Blueriq DCM architecture overview.
• In the first production versions, we will support two scalability aspects:
  • Multiple runtimes for user interaction, with sticky sessions
  • Execute automatic tasks in parallel on a single runtime AND use multiple runtimes for executing automatic tasks
• In the further future, we intend to support:
  • Multiple runtimes for user interaction with external sessions (Redis)
  • Multiple case engines

Dashboarding

Using the DCM dashboard architecture scaling/availablity and failover is supported for all services and components. This approach is only supported by configuring services to use external sessions (redis). 

Third party services

Scaling/availability for third party services (RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Oracle/MSSQL) needs to be configured in these applications. Each of them provides information on how to scale:

Backup strategy

Blueriq stores operational data in several databases. We strongly advise to back up this data, otherwise cases might get corrupt after e.g. a server crash.

SQL (MSSQL/Oracle)

Use the backup capabilities of these platforms that conform to your need. You need to back up:

• process database
• scheduler database
• timeline database
• trace database
• comments database
• aggregate database

MongoDB

Use the backup capability of this platform. You need to back up:

• Maintenance app database
• Case Database
• Locks Database
• DCM Lists Database ^*

^* It is possible to restore the DCM Lists Database from the process database, but this process may take some time, depending on the number of processes in the process database

RabbitMQ

See https://www.rabbitmq.com/backup.html for information. As the data in RabbitMQ changes rapidly, there is probably no secure way to back up data at any given time. You would need to hope that the data concerning messages that were in RabbitMQ at the moment that the server on which it runs crashed is not corrupted.

The best way to deal with this kind of data loss is to use replication, so if one RabbitMQ server crashes, the other can still continue the work.

We advise to combine all exchanges/queues for the DCM setup in a single RabbitMQ virtual host.

Concurrent consumers

For the trace-sql-store, timeline-sql-store, case-engine-client components as well as the Case Engine, it's possible to set a number of concurrent consumers. Please consider the following if you want to use concurrent consumers in your application: Consumers — RabbitMQ.  If you increase the amount of concurrent consumers, the application will start multiple threads to consume messages. This will most likely increase processing speed but also increase memory consumption and CPU usage. Please take this in considerations when updating the amount of concurrent consumers.

The default setting of 1 concurrent consumer should be enough for most applications. If you notice that your application's message throughput is not high enough and there are enough resources, the concurrent consumers could be increased. We advice testing this thoroughly.

Visit Configuring RabbitMQ for more information on the functionality. 

Security

For the runtime(s) that have user interaction, we advise to protect them as you would with any Blueriq Runtime. See Security for more information.

The DCM Maintenance App is intended for intranet use. We don't expect it to be available on a public server.

All other components are internal, for system to system communication, and they shouldn't need to be exposed to public internet and/or intranet. For the third party components, you might want to have a management console, query tool or administration page available for debugging. These need to be configured as restrictively as possible.

We advise you to set up your network protection accordingly.