Hosting many instances of Confluence (multi tenancy?)
Asked by Stephan F?rnrohr:

If one is planning to host many (more than 100) nearly similar Wiki-Systems with Confluence...is there any best practice for such a setup? It would be great if the effort for maintaining and upgrading those systems would not scale 1:1 with the systems. Is there some kind of "multi tenancy" built into confluence?


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: No, you'll need 100 installs, and 100 licences. Unless you devolve the systems down to **Space** level, where you run one wiki and lots of spaces.

comments: author: Stephan F?rnrohr
body: Thank you, Nic!100 liceses is OK! :-)But 100 installs is...ouch, imagine there is a security patch....lots of work, this doesn't sound reasonable.Space level: we would need one domain per space....does this sound practicable?


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I wouldn't like to try to look after 100 licences (well, set up and renew 100 licences, and then knowing how many users is on each licence would be fun)At a Space level, no, you can't do it by domain. The urls for confluence are \<domain\>/SPACE, and it lives on one domain.


author: Stephan F?rnrohr
body: Hello Nic, I found this one:<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.bugsio.confluence.plugins.domain-booster>This might do the job for us (different domains for different spaces)Regards,Stephan


author: Midori
body: You'd need to manage a large number of isolated instances, so you need to tools and methods designed to manage applications in data centers.

If I were you,**I'd seriously looking into [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) and containerizing the Confluence instances** (instead of virtualizing them). And even add [Kubernetes](http://kubernetes.io/) to the mix.


author: Steve Gerstner [bridgingIT]
body: Hi Stephan,

the only thing you can do is provide the application on a shared network mount, this will simplify your updates, but, you still will need to keep your plugins on each instance up to date.

But do you really need 100 installs? As each space has is own permission management, you shouldn't need that under normal circumstances...

Regards

Steve

comments: author: Stephan F?rnrohr
body: Hi Steve, thank you for your answer.If we provide the application on a shared mount....how can we manage the different configurations? The central config files reside in the application folder, is there a possibility to keep the configs different from the application folder? 100 instances? - yes, the plan of our customer goes even further. And he needs different domains for the wikis, so the spaces will not do the job.Kind regards,Stephan


author: Steve Gerstner [bridgingIT]
body: In your app you define the confluence home folder, this one should be unique for each instance.That's the simple part.If you need other adjustements on the application like the seraph-config, you need a intelligent file system ;)Take a look on <http://unionfs.filesystems.org/>...Configurations done via the web interface is antoher tricky part. You need to do it manually or find the dataset in the database... Then you can probabliy work with sql-scripts. But, if you do so, take care that your instance is down and your script does not run on a running instance.Plugin-updates will be the trickiest part. One option, do it manually, or, try to build a script using curl or something like that to automate it...You see, it will be a lot of handicraft work...RegardsSteve


Tags: confluence-administration

server