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Chapter 10. Deploying Red Hat build of Keycloak for HA with the Operator

Deploy Red Hat build of Keycloak for high availability with the Red Hat build of Keycloak Operator as a building block.

This guide describes advanced Red Hat build of Keycloak configurations for Kubernetes which are load tested and will recover from single Pod failures.

These instructions are intended for use with the setup described in the Concepts for multi-site deployments chapter. Use it together with the other building blocks outlined in the Building blocks multi-site deployments chapter.

10.1. Prerequisites
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10.2. Procedure
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  1. Determine the sizing of the deployment using the Concepts for sizing CPU and memory resources chapter.
  2. Install the Red Hat build of Keycloak Operator as described in the Red Hat build of Keycloak Operator installation chapter.
  3. Notice the configuration file below contains options relevant for connecting to the Aurora database from Deploying AWS Aurora in multiple availability zones
  4. Notice the configuration file below options relevant for connecting to the Data Grid server from Deploying Data Grid for HA with the Data Grid Operator
  5. Build a custom Red Hat build of Keycloak image which is prepared for usage with the Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database.

  6. Deploy the Red Hat build of Keycloak CR with the following values with the resource requests and limits calculated in the first step: 

    apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  labels:
    app: keycloak
  name: keycloak
  namespace: keycloak
spec:
  hostname:
    hostname: <KEYCLOAK_URL_HERE>
  resources:
    requests:
      cpu: "2"
      memory: "1250M"
    limits:
      cpu: "6"
      memory: "2250M"
  db:
    vendor: postgres
    url: jdbc:aws-wrapper:postgresql://<AWS_AURORA_URL_HERE>:5432/keycloak
    poolMinSize: 30
    1 
    
    poolInitialSize: 30
    poolMaxSize: 30
    usernameSecret:
      name: keycloak-db-secret
      key: username
    passwordSecret:
      name: keycloak-db-secret
      key: password
  image: <KEYCLOAK_IMAGE_HERE>
    2 
    
  startOptimized: false
    3 
    
  features:
    enabled:
      - multi-site
    4 
    
  additionalOptions:
    - name: log-console-output
      value: json
    - name: metrics-enabled
    5 
    
      value: 'true'
    - name: event-metrics-user-enabled
      value: 'true'
    - name: cache-remote-host
      value: "infinispan.keycloak.svc"
    - name: cache-remote-port
      value: "11222"
    - name: cache-remote-username
      secret:
        name: remote-store-secret
        key: username
    - name: cache-remote-password
      secret:
        name: remote-store-secret
        key: password
    - name: db-driver
      value: software.amazon.jdbc.Driver
  http:
    tlsSecret: keycloak-tls-secret
  instances: 3
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    1
    The database connection pool initial, max and min size should be identical to allow statement caching for the database. Adjust this number to meet the needs of your system. As most requests will not touch the database due to the Red Hat build of Keycloak embedded cache, this change can server several hundreds of requests per second. See the Concepts for database connection pools chapter for details.
    2 3
    Specify the URL to your custom Red Hat build of Keycloak image. If your image is optimized, set the startOptimized flag to true.
    4
    Enable additional features for multi-site support like the loadbalancer probe /lb-check.
    5
    To be able to analyze the system under load, enable the metrics endpoint.

10.3. Verifying the deployment
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Confirm that the Red Hat build of Keycloak deployment is ready. 

oc wait --for=condition=Ready keycloaks.k8s.keycloak.org/keycloak
oc wait --for=condition=RollingUpdate=False keycloaks.k8s.keycloak.org/keycloak
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10.4. Optional: Load shedding
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To enable load shedding, limit the number of queued requests.

Load shedding with max queued http requests

spec:
  additionalOptions:
    - name: http-max-queued-requests
      value: "1000"
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All exceeding requests are served with an HTTP 503.

You might consider limiting the value for http-pool-max-threads further because multiple concurrent threads will lead to throttling by Kubernetes once the requested CPU limit is reached.

See the Concepts for configuring thread pools chapter about load shedding for details.

10.5. Optional: Disable sticky sessions
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When running on OpenShift and the default passthrough Ingress setup as provided by the Red Hat build of Keycloak Operator, the load balancing done by HAProxy is done by using sticky sessions based on the IP address of the source. When running load tests, or when having a reverse proxy in front of HAProxy, you might want to disable this setup to avoid receiving all requests on a single Red Hat build of Keycloak Pod.

Add the following supplementary configuration under the spec in the Red Hat build of Keycloak Custom Resource to disable sticky sessions. 

spec:
  ingress:
    enabled: true
    annotations:
      # When running load tests, disable sticky sessions on the OpenShift HAProxy router
      # to avoid receiving all requests on a single Red Hat build of Keycloak Pod.
      haproxy.router.openshift.io/balance: roundrobin
      haproxy.router.openshift.io/disable_cookies: 'true'
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