Installing Developer Portal in multiple data centers (OPDK 4.18.01 and higher)

Google Cloud Apigee Knowledge Hub
1

This article explains the approach to setup Developer Portal in two data-centers:

  1. Make sure you install the on-premises Developer portal in both the data-centers. This is required so that all the required software/dependencies are installed correctly.
  2. Verify the individual developer portals are working fine.
  3. Make sure you have the nightly database backups in-place. This is useful to make sure you have a copy to rollback to.
  4. When you want to perform a Multi Data-center Drupal setup, we recommend you use the Active-Passive approach. Only one data-center can be active at a time, second data-center kicks in only when the first data-center is down.
  5. Load Balancer for the Developer Portal
    • Make sure it points to data-center 1 and switches to data-center 2 in case of a failover
    • If the HTTP request times out a few times, we can assume the data center is down.
  6. Postgres replication
    • Please refer to this doc on how to setup Postgres replication
  7. File System synchronization
    • Drupal stores user uploaded files on the file system in sites/default/files and sites/default/private directories.
    • We have to make sure that these two directories are synchronized between the two data-centers. You can use NFS, GlusterFS, S3, or other type of syncing mechanism to sync
    • One way sync from the active DC to the passive DC should be enough for this.
  8. Cron Job
    • Make sure that you setup the cron job in only one of the data-centers
    • In this case would be data-center 1
    • Reason for this is to ensure only one data-center writes to the DB.
  9. Settings.php
    • The settings.php file in individual data-centers will still hold the database connection to servers in their Data-Centers.
    • This eliminates the need for adding an additional load balancer in front of the database servers and having to switch them in case of a failover.
2

Do I have an option to use multiple DC using cloud based portal? I understand that Pantheon has only one DC available ie. in USA.

3

It seems Apigee uses Acuqia for EU based portals:

http://docs.apigee.com/developer-services/content/working-acquia

4

This is for Private Cloud releases prior to 17.01.

5

Hi gkoli@apigee.com

In OPDK 4.17.09, two dc dev portal set up (postgres) noticed below

– all the site customization such as logos, color, site information were automatically sync up with other node.

– noticed same behavior with Smartdocs models (Open API specs imports) as well.

Could you please confirm if any of the above file system changes/configurations required here in this case..

Thanks.

6

Except step # 6 everything else should apply.

SmartDocs are stored in Edge so they would sync correctly.

the logo color and site information is stored in the DB and that may explain why they appear to have synced.

Does your site have a custom theme? or custom functionality?

7

Thanks Gitesh..

Currently there is no custom theme on DP. But do we need any file system changes/configurations to apply custom theme..

8

Pantheon has a new DR offering which can do multiple data centers.

https://pantheon.io/resources/disaster-recovery-webinar