High availability License cost

[Tom Clark]

I have several Bitbucket Data Center licenses and there is a new requirement that we make several of our environments into a High Availability type.

Will having a HA environment require that I purchase a second Bitbucket DC license or since the HA portion is on standby until called upon am I allowed to use the Dev license in this example?

Many thanks in advance,

t

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Your Data Center licence entitles you to run one Bitbucket service.  The number of nodes you have in the cluster that the service runs on is not constrained by the licence, even when you've got dormant nodes that you only fire up when there's a problem with others.

Atlassian only really support clusters of 2-4 nodes in a simple "all nodes run, we distribute load evenly" configuration by default, but only in the sense of "that's what they have tested to death". 

More unusual setups are still supported, you just find it might be a bit slower if you're asking for support on a single-node DC install, or one with more than 6 nodes (I say 6 because I know they regularly test that high, but 7+ is more "when we've got time to try"), or ones with skewed nodes

My experience with clustering servers goes back to the days when you always built clusters with odd numbers of nodes so that you always had a clear consensus on decisions, and to this day I still recommend that, but there's also the more sophisticated cases where you've got a cluster with one node doing the primary backups, another dedicated to incoming REST calls and having no vote, or the case you suggest - X nodes, X-2 active most of the time, but if a node fails, you fire up one of the inactive nodes to balance the load. 

Your dev licence is for dropping on to non-production systems so you can do development, sandboxes, testing, upgrade tests and so on.  It's for a separate system.  (It does also say "disaster recovery", but when you've got a DC install, that DR is more about having a remote cluster that can take over if you lose every node in your production system, and there's more sneaky things you can do there to provide HA)

TLDR: your licence covers running the service.  Not nodes.  It does not care if you have one node, six nodes, or eleventy-twelve, some of which are dedicated to certain purposes, and/or dormant until needed.