Can a JIRA/Confluence application connect to 2 crowd servers in failover mode?

[Archanaa Panda]

Hi,

I am connecting my Atlassian applications - JIRA/Confluence/Fisheye to Crowd for SSO across these applications.

Is it possible to connect each of these Atlassian applications to 2 Crowd server instances wherein the second one will be a cold standby for failover?

I am looking at possible options to automatically failover the crowd server without having to change all the application links in each of the Atlassian application that is connected for SSO purposes.

This is assuming that both Crowd server instances will be sharing Database or have active/passive database available so that the SSO tokens and other data created by Crowd 1 will be available to Crowd 2 as well.

So if the above is not possible, I will have to look at achieving this via networking means to maintain same URL for both crowd server instances. But this option may have performance implications (due to extra hops and network requirements) and I wanted to avoid it.

Thanks and Regards,

Archanaa

[Harry Chan · Accepted solution]

Hi, Crowd doesn't support clustering or hot failover. The best way to achieve this would be to setup a virtual IP and cold failover 2 Crowd instances. Point your DNS to the virtual IP instead.

Having said that - has Crowd crashed/failed for you and if so how long and what were the implications? As every Atlassian application maintains a Crowd cache - a slight downtime shouldn't cause any problems. I would look at increasing the length of the cache if it is a problem. This will mean changes will be delayed, but there's always tradeoffs.

[Rodrigo Girardi Adami]

Hi Archanaa,

I believe that could be possible since this configuration is done in local files such as the WEB-INF/classes/seraph-config.xml one.

If you set 2 crowd directories in each application and one of those fail, it will try to reach the other and if they have the same user base, it will login too.

I can't guarantee it will work because I've never tested this so I'll leave this question open so others can give their opinions and ideas.

Hope that helps! :)

Regards,

Rodrigo Adami