topic Re: OPAs on different servers in Workato Pros Discussion Board

OPAs on different servers

kolson — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:34:33 GMT

Tech support is saying it is possible to have multiple OPAs in a single group but running on different servers, but it is not recommended to do it that way. They prefer to have OPAs running on the same server.

Has ANYONE tried to spread them across servers yet have them in the same group?

Re: OPAs on different servers

mroldanvega — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:39:36 GMT

In our production we have it set up like this. We have two separate servers, one OPA on each, and in the same group.

Re: OPAs on different servers

chijie — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:42:33 GMT

Hi Kris,

There must have been a miscommunication from our support. We recommend multiple OPAs in the same group on different servers.

Having all of them in the same server is what we don't recommend because that defeats the purpose of high availability and load balancing within the group.

Re: OPAs on different servers

kolson — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:50:57 GMT

You are definitely right about that. Must have been a miscommunication - thank you for clarifying.

Honestly, it is not clear in the documentation that you intend for the OPAs to be on different servers.

Re: OPAs on different servers

ryan-stewart — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:52:45 GMT

We attempted to run two OPAs in the same group on different servers to increase availability and ran into problems. The issue is that recipes were accessing on-prem services in multiple steps, and due to caching and replication delay, the data stored or returned could varry depending on which OPA ended up being used in a step.

A recipe does not use only one OPA throughout its run. Each step makes its own connection to an OPA and which OPA within a group is chosen will be different for each step. Because we could not gaurentee consistent data when different OPAs were used, we ended up being limited to only haveing one OPA per group to avoid errors.

Re: OPAs on different servers

gwilkinson — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 19:29:56 GMT

We also have two OPAs in PROD on different servers and have not run into any issues as pointed out by Ryan. I will be curious if others have and also Workato's input to this concern. If there is a potential issue, I would like to get out in front of it.

Re: OPAs on different servers

ryan-stewart — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 22:53:20 GMT

We asked to have a feature enhancement, that an OPA get picked when a recipe starts and then use that one OPA throughout its run. I don't know if this was ever implimented or not.

Re: OPAs on different servers

chijie — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 03:53:56 GMT

Hi Ryan,

Do you recall which app/connectors were involved in this issue?

I'd assume it'd be related to on-prem command line scripts?

Databases & HTTP endpoints should be fine since they all route to the same host regardless of which OPA it runs on.

Re: OPAs on different servers

ryan-stewart — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 19:07:25 GMT

Hi Cj,

As I remember, the problem was mostly with file connectors. Even when we pointed both OPAs to a common share location, file updates weren't reflected fast enough for a following step to see the changes.