OPAs on different servers

[kolson]

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?

[mroldanvega]

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

[chijie]

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.

[kolson]

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.

[ryan-stewart]

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.