Understanding Deployment Types

The deployment type of a service determines many different facets of how it functions, including performance, memory usage, and access to files or volumes. Liferay Cloud provides two deployment types for its services: Deployment and StatefulSet.

Differences Between Deployment Types

The Deployment type features the following:

• Network File System (NFS) is mounted onto a directory available to this service
• Network identifiers are random (e.g., liferay-89f9f559, liferay-d1267401)
• Deployment and scaling are unordered
• Automated rolling updates are unordered

Meanwhile, the StatefulSet type features the following:

• Service is allocated a dedicated SSD
• Network identifiers are stable and unique (e.g., search-0, search-1)
• Deployment and scaling are ordered
• Automated rolling updates are ordered

Type	Purpose	Resource Usage and Startup Time	Dedicated SSD for Local Volumes	Access to NFS	Ordered Startup / Scaling
Deployment	Stateless applications with the use of NFS	Consumes less resources and starts up faster than StatefulSet type	X	✓	X
StatefulSet	Stateful applications	Consumes more resources and starts up slower than Deployment type	✓	✓1	✓

In general, the Deployment type is more lightweight and allows for faster deployments, as well as shared volumes between services (for shared files, like the document library). The StatefulSet type is more costly for deployments and resource usage (including the total memory and CPUs allocated for your project), but persists data through deployments and gains improved file access performance by using a dedicated SSD.

Shared Volumes (NFS) vs SSD Storage

The Network File System (NFS) is available to all Deployment type services. NFS will persist regardless of whether a service is re-deployed or even deleted.

The volumes stored in NFS are also available to all Deployment type services. NFS is used out-of-the-box for the Liferay and Backup services to share access to the document library. See Configuring Persistent File System Volumes for more information on configuring volumes for NFS.

StatefulSet type services have a dedicated SSD for all volume storage. The dedicated SSD available to StatefulSet type services is not accessible to other services. Volumes stored on the SSD also persist on re-deployment and after service deletion. In clustered StatefulSet services, each instance has a different volume.

How Liferay Cloud’s Services are Configured

The following details how the services in Liferay PaaS and SaaS are pre-configured out-of-the-box:

• The Liferay and Backup services use the Deployment type, so that they can share access to the document library, which is stored in NFS.

• The Database and Web Server services also use the Deployment type, so that they can remain lightweight and start up quickly.

• The CI service uses the StatefulSet type, so that it can take advantage of the extra file access speed from having a dedicated SSD.

• The Search service also uses the StatefulSet type, so that it can take advantage of extra speed for searches, and so that search indices stored on the SSD are not lost if the service restarts.

Configuring Deployment Types

By default, the services in Liferay PaaS are pre-configured in order to fit a majority of use cases. However, the deployment type for each service is configurable via the kind variable in the service’s LCP.json:

{
    "id": "search",
    "kind": "StatefulSet"
}

Note

Change the deployment type with caution, as it may result in data loss or impacted performance.

Related Topics

• Configuring Persistent File System Volumes
• Understanding Deployment Strategies

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1. StatefulSets can use NFS volumes, but they cannot use the same dedicated volume used for Liferay’s home directory.

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