Use this as a starting point to size a product environment. Adjust the values for your environment as needed based on your load tests.
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Summary:
The used CPU scales linearly with the number of requests up to the tested limit below.
Recommendations:
The base memory usage for a Pod including caches of Realm data and 10,000 cached sessions is 1250 MB of RAM.
In containers, Keycloak allocates 70% of the memory limit for heap based memory. It will also use approximately 300 MB of non-heap-based memory. To calculate the requested memory, use the calculation above. As memory limit, subtract the non-heap memory from the value above and divide the result by 0.7.
For each 15 password-based user logins per second, allocate 1 vCPU to the cluster (tested with up to 300 per second).
Keycloak spends most of the CPU time hashing the password provided by the user, and it is proportional to the number of hash iterations.
For each 200 client credential grants per second, 1 vCPU to the cluster (tested with up to 2000 per second).
Most CPU time goes into creating new TLS connections, as each client runs only a single request.
For each 120 refresh token requests per second, 1 vCPU to the cluster (tested with up to 435 refresh token requests per second).
Leave 150% extra head-room for CPU usage to handle spikes in the load. This ensures a fast startup of the node, and sufficient capacity to handle failover tasks. Performance of Keycloak dropped significantly when its Pods were throttled in our tests.
Keycloak, which by default stores user sessions in the database, requires the following resources for optimal performance on an Aurora PostgreSQL multi-AZ database:
For every 100 login/logout/refresh requests per second:
Budget for 1400 Write IOPS.
Allocate between 0.35 and 0.7 vCPU.
The vCPU requirement is given as a range, as with an increased CPU saturation on the database host the CPU usage per request decreased while the response times increase. A lower CPU quota on the database can lead to slower response times during peak loads. Choose a larger CPU quota if fast response times during peak loads are critical. See below for an example.
Target size:
45 logins and logouts per seconds
600 client credential grants per second
360 refresh token requests per second (1:8 ratio for logins)
3 Pods
Limits calculated:
CPU requested per Pod: 3 vCPU
(45 logins per second = 3 vCPU, 600 client credential grants per second = 3 vCPU, 345 refresh token = 3 vCPU. This sums up to 9 vCPU total. With 3 Pods running in the cluster, each Pod then requests 3 vCPU)
CPU limit per Pod: 7.5 vCPU
(Allow for an additional 150% CPU requested to handle peaks, startups and failover tasks)
Memory requested per Pod: 1250 MB
(1250 MB base memory)
Memory limit per Pod: 1360 MB
(1250 MB expected memory usage minus 300 non-heap-usage, divided by 0.7)
Aurora Database instance: either db.t4g.large or db.t4g.xlarge depending on the required response times during peak loads.
(45 logins per second, 5 logouts per second, 360 refresh tokens per seconds.
This sums up to 410 requests per second.
This expected DB usage is 1.4 to 2.8 vCPU, with a DB idle load of 0.3 vCPU.
This indicates either a 2 vCPU db.t4g.large instance or a 4 vCPU db.t4g.xlarge instance.
A 2 vCPU db.t4g.large would be more cost-effective if the response times are allowed be higher during peak usage.
In our tests, the median response time for a login and a token refresh increased by up to 120 ms once the CPU saturation reached 90% on a 2 vCPU db.t4g.large instance given this scenario.
For faster response times during peak usage, consider a 4 vCPU db.t4g.xlarge instance for this scenario.)
To create the sizing an active-active Keycloak setup with two AZs in one AWS region, following these steps:
Create the same number of Pods with the same memory sizing as above on the second site.
The database sizing remains unchanged. Both sites will connect to the same database writer instance.
In regard to the sizing of CPU requests and limits, there are different approaches depending on the expected failover behavior:
Keep the CPU requests and limits as above for the second site. This way any remaining site can take over the traffic from the primary site immediately without the need to scale.
Reduce the CPU requests and limits as above by 50% for the second site. When one of the sites fails, scale the remaining site from 3 Pod to 6 Pods either manually, automated, or using a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. This requires enough spare capacity on the cluster or cluster auto-scaling capabilities.
Reduce the CPU requests by 50% for the second site, but keep the CPU limits as above. This way, the remaining site can take the traffic, but only at the downside that the Nodes will experience CPU pressure and therefore slower response times during peak traffic. The benefit of this setup is that the number of Pods does not need to scale during failovers which is simpler to set up.
The following setup was used to retrieve the settings above to run tests of about 10 minutes for different scenarios:
OpenShift 4.16.x deployed on AWS via ROSA.
Machinepool with m5.4xlarge instances.
Keycloak deployed with the Operator and 3 pods in a high-availability setup with two sites in active/active mode.
OpenShift’s reverse proxy running in passthrough mode were the TLS connection of the client is terminated at the Pod.
Database Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in a multi-AZ setup.
Default user password hashing with Argon2 and 5 hash iterations and minimum memory size 7 MiB as recommended by OWASP (which is the default).
Client credential grants do not use refresh tokens (which is the default).
Database seeded with 20,000 users and 20,000 clients.
Infinispan local caches at default of 10,000 entries, so not all clients and users fit into the cache, and some requests will need to fetch the data from the database.
All authentication sessions in distributed caches as per default, with two owners per entries, allowing one failing Pod without losing data.
All user and client sessions are stored in the database and are not cached in-memory as this was tested a multi-site setup. Expect a slightly higher performance for single-site setups as a fixed number of user and client sessions will be cached.
OpenJDK 21