There are many deployment architecture options available for Flow. Flow has been designed for a distributed and modular architecture for load balancing across multiple machines.
For smaller Flow Systems (up to approximately 1000 measures and 50 events) all the components can be installed and deployed on a single machine. As these systems grow, it is recommended for performance purposes that the Flow components and the SQL server be separated. As they grow even further (above approximately 10000 measures and 200 events), it is required that the Flow components and the SQL server be separated, and it is recommended that the Flow components are also distributed across separate machines (e.g. deploy the Flow model across separate Data Engines on separate machines, deploy the Flow Server on a dedicated machine, etc.)
Flow Config
Flow Config is typically run on a power user's laptop/desktop machine and is used to configure the Flow System. Flow Config should never be run on the same machine as the Flow Components, nor the SQL Server. As a minimum, the following is recommended for a power user's machine:
- 16 GB minimum memory
- 5 GB minimum free disk space
- 32-bit color depth recommended
- 1920 by 1080 screen resolution recommended
Flow Components (Data Engines, Integration Engines, Flow Server)
The Flow Components are designed to work across multiple server machines for load balancing purposes. Depending on the size of the Flow System, these components should be distributed across more than one server machine.
Where multiple instances of Flow are using the same machine, it is recommended that no more than 5 Flow Systems are deployed to each machine.
As a minimum, the following is recommended for each Flow server machine:
- 4 Cores, 2.7 GHz minimum CPU
- 8 GB minimum memory base
- 8 GB minimum memory per Flow System
SQL Database Server Hardware
Each Flow System requires a SQL Database to be hosted on a SQL Server. Depending on the size of the Flow System, the SQL Database server must be run on its own dedicated server machine or cluster.
Where multiple instances of Flow are using the same dedicated SQL Server, it is recommended that no more than 10 Flow Databases are served by each dedicated SQL Server.
As a minimum, the following is recommended for the SQL Database server machine:
- 4 Cores, 2.7 GHz minimum CPU
- 16 GB minimum memory base
- 100 GB minimum disk space base
- 16 GB minimum memory per Flow System
- 100 GB minimum disk space per Flow System
- SSD or faster technology drives
Please contact us for any architectural guidance where required.