Upscaling Event Broker Services

You can upscale (or scale-up) existing standalone and high-availability event broker services to a higher service-class level if your event broker service requires higher limits than it currently has. You can upscale directly to any service class level. For example, you could scale from Enterprise 250 directly to Enterprise 100K. The advantage of upscaling an existing event broker service rather than creating a new one is that you can keep the configuration settings on your existing event broker service, eliminating the need to reconfigure the connectivity for the client applications connected to your service.

For example, you may require more connections or more queues because your current usage exceeds the limitations for the current service class of your event broker service. For more information about service classes and their limits, see Service Class Options for Event Broker Services.

For more information, see the following:

Considerations and Limitations for Upscaling Event Broker Services

Before upscaling your event broker service, review the following:

Upscaling Limitations

Upscaling an existing service has the following limitations:

  • You can't upscale from a Standalone or Developer class to a high-availability service (nor scale from a high-availability to a Standalone or Developer service).
  • You can't downscale a service. For example, you can't downscale a service from Enterprise 10K to Enterprise 5K.
  • We only support upscaling event broker services deployed in a Kubernetes environments that support volume expansion. Event broker services deployed using Static Local Provisioned volumes can't be upscaled. For more information, see Deployment Architecture for Kubernetes.

Account Considerations

You should consider the following account considerations:

  • Before choosing a service class to upscale to, consider whether that class meets your future growth requirements.

  • While the event broker service retains its configuration settings after the upscale, you may need to change some configuration settings to take advantage of the new service class limits.

Considerations for Upscaling Event Broker Services in Customer-Controlled Regions

If you deploy your event broker services in a Customer-Controlled Region, you must consider the following:

  • Both the existing and new requirements are necessary until the upscaling of the event broker service occurs. It's your responsibility to ensure the required infrastructure is in place to support the upscaled event broker service.

  • Solace upscales event broker services only in Kubernetes cluster versions we currently support. For a list of supported Kubernetes versions by vendor and distribution, see Supported Kubernetes Versions.

  • The Kubernetes cluster hosting the event broker service must support volume expansion. You must set the Storage Class parameter allowVolumeExpansion to true.

To upscale an event broker service from Enterprise 250 to Enterprise 1K, you'll require CPU, memory, and disk resources for both the existing Enterprise 250 event broker service and the new Enterprise 1K event broker service until the upscaling completes. We recommend you contact your infrastructure team prior to booking your event broker service's upscale to ensure you meet these requirements. For more information, see General Resource Requirements for Kubernetes and Default Port Configuration.

After the upscaling of the event broker service completes, you can reallocate resources (CPU, memory, hard-drive) from the old event broker service class (that you upscaled from) if they aren't required or if you need to optimize the resources in your Kubernetes environment.

We recommend that you choose a class size that accommodates not only future requirements (for example, the number of connections), but also aligns with your cost structure. Choosing a class size that is too large with unused connections would not be cost-effective for your organization. Another consideration is that after upscaling the service class, you cannot downscale it. For more information on choosing the right service class, see Choosing Service Classes and Cloud Providers for Event Broker Services.

Upscaling an Event Broker Service

Before you upscale your event broker service, ensure that you review the Considerations and Limitations for Upscaling Event Broker Services.

We schedule times to upscale your event broker service as quickly as we can. You can expect the upscale to occur one to two weeks after we receive the request to upscale the event broker service. The more notice you provide, the more likely we can meet your scheduled request.

We recommend that a person with at least the Mission Control Manager role opens the support ticket. 

If the event broker service to upscale is deployed in your own Customer-Controlled Region, you must review the considerations and ensure that you fulfill the resource requirements before beginning these steps. For more information, see Considerations and Limitations for Upscaling Event Broker Services.

Here are the steps to upscale an event broker service:

  1. Plan a Maintenance Window for Upscaling Your Event Broker Service that aligns with your organization and service requirements and book a slot on Calendly.
  2. After we contact you to confirm a time, we upscale the event broker service. For an overview of what occurs, see Overview of the Upscaling Process for Event Broker Services.

Plan a Maintenance Window for Upscaling Your Event Broker Service

We recommend that you identify time periods to upscale your event broker service that work best for you and minimizes the impact on your client applications. During the upscaling time period, the event broker service is unavailable to client applications.

The time to upscale each event broker service is 15 minutes. Though this is the expected time, plan for additional time to align with your organization and service requirements. As an example, you may want to plan for 30 minutes to provide extra time and to align expectations for your organization. The outage of 15 minutes for an event broker service includes:

  • the time required to upscale the event broker service
  • the time to validate the event broker service

In the unlikely situation where the upscale procedure is unsuccessful, another five minutes may be required to perform a rollback and return your event broker service to its original state. Solace will contact you if rollback is required and collaborate with you to identify the cause.

During the upscaling procedure, there can't be any use of the message spool or hard-disks (such as backups) for the event broker service that's being upscaled.

Overview of the Upscaling Process for Event Broker Services

After we receive your request to upscale an event broker service and are ready to accommodate that request, and have agreed on a time to begin the upscale process, the following occurs:

  1. Solace sends you a notification containing the date, time, and details of when your event broker service is to be upscaled. You must confirm that date and time, and the request details, and let us know if there are changes.
  2. Solace sends a second notification to let you know that the upscaling of the event broker service will start during the agreed upon maintenance window.
  3. During the maintenance window, we upscale your event broker service to the requested service class.
  4. After the upscale procedure completes (approximately 15 minutes), Solace sends a third notification to let you know the results of the upscale procedure. If the upscale procedure was:
    • Successful, proceed to the next step.
    • Not successful, Solace contacts you and works with you to correct the problem and to rebook a subsequent follow-up time to upscale the event broker service again.
  5. After the third notification, client applications can re-connect and start using the event broker service.

    After the upscale procedure, you can validate your event broker service's new class by selecting it in Cluster Manager and reviewing its information on the Configuration tab. The values under the following labels should reflect those your newly chosen service class: 

    • Service Class

    • Endpoint (Queue)

    • Messaging Spool Size

      If you previously increased the event broker services message spool size beyond for the newly selected class, the spool size Messaging Spool Size shows the larger value. For more information, see Configuring Message Spool Sizes.

    • Max Queue Messages

    • Connections

    • Max Kafka Bridges

    • Max Kafka Connections