Camunda for Cloud (PCF and ElephantSQL)

Camunda 7 Topics Discussion & Questions
1

Hi,

I’d like to know if Camunda can be used in a cloud environment?

I have a camunda spring boot application that I was able to put on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and it just works … with the H2 database. But for what I understand H2 is not production grade and when working on cloud environments an application shouldn’t write to the local disk (it’s volatile).

So, is there a way to configure a Camunda Spring Boot application to use a DB cloud service like ElephantSQL (PostgreSQL as a Service)? Is that even supported? PostgresSQL is one of the supported databases for Camunda BPM, and ElephantSQL is a cloud manager of PostgreSQL db servers. I would like to think that is just a matter of configuration, but I couldn’t find anything out there.

I would pretty much appreciate any and all help provided.

Pedro

2

Hi Pedro.

I personally do not have any experience with ElepgantSQL, but as they state to run normal PostgreSQL servers (“ElephantSQL are managed PostgreSQL servers in the cloud”, see https://www.elephantsql.com/docs/faq.html#What_is_ElephantSQL) I do not foresee any problems. Camunda is supported on PostgreSQL (https://docs.camunda.org/manual/7.6/introduction/supported-environments/#supported-database-products). Make sure you get the right version.

Cheers
Bernd

3

Not sure if this answer is not trivial, but to change the database configuration to use a production database you have to change the Spring Boot Datasource Properties:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://host:port/database
spring.datasource.username=dbuser
spring.datasource.password=dbpass
spring.datasource.driver-class-name=org.postgresql.Driver

If you can provide these settings for the ElephantSQL database it should be no problem to replace the usage of the default H2 database with your ElephantSQL database.

4

I was actually able to just set the datasource properties with the information provided by the elephantSQL once that service was added and bound to my application:
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgres://{username}:{pwd}@elmer.db.elephantsql.com:5432/{username}
spring.datasource.username={username}
spring.datasource.password={pwd}
Once I deployed the application I was able to see all the db tables and it’s content in the elephantSQL GUI. The application works, however the PostgreSQL version in use is 9.5.5 and for the free version (tiny turtle) you can’t pick the db version.
ElephantSQL support tells me that “9.6 and 9.5 are backwards compatible with 9.4, so they should work for your app”. Obviously if we decide to go with this option we would be using a dedicated server and per ElephantSQL support “All new dedicated versions comes with 9.6”, though they have some instances in AWS with 9.4.

Is there a plan to support Postgres above 9.4?

5

Hello Pedro, This looks as if it will be fine for my purpose, so I wonder whether you used the camunda spring boot from deployment folder on github, the community spring boot starter application, or something else for your deployed application?

Andrew

6

Hi Andrew,

I used the community spring boot starter application and added the required dependencies to the pom.xml