ArangoDB Production Checklist

The following checklist can help to understand if important steps have been performed on your production system before you go live.

Operating System

  • Executed the OS optimization scripts (if you run ArangoDB on Linux). See Installing ArangoDB on Linux for details.

  • OS monitoring is in place (most common metrics, e.g. disk, CPU, RAM utilization).

  • Disk space monitoring is in place (only if you use the RocksDB storage engine).

ArangoDB

  • The user root is not used to run any ArangoDB processes (if you run ArangoDB on Linux).

  • The arangod (server) process and the arangodb (Starter) process (if in use) have some form of logging enabled and you can easily locate and inspect them.

  • If you use the Starter to deploy, you stopped - and disabled automated start of - the ArangoDB Single Instance, e.g. on Ubuntu:

    1. service arangodb3 stop
    2. update-rc.d -f arangodb3 remove

    On Windows in a command prompt with elevated rights:

    1. sc config arangodb start= disabled
    2. sc stop arangodb

  • If you have deployed a Cluster (and/or are using DC2DC) the replication factor and minimal_replication_factor of your collections is set to a value equal or higher than 2, otherwise you run at the risk of losing data in case of node failure. See cluster startup options.

  • Verify that your storage performance is at least 100 IOPS for each volume in production mode. This is the bare minimum and we would recommend providing more for performance. It is probably only a concern if you use cloud infrastructure. Note that IOPS might be allotted based on volume size, so please check your storage provider for details. Furthermore you should be careful with burst mode guarantees as ArangoDB requires a sustainable high IOPS rate.

  • Whenever possible use block storage. Database data is based on append operations, so filesystem which support this should be used for best performance. We would not recommend to use NFS for performance reasons, furthermore we experienced some issues with hard links required for Hot Backup.

  • Verify your Backup and restore procedures are working.

  • Consider to enable Encryption at Rest (Enterprise Edition only). Make sure to safely store any secret keys you create for this.

Kubernetes Operator (kube-arangodb)

  • Check supported versions for Kubernetes, operator and supported Kubernetes distributions.

  • The ReclaimPolicy of your persistent volumes must be set to Retain to prevent volumes to be prevent volumes to be prematurely deleted.

  • Use native networking whenever possible to reduce delays.