Hosting a Bonita Tomcat Bundle (RESTful API only used) in a small Virtual Machine

Dear BonitaSoft

We are planning to include Bonita BPMN Engine in our architecture, utilizing only its RESTful API for BPMN model execution only (no forms and UI in Bonita, the user experience is handled by our webapps only and they just call Bonita Restful API for BPMN execution purposes).

The computing environment - being a little bit constrained - allows us to dedicate to Bonita Restful API only a single virtual machine with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM


It will be an Ubuntu 20.04LTS VM,  dedicated to the Bonita Tomcat Bundle (We will utilize another dedicated PostgreSQL VM for the DB needs of Bonita).

We are well aware of the requirements stated in https://documentation.bonitasoft.com/bonita/7.10/hardware-and-software-requirements, so the question is if it will be adequate to host Bonita RESTful API in this small VM.


We are going to plan the processes in a very streamlined way, few variables, no documents stored in process etc in order to keep the process instances memory footprint as small as possible. Regarding the business context, it will be a small customer with not huge or heavy BPMN requirements (traffic and process instances).

Thanks!
 

Hi,

The best way to know in this kind of situation is to try !
You can maybe use a tool like Gatling to simulate your workload and check that it matches your need.

HTH
Romain

Dear Romain,

Thank you very much for your reply!

We followed your suggestion: We simulated the workload, and not only did we find that the server accommodated the expected traffic but we, also, managed to serve load many times more than that!

So – the aforementioned computing environment (a vm dedicated to Bonita with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM, this vm is hosted via HyperV in a physical server with 2 physical CPUs (each one having 8 Cores – so in total there are 16 CPU Cores) and 64GB RAM in total) proved to be more than adequate! (Kudos to Bonita Community for this wonderfully designed platform!)

However, our client is still concerned about the specifications in https://documentation.bonitasoft.com/bonita/7.10/hardware-and-software-requirements.

How can those minimum specifications be justified in the context of our architecture? The client reads the specs on the link verbatim, apparently ruling out a working solution that does not match these specs. 

Kindest Regards,

Tilemahos

Hi Tilemahos,

Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile:

You can emphasize the fact that you do not use resource consuming connectors or large documents. As said in the documentation

The hardware recommended for Bonita Platform is strongly dependent on your environment and processes (number of processes instances, number of current users, operations and complexity…​).

So we give a ballpark figure for the required specs. But we should maybe update the wording in the documentation to use recommendation instead of requirements.

Can it help ?

Hi Romain,

Yes, this clarifies things.

Many thanks for your prompt response!