Starting point

The client had a single-node standalone Keycloak instance running. While it worked well, the client was blocked from integrating critical services such as AWS or Slack as it lacked high availability.

Project

We started by developing and testing automation code for managing Keycloak domain-mode clusters in a testing environment. Once all worked well, we deployed a staging Keycloak domain mode cluster and integrated it with the client’s FreeIPA cluster. Once the staging environment was working, we deployed the production domain mode cluster. As the final step we migrated away from the original Keycloak standalone instance. This was easy as Keycloak configurations were all defined as infrastructure code.

End result

The Keycloak domain mode cluster enabled the client to start using Keycloak as the authentication and authorization backend for critical services such as AWS and Slack. They used the staging Keycloak domain mode cluster for testing new Keycloak configurations and for integration of new services into Keycloak. Once the testing procedure was complete the same configuration could be trivially deployed to production.

Main technologies

• Keycloak
• FreeIPA
• Puppet