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High Availability

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High Availability (HA) mode solves for horizontal scalability and automatic failover within a single region. When in HA mode, Coder continues using a single Postgres endpoint. GCP, AWS, and other cloud vendors offer fully-managed HA Postgres services that pair nicely with Coder.

For Coder to operate correctly, Coderd instances should have low-latency connections to each other so that they can effectively relay traffic between users and workspaces no matter which Coderd instance users or workspaces connect to. We make a best-effort attempt to warn the user when inter-Coderd latency is too high, but if requests start dropping, this is one metric to investigate.

We also recommend that you deploy all Coderd instances such that they have low-latency connections to Postgres. Coderd often makes several database round-trips while processing a single API request, so prioritizing low-latency between Coderd and Postgres is more important than low-latency between users and Coderd.

Note that this latency requirement applies only to Coder services. Coder will operate correctly even with few seconds of latency on workspace <-> Coder and user <-> Coder connections.

Setup

Coder automatically enters HA mode when multiple instances simultaneously connect to the same Postgres endpoint.

HA brings one configuration variable to set in each Coderd node: CODER_DERP_SERVER_RELAY_URL. The HA nodes use these URLs to communicate with each other. Inter-node communication is only required while using the embedded relay (default). If you're using custom relays, Coder ignores CODER_DERP_SERVER_RELAY_URL since Postgres is the sole rendezvous for the Coder nodes.

CODER_DERP_SERVER_RELAY_URL will never be CODER_ACCESS_URL because CODER_ACCESS_URL is a load balancer to all Coder nodes.

Here's an example 3-node network configuration setup:

Name	`CODER_HTTP_ADDRESS`	`CODER_DERP_SERVER_RELAY_URL`	`CODER_ACCESS_URL`
`coder-1`	`*:80`	`http://10.0.0.1:80`	`https://coder.big.corp`
`coder-2`	`*:80`	`http://10.0.0.2:80`	`https://coder.big.corp`
`coder-3`	`*:80`	`http://10.0.0.3:80`	`https://coder.big.corp`

Kubernetes

If you installed Coder via our Helm Chart, just increase coder.replicaCount in values.yaml.

If you installed Coder into Kubernetes by some other means, insert the relay URL via the environment like so:

env:
  - name: POD_IP
    valueFrom:
      fieldRef:
        fieldPath: status.podIP
  - name: CODER_DERP_SERVER_RELAY_URL
    value: http://$(POD_IP)

Then, increase the number of pods.

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Kubernetes

Install Coder on Kubernetes