Understand your deployment scenario

There are three main installation scenarios for installing CFM on a CDP Private Cloud Base cluster, and it is helpful to understand the difference between them before you get started with your CFM deployment.

Install NiFi and NiFi Registry on a Base cluster

Installing NiFi and NiFi Registry on your Base cluster is a simplified deployment during which you create only one cluster. You can do this if you are setting up in trial deployments or in simple production scenarios.

A Base cluster is a large cluster that contains SDX services like Ranger and Atlas, as well as compute and storage services like NiFi, Impala, and Hive. It is sometimes called a Regular cluster in Cloudera Manager, and it is also known as an SDX cluster, a Shared cluster, or a Data Lake cluster.

You can install NiFi Registry on the Base cluster. If you are using multiple NiFi services, you would likely want to share the NiFi Registry instance across all of these NiFi services.

In simplified deployment scenarios, you can also install NiFi on the Base cluster to achieve a single-cluster setup. With this scenario, you may have many services on the Base cluster relying on the same Zookeeper quorum, which may not suit your use case depending on the expected workload.

Install NiFi and NiFi Registry on a Compute cluster

Although it is not a recommended setup, it is possible to install both NiFi and NiFi Registry on a Compute cluster.

A Compute cluster consists of compute nodes only. The Compute cluster is then connected to a Base cluster with SDX services like Ranger and Atlas using a Shared Data Context.

Installing NiFi on a Compute cluster is recommended when you want to:

deploy multiple NiFi clusters for larger scale production deployments
isolate your dataflows
have different authorization models per dataflow

and in other similar deployment scenarios.

Install NiFi on a Compute cluster and NiFi Registry on a Base cluster

For production deployments, it is recommended to install NiFi on one or more Compute clusters, and to install NiFi Registry on the Base cluster. This provides a dedicated Zookeeper quorum for each NiFi cluster. Use this setup when you want to share dataflows across multiple NiFi Compute clusters in your CDP environment.

Review CFM deployment workflow to understand the steps required for each scenario.