07.12.2024
Embracing Hybrid Architectures for Ping CIAM Platforms

Midships . 6 Minutes Read
Preface
At Midships, inquiries about Hybrid Architectures are common, and although we possess whitepapers on the subject, creating a brief article on the option and benefits seemed beneficial. The Midships team welcomes you to get in touch if you wish to discover more.
Introduction
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, hybrid architectures are becoming the new normal. They offer improved resiliency through redundancy and eliminate dependency on a single provider. This flexibility enables businesses to quickly make strategic decisions and determine which cluster will serve as the primary cluster for traffic. Additionally, hybrid architectures allow businesses to control their own data copy, which can be used for data analysis without vendor lock-in. Given the stringent regulatory requirements for service uptime, customers cannot rely on a single provider, especially for a tier-1 service like CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management).
What Does Hybrid Architecture for Ping Look Like?
A hybrid architecture for Ping CIAM platforms involves a CIAM application that uses P1AIC (PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud). Alongside this, a second cluster of CIAM is deployed either on-premises or on the public cloud. The data is synchronized between P1AIC and the second cluster. Depending on business needs and regulatory sensitivity, the secondary cluster can be promoted to the primary cluster in a matter of hours or even minutes.
Different Options for a Second Cluster
Cold Standby: A second cluster is ready to be deployed, and pipelines are set up. The data from P1AIC is synchronized to the second environment. During the switchover, the entire application stack is deployed, the synchronized data is loaded, and the application is started. Switchover time: typically less than1 hour.
Warm Standby: A second cluster is deployed in a scaled-down manner. The data from P1AIC is synchronized to the second environment. During the switchover, the data is loaded into the system, and the application is started. Switchover time: less than 30 minutes.
Hot Standby: A second cluster is deployed in a partially scaled-down manner. The data from P1AIC is actively loaded into the application in near real-time. During the switchover, the application is ready to start serving traffic immediately. Switchover time: less than15 minutes.
How Can Midships Help with This Complex Setup?
Midships Accelerator can be deployed on any Kubernetes infrastructure, making it a versatile solution for hybrid architectures. A fresh deployment of the whole stack takes under 10 minutes (down to 6 minutes for most customers).
Midships Accelerator also makes in-situ minor version upgrades quick and painless, enabling deployments with no downtime. Additionally, Midships can set up pipelines that deploy BAU (Business As Usual) enhancements to both P1AIC and the second cluster, ensuring they are always in sync. This reduces overhead for development teams. The ability to dynamically scale the cluster will reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the second cluster while ensuring firms minimize downtimes from black-swan events and meet their regulatory obligations.