[keycloak-user] Persisting User Sessions in the DB?

[Stian Thorgersen]

On 29 August 2016 at 16:54, Jared Blashka <jblashka at redhat.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the link to that JIRA. I had seen it before and wanted to find
> it again before emailing the list but couldn't find it.
>
> I had some questions about the proposed solution.
>

What's described in the issue is just an initial brain dump and we haven't
looked into it in much detail yet. Feedback and suggestions are most
welcome :)


>
> In the propsed solution, Keycloak creates a session cookie first visit the
> page and updated when the user first authenticates. How does the load
> balancer sitting in front of Keycloak understand which Keycloak host
> corresponds with a given session cookie? Our current load balancers set a
> sticky session cookie with a node name as the cookie value.
>

Not sure - If Keycloak creates the cookie the name should most likely be
configurable (maybe even the value?!). If the LB creates the cookie we'd
need an option to make Keycloak pick that up instead of creating its own.


>
> Following up from that question, how would this solution work with
> multiple load balancer layers? We have a global load balancer that
> distributes traffic at a per data center level and then load balancers
> within each data center.
>

Not sure - would that normally have two separate cookies?


>
> Finally, it sounds like this solution would only work for clients that use
> the keycloak adapters? We're going to have to integrate with third-party
> vendors in the future and can't dictate how they write their applications.
> Even outside of that, we also have internal customers that own
> python/perl/rails applications and couldn't use a Keycloak adapter even if
> they wanted to because there aren't adapters available for those platforms
> yet.
>

Pretty sure there's no standard way of doing this as there's nothing in the
code-token or refresh-token requests that can be used.

An alternative mechanism I had in mind was that we'd allow Keycloak servers
to talk to each-other to delegate requests to another node. Would that work?


>
> Jared
>
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Stian Thorgersen <sthorger at redhat.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We had a JPA user session provider at some point, but dropped it mainly
>> for performance reasons and the fact it was not very well implemented.
>> Having to write to the database for every request (including token refresh)
>> would not be very good for performance, especially not with db replication
>> enabled. There might be the possibility of creating a hybrid or to reduce
>> the amount of writes to the session, but that would probably be quite a bit
>> of work to do.
>>
>> For authorization code flow we do have plans to figure out sticky
>> sessions for that where both the requests from the browser and server-side
>> applications ends up going to the same node. See
>> https://issues.jboss.org/browse/KEYCLOAK-2352.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 24 August 2016 at 23:16, Jared Blashka <jblashka at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure why I never noticed this before, but I was doing some
>>> investigation today and couldn't find any session information actually
>>> populated in the DB tables.  Both USER_SESSION and CLIENT_SESSION were
>>> empty.
>>>
>>> After some digging in the code I saw that the only UserSesssionProvider
>>> implementation is the Infinispan-based one and it looks like the only type
>>> of user sessions that get persisted in the DB are offline sessions (via the
>>> JpaUserSessionPersisterProvider).
>>>
>>> Was there a particular reason a JpaUserSessionProvider doesn't exist?
>>>
>>> Background: We're aiming to have a highly available+resilient
>>> active-active multi-data center deployment of Keycloak. Ultimately, there
>>> should be no customer impact if a particular data center fails; there
>>> should be no IDP outage and they shouldn't have to log in again. We ran
>>> into issues with asynchronous user data replication earlier, which is why
>>> we're currently working on migrating our existing MariaDB cluster to use
>>> Galera (which has been looking pretty good so far) but it looks like we
>>> mistakenly assumed that this synchronous replication would also handle user
>>> session data.
>>>
>>> Not replicating user session data across data centers is also going to
>>> cause us problems (its already caused us problems actually) when it comes
>>> to the OAuth authorization code flow as well. Since that flow involves
>>> back-channel server communication we can't guarantee that the client server
>>> will communicate with the same data center the client authenticated at. If
>>> a client calls out to the "wrong" data center, the flow will fail.
>>>
>>> I can spend some time tomorrow investigating the performance when
>>> clustering infinispan across data centers, but I'm not particularly
>>> optimistic about the results.
>>>
>>> Any thoughts/comments on our problem?
>>>
>>>
>>> Jared
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> keycloak-user mailing list
>>> keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
>>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-user
>>>
>>
>>
>
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