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

[Jared Blashka]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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