Production checklist

This is a checklist for configuring and securing Cube for a production deployment.

Disable Development Mode

When running Cube in production environments, make sure development mode is disabled both on API Instances and Refresh Worker. Running Cube in development mode in a production environment can lead to security vulnerabilities. Enabling Development Mode in Cube Cloud is not recommended. Development Mode will expose your data to the internet. You can read more on the differences between production and development mode here.

# Set this to false or leave unset to disable development mode
CUBEJS_DEV_MODE=false

Set up Refresh Worker

To refresh in-memory cache and pre-aggregations in the background, we recommend running a separate Cube Refresh Worker instance. This allows your Cube API Instance to continue to serve requests with high availability.

# Set to true so a Cube instance acts as a refresh worker
CUBEJS_REFRESH_WORKER=true

Set up Cube Store

Cube Store manages in-memory cache, queue and pre-aggregations for Cube. Follow the instructions here to set it up.

Depending on your database, Cube may need to "stage" pre-aggregations inside your database first before ingesting them into Cube Store. In this case, Cube will require write access to a dedicated schema inside your database. The schema name is prod_pre_aggregations by default. It can be set using the pre_aggregations_schema configration option.

Secure the deployment

If you're using JWTs, you can configure Cube to correctly decode them and inject their contents into the Security Context. Add your authentication provider's configuration under the jwt property of your cube.js configuration file, or if using environment variables, see CUBEJS_JWK_*, CUBEJS_JWT_* in the Environment Variables reference.

Set up health checks

Cube provides Kubernetes-API compatible (opens in a new tab) health check (or probe) endpoints that indicate the status of the deployment. Configure your monitoring service of choice to use the /readyz and /livez API endpoints so you can check on the Cube deployment's health and be alerted to any issues.

Appropriate cluster sizing

There's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to sizing a Cube cluster and its resources. Resources required by Cube significantly depend on the amount of traffic Cube needs to serve and the amount of data it needs to process. The following sizing estimates are based on default settings and are very generic, which may not fit your Cube use case, so you should always tweak resources based on consumption patterns you see.

Memory and CPU

Each Cube cluster should contain at least 2 Cube API instances. Every Cube API instance should have at least 3GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores allocated for it.

Refresh workers tend to be much more CPU and memory intensive, so at least 6GB of RAM is recommended. Please note that to take advantage of all available RAM, the Node.js heap size should be adjusted accordingly by using the --max-old-space-size option (opens in a new tab):

NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=6144"

The Cube Store router node should have at least 6GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores allocated for it. Every Cube Store worker node should have at least 8GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores allocated for it. The Cube Store cluster should have at least two worker nodes.

RPS and data volume

Depending on data model size, every Core Cube API instance can serve 1 to 10 requests per second. Every Core Cube Store router node can serve 50-100 queries per second. As a rule of thumb, you should provision 1 Cube Store worker node per one Cube Store partition or 1M of rows scanned in a query. For example if your queries scan 16M of rows per query, you should have at least 16 Cube Store worker nodes provisioned. Please note that the number of raw data rows doesn't usually equal the number of rows in pre-aggregation. At the same time, queries don't usually scan all the data in pre-aggregations, as Cube Store uses partition pruning to optimize queries. EXPLAIN ANALYZE can be used to see scanned partitions involved in a Cube Store query. Cube Cloud ballpark performance numbers can differ as it has different Cube runtime.

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