Overview

The Instana Self-Hosted Standard Edition (also known as Standard Edition or SHSE) was recently announced. It provides a simple and easy to use experience for on-premise installation of Instana. Based upon a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes, the Standard Edition has a significantly lower deployment footprint than the Instana Self-Hosted Custom Edition while still supporting the ability to scale to the needs of many small to medium (SMB) observability environments or as a means of starting out with a minimum observability setup and grow as per the observability needs.  As a replacement for the Instana Self-Hosted Classic Edition (which is based on Docker), the Standard Edition can surpass the performance and scale of the Classic Edition. 

Before comparing the performance of the Standard Edition to the Classic Edition, it should be noted that there are significant differences between both editions. First, the Classic Edition, which is based on Docker, was built upon a much smaller code base and consequently limited in the number of features offered and are available for use. The Classic Edition does not include the following features or support: 

• BeeInstana metrics store for custom analytics 

• Service Level Objectives (SLO) 

• OTel 

• Logging 

• Synthetics 

• Action Framework 

• BizOps 

These features are now included in the Standard Edition and even though most are turned off by default, they can be enabled after the installation on demand.  Note that, each feature adds a small amount of additional footprint and other runtime resources.

The Standard Edition also ships with the datastores to run within the instance and this could potentially require additional footprint and runtime resources than the Classic Edition.

Finally, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution is the foundation of the Standard Edition and not part of the Classic Edition. While this base platform requires additional resources, it also provides more capabilities as it has built-in ability to scale workloads and tune the resource usage.

The diagram below captures high level architectural view of the Instana Self-Hosted Standard Edition:

Ease of deployment and management

The Standard Edition ships with stanctl command which can be used to easily install and manage a single node cluster. The stanctl command itself can be installed in a platform specific way via the underlying package manager after registering the Instana repository. Then, all that is needed is to invoke the stanctl command with up option and provide the relevant details when prompted to deploy a single node cluster. It takes few minutes before the Instana backend is ready for interaction via the Instana dashboard. The instance can stop the running cluster by invoking the stanctl command with down option.

Upgrading to new versions of Standard Edition as easy as updating the stanctl command and then running it with up option on the Instana host. Backing up the current cluster involves stopping it by invoking the stanctl command with down option and copying specific files and directories along with taking snapshots of the mounted disks. To restore data on a new Instana host, a new set of disks from the saved snapshots need to be created and mounted along with restoration of the data from copied files and directories which should then be followed by the stanctl up command. Finally, uninstalling the cluster involves invoking the stanctl command with cluster delete option. It is all that simple!

For additional details on deploying and managing the Standard Edition refer to the online documentation. 

Standard vs Classic (Docker) Editions

The Standard Edition includes the ability to scale beyond the levels of the support of Docker, when more observability capacity is needed.  Since it is based on a distribution of Kubernetes, the compute and memory resources can be more efficiently used in supporting Instana than on a Docker host.  There is also an option that allows for resources to be controlled or assigned to different aspects of Instana based upon the workload.  With Kubernetes, it is also possible to spread the processing over more pod replicas to leverage the underlying cores more efficiently. For example, if there is a larger number of metrics that are being monitored over applications, more resources can be allocated and replicas created for metric processing. Docker does have some options to manage resources more specifically and efficiently, but it is not implemented as Kubernetes to provide the same ability to scale services horizontally.

Tests performed on the same hardware of the Classic Edition (Docker) and the Standard Edition found that the Standard Edition can support more MVS/hosts, entities and applications spans.  This can be seen even with small hardware configurations as shown in the specific results below. Comparing the two editions, even the Demo profile is able to support more hosts than the Docker version. Larger hardware configurations have shown the Standard Edition to have even greater ability to scale. The Kubernetes base is able to more efficiently manage resources as the load increases. 

 Summary

With the Instana Self-Hosted Standard Edition, there is a new option for quickly and easily setting up Instana. While the expectation that something so easy to set up is limited in its ability to scale, the Standard Edition has shown that is not the case. The Standard Edition has more capabilities and the foundation and ability to grow.