Getting Ready

To get you going, we will help guide you through some decisions you need to make early on:

Licensing - we have a variety of options to suit our customer's varied needs; to include:
- Community Edition (CE) - free to use and quick to get started. This option is perfect for Small-to-Medium Businesses (SMBs), test and evaluation purposes, or for consultants/1099 auditors. It provides a free platform to get started on your compliance journey. This version does require a local installation onto a laptop or VM and just requires Docker for hosting. View License
- Enterprise Edition (EE) - for large enterprises and sophisticated customers who demand a more robust set of features and support. View License
- Managed Services - where you want don't want to host/support the application and may need specific SLA guarantees and support. Contact our Sales team today to learn more.
Hosting - In general, customers should consider the following for hosting RegScale:
- Laptop/Desktop - for testing and evaluation purposes. There are no external dependencies and you can get started in minutes.
- Virtual Machine (VM) - a single installation but available to multiple users over the network. Only requires Docker to be installed and a connection to a SQL Server Database.
- Air-Gapped - RegScale can be deployed securely on classified, ICS, or otherwise air-gapped networks. The only difference for the customer is the need to securely sneaker-net application updates to the container via thumb-drive or other means.
- on premises - RegScale can run on any virtual or physical machine that supports Docker. This includes most modern Linux OSes including Ubuntu and Red Hat.
- Kubernetes - scale RegScale to support large scale production needs to enhance resiliency. (NOTE: RegScale can also supports Docker Swarm but this configuration is untested and may require some professional services.)
- Cloud - RegScale can be deployed on a cloud VM or on any hosted Kubernetes service in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Production Sizing - once you are ready to offer RegScale in production, we recommend a more robust hosting configuration as shown below:
- Multi-Node Kubernetes Cluster - to allow for non-disruptive upgrades and growth.
- Minimum of 3 pods for high availability
- SQL Server Database (non-Express edition) sized based on your expected load to achieve 5 ms (reads) and 10 ms (writes). If running in Azure, recommend at least the Standard Tier DB with 5 DTUs
- Configure backups for both the database and storage (NOTE: The container is stateless and does not require backup)
- Minimum of 10 GB of persistent file storage that is expandable over time

Database

A Microsoft SQL Server Database (or MS SQL Server Express) is required to run RegScale. This database should be named "ATLAS" to minimize any confusion later if needing RegScale support. In order to connect to the database, you will need an ADO.NET (SQL Authentication) connection string, similar to the following:

Server=tcp:{yourdatabase}.database.windows.net,1433;Initial Catalog=ATLAS;Persist Security Info=False;User ID={your_username};Password={your_password};MultipleActiveResultSets=False;Encrypt=True;TrustServerCertificate=False;Connection Timeout=30;

The connection string is stored as an environment variable within the container. It is most commonly (and securely) applied using Kubernetes Secrets or some other mechanism which are detailed in the Kubernetes section.