Overview¶

The Prefect application is designed in a cloud-native, scalable way. Installation of the Prefect application is done through Helm.

Minimum Requirements¶

Each cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) has a service that provides and implements the main infrastructure requirements. See Infrastructure Services for minimum sizing requirements for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, and Redis.

The required components are:

Load Balancer — L4 or L7, with TLS termination and an ingress controller such as ingress-nginx
Kubernetes Cluster — with autoscaling enabled and a storage class available (csi-ebs, managed-csi, etc.)
Redis
PostgreSQL — see Database Flags for recommended configuration
Istio — manages authorization requests, TLS/mTLS, and URI/service routing rules
Prefect Services

Cloud Architecture Overview¶

All three major cloud providers are supported (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Cloud Overview

Application Service Overview¶

Architecture Overview

Auth¶

Prefect Customer-Managed supports SSO via ADFS, Okta, and Entra. See Authentication Methods for provider configuration details.

SMTP¶

An SMTP server is optional. The SMTP server is primarily responsible for notifications, through triggers like automations. The Customer-Managed installation can function without an SMTP server; however, the notifications system will be unable to send e-mails.