Nodes and services introduction

Install nodes in the environment to enable the use of Spotfire web clients, Spotfire Automation Services, and the TERR service or Spotfire Service for Python.

The installed client, called Spotfire Analyst, can be used together with the Spotfire Server directly. To enable use of Spotfire web clients, Spotfire Automation Services, and the TERR service or Spotfire Service for Python, one or more nodes must also be configured, preferably on dedicated computers, virtual machines or containers.

For each node, the administrator installs and enables a service with a specified capability. A node can have the service with the Spotfire Web Player capability, the Spotfire Automation Services capability, the TERR service, or the Spotfire Service for Python capability.

The Web Player service enables users to perform analyses in a web browser, Automation Services can be used to automate multi-step tasks, and the TERR service or Spotfire Service for Python can be used for additional calculations and advanced analytics. The capabilities of the enabled services determine the functionality that the node provides to Spotfire end users, through the Spotfire Server.

Note: It is strongly recommended to add all different types of services on separate computers, virtual machines or containers in production systems. This is because the Java virtual machine (JVM) and .NET processes for the different services will try to allocate all available memory before starting to use cache or memory garbage collection, and this can result in resource allocation conflicts. For failover and performance purposes, multiple service instances of the same type can be added on each node.

If you still must deploy different services on the same host, you can try to manage the process resource allocation, for example, by reducing the resources via Spotfire configs and by scheduling usage of different services to different times.

You can scale your Spotfire environment by adding or removing nodes and service instances.