Nodes and services introduction

The installed client can be used together with the Spotfire Server directly, but the Spotfire environment also includes a number of different services that enhance your system in different ways. To enable the use of the services, you install node managers that help with the communication between the servers and the services.

The following services are available:

Spotfire Web Player – enables users to create and view analyses in a web browser, with the Spotfire web client.
Spotfire Automation Services – can be used to automate multi-step tasks.

The data function services can be used for additional calculations and advanced analytics, using different calculation engines:

Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R - Server Edition (a/k/a the TERR™ service)
Spotfire Service for Python
Spotfire Service for R

To enable use of any of this functionality one or more nodes must be configured, preferably on dedicated computers, virtual machines or containers.

For each node, you install and enable a service with a specified capability. A node can have the service with the Spotfire Web Player capability, the Spotfire Automation Services capability, or one of the data function services capabilities. The capabilities of the enabled services determine the functionality that the node provides to Spotfire end users via the server.

Note: For production environments, we strongly advise that you deploy each of the different types of Spotfire services on separate, dedicated computers (physical computers, virtual machines, or containers).

If you still decide to deploy different services on the same computer (for example, for testing purposes), you must manage the resource allocation of the processes so they do not conflict with each other.

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