An ABS cluster consists of stateless ABS nodes communicating with a MongoDB replica set. Each ABS node connects to the MongoDB cluster to obtain cluster configuration information that describes peer nodes. ABS nodes themselves do not communicate with each other; they periodically send heartbeats to MongoDB with status information. Each ABS node exposes:

  • REST APIs for log streaming between ABS and API Security Enforcer
  • REST APIs between ABS and management applications which fetch metrics, anomalies, attack types, backend error, blocked connections, flow control, and cluster status.

An ABS cluster is depicted in the following diagram:

To configure an ABS cluster, complete the following steps:

  1. Install MongoDB in a replica set
  2. Connect ABS to MongoDB

To set up an ABS cluster, no separate steps have to be completed. To create an ABS cluster, add an ABS node and connect it to MongoDB primary node. Since ABS forms a stateless cluster, the information of all the nodes in the cluster is fetched by ABS nodes from MongoDB.

Scale down ABS cluster: To scale down the cluster, stop the ABS node that you wish to remove from the cluster. Edit the abs.properties file to remove MongoDB IP address.