Install Camunda 8 Self-Managed for production and advanced development setups
Use this overview to choose an installation approach for Camunda 8 Self-Managed in production-ready environments (cloud or on-premises), and in advanced development setups that mirror production for CI/CD, integration testing, or shared clusters.
Production installations
Starting in 8.9, Camunda 8 Run uses H2 as the default secondary storage out of the box. Elasticsearch remains a supported alternative in Camunda 8 Run. OpenSearch and RDBMS-based secondary storage are supported in Self-Managed deployments. See the Camunda 8 Run configuration docs for backend configuration details.
- Helm/Kubernetes (Recommended): We recommend using Kubernetes and Helm to run Camunda 8 Self-Managed in production. With the right configuration, Camunda 8 Self-Managed can be deployed on any Certified Kubernetes distribution (cloud or on-premises). We also officially support a variety of providers like Red Hat OpenShift and Amazon EKS.
- Docker: Run Camunda components as Docker images in production on Linux systems. Windows and macOS are supported for development environments only.
- Manual: Run each Java application on virtual machines or bare-metal servers with a supported Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This offers flexibility but requires manual configuration of component interactions. Use this approach only when necessary. Windows and macOS are supported for development environments only.
To run Camunda 8 in a local environment for development or evaluation purposes only, see running locally.
Production storage choices
Choosing the right storage configuration is a critical step for production deployments:
- Install Camunda 8 using one of the production deployment options above (Helm/Kubernetes recommended).
- Review storage concepts: primary and secondary storage overview and details on secondary storage.
- Provision your chosen storage backend(s) before enabling web applications such as Operate, Tasklist, or Optimize.
Guidance:
- Prefer managed services or operator-based infrastructure for production deployments to reduce operational overhead and improve reliability (for example, managed secondary storage services such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or managed RDBMS). Choose the backend that best fits your operational model, performance profile, and compliance requirements.
- Benchmark and size your environment using sizing your environment and the Camunda benchmark project referenced there.
For environment compatibility and supported versions, see supported environments.