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

note

Starting in 8.9-alpha3, Camunda 8 Run uses H2 as the default secondary storage out-of-the-box. Elasticsearch remains bundled and supported as an optional alternative; OpenSearch is supported for Self‑Managed deployments but is not bundled in Camunda 8 Run. See the Camunda 8 Run configuration docs for enabling Elasticsearch if required.

• 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.

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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 or vendor-supported infrastructure for production deployments to reduce operational overhead and improve reliability (for example, managed Elasticsearch/OpenSearch services or managed RDBMS).
• Benchmark and size your environment using sizing your environment and the Camunda benchmark project referenced there.

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For environment compatibility and supported versions, see supported environments.