Externalization of services introduction
Pega Platform™ uses several third‑party services to support specific operations. These industry‑standard services provide features that are not part of core functions and are not practical for Pega products to recreate internally.
The following external services support Pega Platform:
- Elasticsearch: Provides search and reporting features, including fuzzy search. The Search and Reporting Service (SRS) replaces the legacy embedded Elasticsearch and client‑server plug‑in with a cloud‑native microservice architecture for enterprise‑scale deployments. SRS includes the following components:
- Multi-tenant search service: A containerized microservice delivered as a Docker image (platform‑services/search‑n‑reporting‑service) from the Pega image registry. It manages communication between Pega Platform nodes and the search engine and supports multiple environments with full data isolation.
- External cluster search engine: An Elasticsearch or OpenSearch cluster that your organization provisions and manages internally or through a service provider. This flexibility aligns with organizational technology standards.
- Apache Kafka: Provides distributed streaming for queuing, messaging, and background processing. As of Pega Platform '24.2, you must deploy Kafka externally because embedded versions are deprecated.
- Apache Cassandra: Serves as the specialized database for decision management data used by Pega Customer Decision Hub™ and Pega Process AI™. External deployment is required because embedded versions are deprecated.
Hazelcast deprecation
As of Pega Platform™ 25, Hazelcast is no longer included in the architecture for external services. Built‑in Pega Platform features now handle node clustering, session replication, and caching. These features improve reliability and performance and do not require additional external services.
Externalization of services
Externalizing third‑party services improves Pega Platform™ by allowing each integration to evolve on its own schedule. Keeping these services outside Pega Platform supports faster adoption of new features, rapid responses to technological changes, and consistent application of security updates. This approach ensures that organizations use the full strengths of modern third‑party solutions.
The shift toward externalized services reflects a deliberate architectural direction that aligns with cloud‑native and industry‑standard practices. Understanding this direction helps Lead System Architects make informed design decisions and explain its benefits to stakeholders.
Externalization also aligns Pega Platform with containerized and microservice‑based deployment models. Modern enterprise applications consist of independently deployable components, each with its own scaling, lifecycle, and operational requirements. Externalizing these services positions Pega Platform to function reliably within this modular, cloud‑native ecosystem.
Advantages of externalization of services
Externalizing third‑party solutions and provisioning them as independent services for Pega Platform provides several important benefits. Because these services are upgraded, deployed, and maintained outside Pega Platform release cycles, you can use the latest supported versions as long as they remain compatible with your Pega Platform version. This approach supports continuous access to current, high‑quality features without waiting for updates.
Externalization also improves overall application quality. Performance, security, scalability, time‑to‑market, cost efficiency, and maintenance workload can all be optimized when third‑party services operate independently from Pega Platform.
The following list is a high‑level overview of the primary advantages:
- Performance: External third‑party services do not contend with Pega Platform for system resources, which can improve overall performance.
- Security: Each third‑party service performs its own vulnerability checks and maintains independent security controls. These services can apply security patches without affecting Pega Platform, which improves the security posture of the overall system.
- Availability and stability: Debugging, troubleshooting, and resolving issues in external services have minimal impact on Pega Platform. This separation improves application availability and maintains system stability.
- Scalability: Because the services run outside Pega Platform, you can scale them independently without modifying your Pega Platform deployment.
- Maintenance: External services can be updated outside Pega Platform release cycles. This approach supports continuous improvement without disrupting the broader deployment.
- Specialized support: Organizations can assign specialized teams to manage technologies such as Kafka, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch instead of requiring Pega Platform administrators to maintain broad knowledge across multiple technologies.
- Compliance and governance: Different services can follow different governance requirements. For example, a data store that contains customer decision data can require stricter retention and privacy controls than a messaging service that processes transient events.
- Time and cost efficiency: Many enterprises already use these third‑party services for other applications. Reusing existing operational knowledge and infrastructure reduces the time, cost, and effort required to support Pega Platform.
By externalizing these services, organizations help ensure that Pega Platform remains efficient, secure, and scalable while minimizing operational overhead and optimizing resource use.
Pega Platform continues to evolve toward containerized, cloud‑native, modular components. Additional services may transition to external deployment models in future versions, reinforcing this architectural direction.
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