Harbor Cluster without K8s

[timholl]

Hello community,

is it possible to deploy Harbor in a cluster (no single point of failure) using the compose deployment (not the k8s deployment)?

External load balancers, HA postgres, S3 and LDAP are available in my environment, but no k8s cluster.

I already tried to simply spin up multiple identical Harbor instances with the compose deployment and connect them to the same database, but without success. (They seem to invalidate each others LDAP bind credentials, therefore I wondered if this setup is supported at all.)

[uozalp]

From what I understand, Harbor deployed with docker-compose is really intended for single instance use. Even if you externalize DB, S3, LDAP, etc., running multiple instances in active-active mode is not officially supported and tends to cause issues like auth and session inconsistencies (likely due to shared secret/state handling).

So I’m not fully sure it’s possible to make it truly HA without Kubernetes, but in practice compose setups don’t work reliably in that mode.