Plan your deployment
Everything in this section is a decision you make before touching a server: what the components are, how big each one needs to be, and what the requirements are for the versions you'll run. Work through the pages in order.
The components of a Mattermost deployment and how they fit together: access layer, application layer, and the database, file storage, search, and cache behind them.
Pick a scale tier, deployment type, and hosting provider to get a target architecture diagram and a bill of materials sized to those choices.
Minimum client, server, database, and hardware requirements, including the minimum PostgreSQL version policy.
What to decide here
Sizing depends on more than user count. Before you move on to Prepare, settle:
- Expected user count and growth. Sizing is driven by concurrent users, not registered users. Size your deployment maps a scale tier to a bill of materials.
- Whether you need high availability. HA changes the topology, the licensing, and the deployment method. See High availability cluster-based deployment.
- Your backup and disaster recovery requirements. These are deployment-time architecture decisions, not day-2 tasks. See Back up and recover.
- Which deployment method fits your environment. Kubernetes, Linux, or containers. The trade-offs are compared in Deploy the Mattermost server.
- Security and compliance constraints. If you're deploying air-gapped, into a coalition network, or under a compliance framework, start from Deployment Scenarios, because those constraints shape every decision that follows.
- Integrations with existing systems. Identity provider, SMTP relay, push notification service, and search infrastructure all need to exist before you cut over users.
Not deploying it yourself? Deployment Solution Programs covers the third-party and community-maintained solutions that deploy Mattermost for you, and the standards each recognition tier commits to.