Deploy App Connect on OpenShift

Rashid · September 20, 2019

ACE OpenShift

It is fascinating how integration patterns are transforming toward more light and agile type of architecture. I see cloud-native development approach plays a vital role in this, where each integration service is becoming independent and elastic.

Let’s demonstrates that by deploying App Connect Server on the OpenShift platform. There are two main steps:

Install Helm on OpenShift
Deploy App Connect via IBM charts

Install Helm

download Helm client

source /dev/stdin <<< "$(curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-helm/helm-v2.9.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz | tar xz)"

create OpenShift project for Helm server (tiller)
```
oc new-project tiller
```
set the tiller project/namespace .. that will enable Helm client to fetch the server-side
```
export TILLER_NAMESPACE=tiller
```
initialize Helm client
```
cd linux-amd64
./helm init
```

set the service-account for Helm server to give it the required access privileges

oc process -f https://github.com/openshift/origin/raw/master/examples/helm/tiller-template.yaml -p TILLER_NAMESPACE="${TILLER_NAMESPACE}" -p HELM_VERSION=v2.9.0 | oc create -f -

verify Helm client and server deployment

./helm version
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.9.0", GitCommit:"f6025bb9ee7daf9fee0026541c90a6f557a3e0bc", GitTreeState:"clean"}
Server: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.9.0", GitCommit:"f6025bb9ee7daf9fee0026541c90a6f557a3e0bc", GitTreeState:"clean"}

Deploy App Connect

create a project/namespace
```
oc new-project ace
```

grant tiller to access the project

oc policy add-role-to-user edit "system:serviceaccount:${TILLER_NAMESPACE}:tiller"

apply SCC to enable ace with the necessary access permissions

oc create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IBM/cloud-pak/master/spec/security/scc/ibm-anyuid-scc.yaml

create a service-account for to blind the SCC with ace deployment
```
oc create sa ibm-ace-sa
```

add the SCC to the service account

oc adm policy add-scc-to-user ibm-anyuid-scc -z ibm-ace-sa

add IBM charts to your local repo

helm repo add stable https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IBM/charts/master/repo/stable

load App Connect image to local docker registry

docker load -i ibm-ace-server-11.0.0.5.tar.gz

tag App Connect image with your registry host

docker tag ibm-ace-server:11.0.0.5 docker-registry.default.svc:5000/ace/ibm-ace-server:11.0.0.5

push App Connect image to cluster registry

docker push docker-registry.default.svc:5000/ace/ibm-ace-server:11.0.0.5

deploy App Connect

helm install --name ace-dev stable/ibm-ace-server-dev --set license=accept --set image.repository.aceonly={docker-repo/ace-image-name} --set image.tag={image-tag}

` you may update the chart values: image path & tag via the cli`

verify the deploymnet
```
oc get pod
```

the result should similar to this

NAME                            READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
ace-ibm-ace-5dcd4976f7-2jzqt    1/1       Running   0          6m
ace-ibm-ace-5dcd4976f7-k4vb5    1/1       Running   0          7m
ace-ibm-ace-5dcd4976f7-xdk6t    1/1       Running   0          7m
tiller-deploy-9d8996745-j5vxq   1/1       Running   0          4h

Big shout out to Rob Convery and his team for the well documented resources: ace-helm & ace-docker