Event Endpoint Management continues to be enhanced

Event Endpoint Management continues to be available and enhanced as part of IBM's integration platforms.

End of Marketing announcement for IBM Event Automation

Event Streams and Event Processing are deprecated and no enhancements will be provided. Support and security fixes will be provided in line with published support lifecycle policies. Future event-driven solutions that make use of Apache Kafka and Apache Flink will be delivered by IBM Confluent.

For more information, see the support lifecycle transition and software ordering completion announcement.

Prerequisites

Ensure that your environment meets the following prerequisites before you install Event Endpoint Management.

Container environment

Event Endpoint Management 11.8.x is supported on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and other Kubernetes platforms that support the Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) containers.

If you are using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, ensure that your environment meets the following requirements:

  • A supported version of the OpenShift Container Platform installed. For supported versions, see the support matrix.
  • The OpenShift Container Platform CLI (oc) installed.

If you are using other Kubernetes platforms, ensure that your environment meets the following requirements:

  • A supported version of a Kubernetes platform is installed. For supported versions, see the support matrix.
  • The Kubernetes command-line tool (kubectl) installed.

If you plan to run the Event Gateway as a Docker container, the minimum requirements for the Docker environment where the gateway runs are 2 CPU cores and 2 GiB of memory.

Hardware requirements

Ensure that your hardware can accommodate the resource requirements for your planned deployment.

Resource requirements

Event Endpoint Management resource requirements depend on several factors. The following sections provide guidance about minimum requirements for a quick start deployment, and options for initial production configurations.

Minimum resource requirements for an Event Endpoint Management deployment with an operator-managed Event Gateway are as follows, and are based on the total of requests set for the deployment. More resources are required to accommodate the limit settings (see more about “requests” and “limits” later in this section).

Deployment CPU (cores) Memory (GiB) Chargeable cores (see licensing)
Event Endpoint Management operator 0.2 0.5 N/A
Event Manager instance 0.5 0.5 1
Event Gateway instance 1.0 1.0 1

Note: Event Endpoint Management provides sample Event Manager configurations to help you get started with deployments. The resource requirements for these specific samples are detailed in the planning section. If Event Endpoint Management is not installed on your system yet, ensure that you consider the resource requirements for the Event Endpoint Management operator together with the intended Event Manager and Event Gateway instance requirements (quick start or production).

Requests and limits are Kubernetes concepts for controlling resource types such as CPU and memory.

  • Requests set the minimum requirements for a container to be scheduled. If your system does not meet the request value, then the services cannot start.
  • Limits set the value beyond which a container cannot consume the resource. It is the upper limit within your system for the service. Containers that exceed a CPU resource limit are throttled, and containers that exceed a memory resource limit are terminated by the system.

Ensure that you have sufficient CPU capacity and physical memory in your environment to service these requirements. Your Event Manager and Event Gateway instances can be dynamically updated later.

Operator requirements

The Event Endpoint Management operator requires the following minimum resource requirements. Ensure that you include sufficient CPU capacity and physical memory in your environment to service the operator requirements.

CPU request (cores) CPU limit (cores) Memory request (GiB) Memory limit (GiB)
0.2 1.0 0.5 1

You can install only one version of the Event Endpoint Management operator on a cluster. Installing multiple versions on a single cluster is not supported due to possible compatibility issues as they share the Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), making them unsuitable for coexistence.

Cluster-scoped permissions required

The Event Endpoint Management operator requires the following cluster-scoped permissions, even if the operator is set to manage instances in a single namespace:

  • Permission to retrieve storage classes: The Event Endpoint Management operator uses admission webhooks to provide immediate validation and feedback about the creation and modification of the Event Manager and operator-managed Event Gateway instances. The permission to retrieve storage classes is used by the webhooks to find a default storage class.
  • Permission to list specific CustomResourceDefinitions: Allows Event Endpoint Management to identify whether other optional dependencies are installed into the cluster.

Red Hat OpenShift Security Context Constraints

If used, Event Endpoint Management requires a Security Context Constraint (SCC) to be bound to the target namespace before installation.

By default, Event Endpoint Management complies with restricted or restricted-v2 SCC depending on your OpenShift Container Platform version.

Network requirements

Event Endpoint Management is supported for use with IPv4 networks only.

Ingress controllers

To expose Event Endpoint Management services externally outside your cluster, the Event Endpoint Management operator creates:

  • OpenShift routes on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
  • Kubernetes ingress resources on other Kubernetes platforms.

To use ingress, ensure you install and run an ingress controller on your Kubernetes platform. The SSL passthrough must be enabled in the ingress controller for your Event Endpoint Management services to work. Refer to your ingress controller documentation for more information.

Note: You must specify either Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform routes or Kubernetes ingresses for communication between Event Manager and Event Gateways. Specifying Kubernetes Services as your endpoints when you add gateways is not supported.

Data storage requirements

Event Endpoint Management supports any Container Storage Interface (CSI) compatible storage classes.

Specifically, for RedHat OpenShift Kubernetes Service (ROKS), you can use either:

  • IBM Cloud Block storage, ibmc-block-<tier>, where <tier> can be gold, silver or bronze
  • (Only on Single-Zone clusters) IBM Cloud File storage with support for supplemental group IDs, ibmc-file-<tier>-gid

You can use the storage classes to set up persistent storage or to back up and restore your data.

If you want to set up persistent storage, ensure that the cluster administrator created one or more storage classes that support ReadWriteOnce and allows read and write access to non-root users.

For example, you can use one of the following systems:

  • Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (previously OpenShift Container Storage) version 4.2 or later (block storage only)
  • IBM Cloud Block storage
  • IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks: block storage from IBM Spectrum Virtualize, FlashSystem, or DS8K
  • Portworx Storage version 2.5.5 or later
  • Rook Ceph

Important: The previous list includes storage providers that you can use to provision persistent volumes for Event Endpoint Management. Some providers might not support all features of a storage provider, such as snapshot-based backup and restore of the volumes. If you want to back up and restore your Event Manager instance, ensure you use a storage provider compatible with the CSI specification for taking snapshots.

Event Gateway compatibility

Ensure that both your Event Gateway and Event Manager instances are from the same version of Event Endpoint Management, or that the Event Gateway is from an earlier version.

Event Endpoint Management UI

The Event Endpoint Management user interface (UI) is supported on the following web browsers:

  • Google Chrome version 113 or later
  • Mozilla Firefox version 113 or later
  • Safari version 16.5 or later

Certificate management

A certificate manager is required to manage the Event Endpoint Management internal and system-to-system certificates. Event Endpoint Management cannot operate without a certificate manager. By default, the certificate manager is also used for managing the external user-facing Event Endpoint Management certificates.

  • On Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, install the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift.
  • On other Kubernetes platforms, use a certificate manager installation, for example cert-manager, that supports Issuer.cert-manager.io/v1 and Certificate.cert-manager.io/v1 GroupVersionKind (GVK), or create certificates manually and provide them to Event Endpoint Management by using Kubernetes secrets.

The cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

If you already have the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift installed on your cluster, you can skip this check.

  • To check whether the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift is installed on your cluster by using the OpenShift web console, complete the following steps:

    1. Log in to the OpenShift Container Platform web console using your login credentials.
    2. Expand the Operators drop-down menu and select Installed Operators to open the Installed Operators page.
    3. In the list of installed operators, check whether cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift is available, and whether the status is showing as Succeeded in the cert-manager-operator namespace.

  • To check whether the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift is installed on your cluster by using the CLI, run the following command:

      oc get pods -n cert-manager

    If the cert-manager pods are up and running, the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift is ready to use.

  • If you need to install the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift, follow the instructions in the OpenShift documentation.

Important: You can have only one cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift installed on your cluster. Choose the appropriate version based on what other software is running in your environment. If you have an existing IBM Cloud Pak for Integration deployment, check whether you have a foundational services operator already and note the version.

Optional: Authenticate with Keycloak provided by IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

If you are installing on the OpenShift Container Platform as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, you can configure access for your integration capabilities such as Event Endpoint Management by using Keycloak.

Keycloak is supported in Event Endpoint Management when an IBM Cloud Pak for Integration version 16.1.0 (operator 7.3.0) or later is available. See the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration documentation for information about installing IBM Cloud Pak for Integration.

For more information, see managing access with Keycloak.