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 Flink will be delivered by IBM Confluent Platform.

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

Attention: This version of Event Streams has reached End of Support. For more information about supported versions, see the support matrix.

Preparing for multizone clusters

Event Streams supports multiple availability zones for your clusters. Multizone clusters add resilience to your Event Streams installation.

For guidance about handling outages in a multizone setup, see managing a multizone setup.

Zone awareness

Kubernetes uses zone-aware information to determine the zone location of each of its nodes in the cluster to enable scheduling of pod replicas in different zones.

Some clusters, typically AWS, will already be zone aware. For clusters that are not zone aware, each Kubernetes node will need to be set up with a zone label.

To determine if your cluster is zone aware:

  1. Log in to your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a cluster administrator by using the oc CLI (oc login).

  2. Run the following command as cluster administrator:

    oc get nodes --show-labels

If your Kubernetes cluster is zone aware, the following label is displayed against each node:

  • topology.kubernetes.io/zone if using OpenShift 4.5 or later
  • failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone if using an earlier version of OpenShift

The value of the label is the zone the node is in, for example, es-zone-1.

If your Kubernetes cluster is not zone aware, all cluster nodes will need to be labeled using a value that identifies the zone that each node is in. For example, run the following command to label and allocate a node to es-zone-1:

oc label node <node-name> topology.kubernetes.io/zone=es-zone-1

The zone label is needed to set up rack awareness when installing for multizone.

Kafka rack awareness

In addition to zone awareness, Kafka rack awareness helps to spread the Kafka broker pods and Kafka topic replicas across different availability zones, and also sets the brokers’ broker.rack configuration property for each Kafka broker.

To set up Kafka rack awareness, Kafka brokers require a cluster role to provide permission to view which Kubernetes node they are running on.

Before applying Kafka rack awareness to an Event Streams installation, apply a cluster role:

  1. Download the cluster role YAML file from GitHub.
  2. Log in to your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a cluster administrator by using the oc CLI (oc login).

  3. Apply the cluster role by using the following command and the downloaded file:

    oc apply -f eventstreams-kafka-broker.yaml