Prerequisites

Ensure your environment meets the following prerequisites before installing Event Streams.

Container environment

Event Streams 11.5.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 you have the following set up for your environment:

A supported version of OpenShift Container Platform on a supported system installed. For supported container platform versions and systems, see the support matrix.
The OpenShift Container Platform CLI (oc) installed.
As an option, you can install a supported version of the IBM Cloud Pak foundational services to use the components offered by foundational services.

If you are using other Kubernetes platforms, ensure you have the following set up for your environment:

A supported version of a Kubernetes platform on a supported system installed. For supported container platform versions and systems, see the support matrix.
The Kubernetes command-line tool (kubectl) installed.

Note: For completing tasks by using the command line, you can use both kubectl and oc commands if your deployment is on the OpenShift Container Platform. This documentation set includes instructions that use the kubectl command, except for cases where the task is specific to OpenShift.

Hardware requirements

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

Kubernetes manages the allocation of containers within your cluster. This allows resources to be available for other Event Streams components which might be required to reside on the same node.

For production systems, it is recommended to have Event Streams configured with at least 3 Kafka brokers, and to have one worker node for each Kafka broker. This requires a minimum of 3 worker nodes available for use by Event Streams. Ensure each worker node runs on a separate physical server. See the guidance about Kafka high availability for more information.

Resource requirements

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

Installing Event Streams has two phases:

Install the Event Streams operator. The operator will then be available to install and manage your Event Streams instances.
Install one or more instances of Event Streams by applying configured custom resources. Sample configurations for development and production use cases are provided to get you started.

Minimum resource requirements are as follows, and are based on the total of requests set for the deployment. You will require more resources to accommodate the limit settings (see more about “requests” and “limits” later in this section). Always ensure you have sufficient resources in your environment to deploy the Event Streams operator together with a development or a production Event Streams instance.

Deployment	CPU (cores)	Memory (GiB)	Chargeable cores (see licensing)
Operator	0.2	1.0	N/A
Development	2.4	5.4	1
Production	2.8	5.9	3

Note: Event Streams provides sample configurations to help you get started with deployments. The resource requirements for these specific samples are detailed in the planning section. If you do not have an Event Streams installation on your system yet, always ensure you include the resource requirements for the operator together with the intended Event Streams instance requirements (development or production).

Event Streams is a Kubernetes operator-based release and uses custom resources to define your Event Streams configurations. The Event Streams operator uses the declared required state of your Event Streams in the custom resources to deploy and manage the entire lifecycle of your Event Streams instances. Custom resources are presented as YAML configuration documents that define instances of the EventStreams custom resource type.

The provided samples define typical configuration settings for your Event Streams instance, including broker configurations, security settings, and default values for resources such as CPU and memory defined as “request” and “limit” settings. Requests and limits are Kubernetes concepts for controlling resource types such as CPU and memory.

Requests set the minimum requirements a container requires to be scheduled. If your system does not have the required request value, then the services will not start up.
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 you have sufficient CPU capacity and physical memory in your environment to service these requirements. Your Event Streams instance can be dynamically updated later through the configuration options provided in the custom resource.

Operator requirements

The Event Streams operator requires the following minimum resource requirements. Ensure you always 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	1.0	1.0

Cluster-scoped permissions required

The Event Streams operator requires the following cluster-scoped permissions:

Permission to list nodes in the cluster: When the Event Streams operator is deploying a Kafka cluster that spans multiple availability zones, it needs to label the pods with zone information. The permission to list nodes in the cluster is required to retrieve the information for these labels.
Permission to manage admission webhooks: The Event Streams operator uses admission webhooks to provide immediate validation and feedback about the creation and modification of Event Streams instances. The permission to manage webhooks is required for the operator to register these actions.
Permission to list specific CustomResourceDefinitions: This allows Event Streams to identify whether other optional dependencies have been installed into the cluster.

In addition to the previous permissions, the Event Streams operator requires the following cluster-scoped permissions on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform:

Permission to manage ConsoleYAMLSamples: ConsoleYAMLSamples are used to provide samples for Event Streams resources in the OpenShift Container Platform web console. The permission to manage ConsoleYAMLSamples is required for the operator to register the setting up of samples.
Permission to list ClusterRoles and ClusterRoleBindings: The Event Streams operator uses ClusterRoles created by the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) as parents for supporting resources that the Event Streams operator creates. This is needed so that the supporting resources are correctly cleaned up when Event Streams is uninstalled. The permission to list ClusterRoles is required to allow the operator to identify the appropriate cluster role to use for this purpose.
Permission to view ConfigMaps (only on OpenShift with IBM Cloud Pak foundational services): When Event Streams uses authentication services from foundational services, the status of these services is maintained in ConfigMaps, so the permission to view the contents of the ConfigMaps allows Event Streams to monitor the availability of the foundational services dependencies.

Adding Event Streams geo-replication to a deployment

The Event Streams geo-replicator allows messages sent to a topic on one Event Streams cluster to be automatically replicated to another Event Streams cluster.

To use this feature, ensure you have the following additional resources available. The following table shows the prerequisites for each geo-replicator node.

CPU request (cores)	CPU limit (cores)	Memory request (GiB)	Memory limit (GiB)	Chargeable cores (see licensing)
1.0	2.0	2.0	2.0	1

For instructions about installing geo-replication, see configuring.

Red Hat OpenShift Security Context Constraints

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

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

If you use a custom SCC (for example, one that is more restrictive), or have an operator that updates the default SCC, the changes might interfere with the functioning of your Event Streams deployment. To resolve any issues, apply the SCC provided by Event Streams as described in troubleshooting.

Kubernetes Pod Security Standards

If used, Event Streams requires a Pod Security Standard (PSS) to be bound to the target namespace prior to installation.

By default, Event Streams complies with the following:

Kubernetes 1.24 and earlier complies with the ibm-restricted-psp Pod Security Policy.
Kubernetes 1.25 and later complies with the built-in restricted Pod Security Standard.

Network requirements

Event Streams is supported for use with IPv4 networks only.

Ingress controllers

When you want to expose Event Streams services externally outside your cluster, you can use OpenShift routes or ingress on other Kubernetes platforms.

When using 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 Streams services to work. Refer to your ingress controller documentation for more information.

Data storage requirements

If you want to set up persistent storage, Event Streams requires block storage configured to use the XFS or ext4 file system. The use of file storage (for example, NFS) is not recommended.

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
Kubernetes local volumes
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Rook Ceph

Schema requirements

The Apicurio Registry is used in Event Streams to store message schemas. Each Event Streams cluster has its own instance of Apicurio Registry providing schema registry functionality.

To connect your applications to use the Apicurio Registry, ensure all applications connecting to your instance of Event Streams that use the schema registry are using Apicurio client libraries version 2.5.0 or later.

Event Streams UI

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

Google Chrome version 65 or later
Mozilla Firefox version 59 or later
Safari version 11.1 or later

Event Streams CLI

The Event Streams command-line interface (CLI) is supported on the following systems:

Windows 10 or later
Linux® Ubuntu 16.04 or later
macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later

See the post-installation tasks for information about installing the CLI.

Kafka clients

The Apache Kafka Java client included with Event Streams is supported for use with the following Java versions:

IBM Java 8 or later
Oracle Java 8 or later

You can also use other Kafka version 2.0 or later clients when connecting to Event Streams. If you encounter client-side issues, IBM can assist you to resolve those issues (see our support policy).

Event Streams is designed for use with clients based on the librdkafka implementation of the Apache Kafka protocol.

Optional: IBM Cloud Pak foundational services for OpenShift

If you are installing on the OpenShift Container Platform, you can access additional features with IBM Cloud Pak foundational services. To enable the additional features, install a supported version of foundational services before installing Event Streams, as described in the foundational services documentation. Event Streams supports foundational services version 3.19.0 or later 3.x releases, and 4.x releases.

Event Streams supports both the Continuous Delivery (CD) and the Long Term Service Release (LTSR) version of foundational services (for more information, see release types). This provides more flexibility for compatibility with other Cloud Pak components (for more information, see deploying with other Cloud Paks on the same cluster).

By default, the starterset profile is requested for new installations. If you are preparing for a production deployment, ensure you set a more suitable profile, for example, the medium profile as described in setting the hardware profile.

Note: If you are installing Event Streams in an existing IBM Cloud Pak for Integration deployment, the required foundational services might already be installed due to other capabilities, and the dependencies required by Event Streams might already be satisfied with a profile other than the default starterset.

If you plan to install other IBM Cloud Pak for Integration capabilities, ensure you meet the resource requirements for the whole profile. If you only want to deploy Event Streams on the cluster, you can calculate more granular sizing requirements based on the foundational services components that you want to use for your Event Streams installation.

For more information about foundational services, see the IBM Cloud Pak foundational services documentation.

Note: Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication is only available on the OpenShift Container Platform with IBM Cloud Pak foundational services 3.x releases. It is not supported on other Kubernetes platforms.

Optional: Authenticate Event Streams with Keycloak

If you are installing on the OpenShift Container Platform, you can configure access for your integration capabilities such as Event Streams by using Keycloak.

Keycloak is supported on Event Streams 11.3.0 and later when an IBM Cloud Pak for Integration version 2023.4.1 (operator 7.2.0) 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 sections about configuring UI security and managing access with Keycloak.

Limitations

Configuring your access with Keycloak in Event Streams has the following limitations:

You cannot access the dashboards that are included in the Event Streams UI for monitoring Kafka health and topic health.
The Event Streams CLI is not supported.

Note: You can authenticate the CLI by using a different mechanism (for example, SCRAM) even if you have other authentication mechanisms configured for your Event Streams instance (for example, Keycloak).
Authentication with Keycloak is not supported for REST endpoints (REST Producer, Admin API, Apicurio Registry).