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What are the Production Deployment Guides?

The Cloud Pak Production Deployment Guides document and demonstrate how to design, deploy and operate cloud-native solutions leveraging IBM Cloud Pak capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift environments. The guides focus on Production level qualities of services such as High Availability, Security and Performance including how to design, install and manage your Cluster in the popular managed and unmanaged Cloud environments as well as tackling disconnected or air-gapped environments.

Production Deployment Guide objectives

There are a number of objectives behind providing the Production Deployment Guides. The three main goals of the Guides are provided below:

Provide opinionated, validated Production topologies

There are many different topology related options to consider when deploying Cloud Paks in Production and often our customers are looking for IBM to guide them to the right decisions for their environment. These guides provide an opinionated approach that has been validated in each of the major clouds by a team of IBMers including field practitioners, developers and thought leaders.

More information can be read in golden-topology.

Provide a GitOps driven automation framework

What is GitOps?

GitOps requires us to describe the entire system declaratively in Git where the desired system state is versioned, managed and applied by software agents.

Automation is key for scale in the Cloud world and OpenShift and Cloud Paks are no different. The implementation code and artifacts provided along with these guides are based on a GitOps approach where infrastructure and everything deployed in to an OpenShift Cluster (including Cloud Paks) is described as code and is managed in the same way that application code would be.

More information on the gitops structure can be read in gitops and the different personas that can benefit from this guide is listed in personas.

Enable IBMers to setup Production topologies

These guides and the assets provided along with them are designed for use by IBM field practitioners from Customer Success, Tech Sales, Tech Garage and Expert Labs. Before a customer is ready for Production, the Cloud Pak Quickstarts can be used to show a Customer how to run a given Cloud Pak capability on any cloud and to provide a foundation to discuss automation, GitOps and cloud-native concepts. Once the customer is ready to discuss their Production topology, the Infrastructure assets will be important in showing how to design a Cluster with the required qualities of service. Finally, once the topology is agreed, the automation provided by the guides can be used to quickly configure a Production cluster and deploy workloads.

Note

Before using this guide, check the following pre-requisites and important updates.

Go to the Hands-on Guides section if you would like to try out some hands-on activities.

Video Introduction

This short video describes the motivation behind Production Deployment Guides, what its GitOps configurations can do, and the basic structure of the solution.

Guided walkthrough

If you'd like to have a guided walkthrough of what the Production Deployment Guides provide, check out this video demonstration of the Guides in action:

Deploying MQ Quick-start

Components of the Production Deployment Guides

As the name suggests, the Production Deployment Guides provide a collection of guidance that can be used to deploy IBM Cloud Paks in Production Topologies on different cloud providers. The following provides a listing of the assets that make up the Production Deployment Guides:

content diagram

To start deploying IBM Cloud Pak using this guide, read deployment paths.