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App Connect Enterprise Quickstart

Introduction

The instructions in this section will walk you through the steps necessary for setting up a demo environment that can be quickly shown to customers to showcase the art of the possible.

This demo in no way removes the need for following the tutorial style instructions that are documented in other sections of this guide. The instructions below will set up a pre-canned application demo environment to show to the customers.

Pre-requisites

Create a custom Git Organization

Create a new Git Organization to host the different GitOps repositories.

Note

Make sure you do not populate your GitHub organization with cloned repositories. The GitHub organization must be empty and will be populated automatically by the environment provisioning.

Instructions:

  1. Log in to http://github.com and select the option to create a New organization.

    New Organization

  2. Click on Create a free organization plan.

  3. Complete the wizard by filling in the Organization account name and Contact email fields. Select the My personal account bullet and complete the verification step and click Next.

  4. Skip the step to add members to the Organization.

  5. Complete the Welcome to GitHub questionnaire and click Submit.

  6. Congratulations, you have successfully created a new Github Organization.

    Note

    Please ensure your GitHub organization is Public and not Private.

Create a Git Personal Access Token (PAT)

Create a new Git Personal Access Token with the appropriate scopes. This will be required to run the application pipelines or to set up webhooks.

Instructions:

  1. Log in to http://github.com and click on Settings.

    New Organization

  2. Select Developer settings and click on Personal access tokens.

  3. Provide a name for the token, set the Expiration to 90 days ,set the following scopes and click Generate token.

    GitHub Personal Access Token scopes

    Token Scopes
    Token Scopes

  4. Copy and save the Personal Access Token. You will not be able to retrieve this value again later.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster with GitOps Configuration

Create the cluster

  1. Provision a Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster with GitOps Configuration from IBM Technology Zone. Select the OpenShift + GitOps Configuration tile.

  2. Click the Reserve now radio button.

  3. Provide a name for the cluster, select Practice / Self-Education for the purpose and choose the region to provision the cluster.

  4. Once a Preferred Geography has been selected, provide the appropriate Worker Node Count and Worker Node Flavor values based on the requirements for this quickstart listed in the note below. Finally, click Submit.

    Note

    For this IBM App Connect Enterprise Quickstart we recommend you to request the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster with GitOps Configuration with the following size:

    • Worker Node Count = 3
    • Worker Node Flavor = 8 CPU x 32 GB

Use the cluster

You will receive an email once the cluster provisioning is complete. The email will contain details on the cluster including the ArgoCD Console URL and admin credentials. This same information can also be found on the My reservations from IBM Technology Zone.

Once your cluster is ready, proceed to the next step to select resources to deploy.

Install required CLIs

  • Install the Github CLI (version 1.14.0+)

  • Install the OpenShift CLI oc (version 4.7 or 4.8)

    • Log into your OCP cluster, substituting the --token and --server parameters with your values:

      oc login --token=<token> --server=<server>

      If you are unsure of these values, click your user ID in the OpenShift web console and select Copy login command.

  • Install the kubeseal CLI

    The kubeseal utility uses asymmetric crypto to encrypt secrets that only the controller can decrypt. These encrypted secrets are encoded in a SealedSecret resource which can safely be checked into your gitops repo. The controller will decrypt the secretes and install into your cluster.

Select resources to deploy

  • Clone the multi-tenancy-gitops repository in your Git Organization if you have not already done so and select the K8s resources to deploy in the infrastructure and services layers.

Instructions

  1. Select a profile and delete the others from the 0-bootstrap directory. If this is your first usage of the gitops workflow, Use the single-cluster profile. 
    GITOPS_PROFILE="0-bootstrap/single-cluster"
  2. Review the Infrastructure layer kustomization.yaml and un-comment the resources to deploy to match the IBM App Connect Enterprise recipe .
  3. Review the Services layer kustomization.yaml and un-comment the resources to deploy to match the IBM App Connect Enterprise recipe .
  4. Commit and push changes to your git repository 
    git add .
git commit -m "initial bootstrap setup"
git push origin

Validation

  1. Check the status of the CommonService and PlatformNavigator custom resource. 
    # Verify the Common Services instance has been deployed successfully
oc get commonservice common-service -n ibm-common-services -o=jsonpath='{.status.phase}'
# Expected output = Succeeded

# [Optional] If selected, verify the Platform Navigator instance has been deployed successfully
oc get platformnavigator -n tools -o=jsonpath='{ .items[*].status.conditions[].status }'
# Expected output = True
  2. Log in to the Platform Navigator console 
    # Retrieve Platform Navigator Console URL
oc get route -n tools integration-navigator-pn -o template --template='https://{{.spec.host}}'
# Retrieve admin password
oc extract -n ibm-common-services secrets/platform-auth-idp-credentials --keys=admin_username,admin_password --to=-