Deployment overview

This information is a high-level overview of how to install and deploy FTM offerings on Red Hat® OpenShift®.

The following list describes, at a high level, the steps that you need to take to deploy your FTM offering to Red Hat OpenShift. When you are ready to start deploying your FTM offerings, see Deploy to Red Hat OpenShift.
  1. Review the hardware and software requirements to prepare for installation and deployment. For more information, see FTM Hardware and Software requirements.
  2. Review the release information and other support documentation for your FTM offering. The support documentation contains information about any new features or known issues for the offering. Links to the support documentation are in the related information section at the end of the topic.
  3. Collect any configuration information that you might need for the deployment. For example, database connectivity information, usernames and passwords, and other information.
  4. Verify that your Red Hat OpenShift cluster is ready to be used for your FTM installation. Ensure that you have administrator access to the cluster.
    • You also need to install the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform command-line interface (CLI) to interact with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. For more information about the Red Hat OpenShift CLI, see CLI tools in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform documentation.
  5. If your Red Hat OpenShift cluster does not have access to an external network, you can install in an air gap environment to get the container images for the FTM offerings. The following list shows the air gap methods that are available for you to use.
  6. Several tasks, such as the tasks in the following list, need to be done before you install the Red Hat OpenShift operators for the FTM offerings.
    • Install the IBM® Cloud Platform Common Services operator and its IBM Licensing Operator operand.
    • Create and configure the network storage. For example, configuring the storage class.
    • Ensure that you have a software load balancer, such as HAProxy, available.
    • To avoid process-related issues, the process limit for each of the worker nodes in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster must be at least 4096.
    • Configure mirroring for the cluster.
    • Add the IBM operator catalog.
  7. Create or set up the Red Hat OpenShift project to use for your FTM offerings.
  8. Create a secret that the cluster can use to get the secured container images that it needs.
  9. If you want to provision IBM MQ services by using the IBM MQ operator, you must install the IBM MQ operator with the native HA capability. For more information about the way that you install, deploy, and use IBM MQ in fix pack 1, see the IBM MQ comparison documents in the entitled documentation fix pack. The link to the entitled documentation fix pack is in the support links document for your FTM offering.
  10. If you want your database on Db2® Universal Container (Db2U), install, configure, and deploy Db2 on Red Hat OpenShift.
  11. Install the FTM Red Hat OpenShift operators that are needed for the FTM offering that you want to deploy. The following offerings can be deployed on Red Hat OpenShift.
    • Financial Transaction Manager
    • FTM for Check
  12. Create the artifacts instance for your selected FTM offering. This artifacts container contains the files that are needed for the offering. For example, the files that are needed to create the database and the compressed files that are needed by the Red Hat OpenShift operator to deploy the offering.
    • If you are using Db2U, you can choose to load the sample data when you create the artifacts instance for your FTM offering.
  13. If you want your Db2 database to be external to the cluster, install and configure it now. For example, you might need to install a new or migrate an existing external database.
  14. If you are deploying any of the offerings in the following list, install and run the data setup utility (DSU) to import the configuration data for the necessary Payment Feature Services components.
    • FTM for Check
  15. The following offering-specific, predeployment configuration tasks use files that you retrieve from the artifact container for the offering.
    1. Create a security context constraint (SCC) for the instance to be deployed.
    2. Map the persistent volumes to the network storage that you created. For example, create mount points in your NFS V4 storage and then map the persistent volumes to the mount points.
    3. Create custom self-signed certificates.
    4. Create an application secret for your FTM installation on Red Hat OpenShift.
    5. If signature verification of images is not configured for your Red Hat OpenShift cluster, add the public key for the signed images for your FTM offering.
  16. Deploy the Red Hat OpenShift instance for your selected FTM offering.
  17. Configure an optional HAProxy software load balancer. For example, you might want to use a load balancer for IBM MQ or IBM App Connect Enterprise.
  18. Configure optional NodePort services. For example, you might want to connect to IBM MQ or Db2 through exposed ports for testing purposes.
  19. Add the certificate for the IBM Licensing Operator operand to the FTM keystore.
  20. Enable and configure SSL for Business Rules Server.
  21. Access the FTM components to verify the deployment.
  22. Start the installation and deployment of your FTM offerings by using the information in Deploy to Red Hat OpenShift.