Planning for installation and metering

Various roles are expected to be involved in the installation of IBM Cloud Pak for Automation: developers, system administrators, operations, and DevOps teams. Each of these teams, interact with the infrastructure in a distinct way.

The system administration team is responsible for configuring the physical infrastructure for running your cluster. The operations team maintains the cluster through patching, upgrading, and scaling. DevOps teams configure continuous delivery activities, monitoring, logging, rolling upgrades, and deployments. Developers consume the API and the resources that are exposed by the infrastructure.

A Cluster Administrator is likely to create teams of users that have access to certain resources based on the Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. An IAM role defines the actions that a user can take on the team resources.

The minimum RBAC role that is needed to install IBM Cloud Pak for Automation is the Operator role. However, if redeployment and cleanup are needed then the user needs to have the Administrator role. For more information, see Role-based access control (RBAC).

To run stateful applications, developers need to store the persistent data in a managed storage that is backed by some physical storage. Physical storage can be: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Google Compute Engine (GCE) Disk, internet Small Computer Serial Interface (iSCSS) disks, or a Network File System (NFS). To create the storage, administrators need to provision persistent volume (PV). PVs are pre-provisioned storage resources that can be used by an application. To use a PV, a persistent volume claim (PVC) is needed to consume the storage resources declared in a PV. A PVC is a special volume type that specifies a storage requirement, such as 1 Gigabyte.

Namespaces can be used to isolate workloads and allow a cluster to be used by multiple users without undesired interaction. The namespace is a parameter that you enter as part of the configuration, and is used for the deployment that is installed by Kubernetes.

At the beginning of a project, the administrator might encourage developers to use a namespace that is in their own name as they are likely to be short-lived and do not need to be metered. In the long term and for tracking purposes, it makes sense to divide up workloads into dedicated namespaces for your application lifecycle stages, such as development, preproduction, and production.

If you deploy all of your IBM Cloud Pak for Automation capabilities at the same lifecycle stage into a targeted namespace, you can then filter the usage reports by the namespace and the platform label or swidtag.

Metering is critical to help you understand your deployments against entitlements. Metering uses a system of metadata annotation in Helm charts and aggregation of VPCs that can be exported to CSV files.