Reference architecture high-level design

RHOCP is designed to facilitate the orchestration, deployment, and management of running containerized applications. Therefore, the key architectural challenges of your deployment are to consider how you can ensure that your applications adhere to best practices of a cloud-native container workload.

For greenfield application development, it might be an easy task to design your solutions as microservices and deploy them as containers, which can interact with each other through light-weight protocols and defined APIs.

For monolithic applications, the packaging as containerized workloads will most likely be more of a challenge and require planning of transformation efforts.

When planning to deploy an RHOCP cluster, it is important to understand the IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE architecture and decide whether you want to plan for Proof of Concept (PoC), Proof of Technology (Pot), or rather production-like environments for larger workloads.

When deploying an RHOCP environment on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE, you must consider that the machine needs to be partitioned first. This represents a hardware-level virtualization, which allows sharing resources across those partitions like processor/core capacity, I/O and network. Retaining multi-tenant due to the highest isolation certification in the industry 'Evaluation Assurance Level 5+' (EAL5+).

The resulting Logical Partitions (LPARs) are the base for building different workload environments that can run side by side on the same hardware machine.

The LPARs can reside on one or multiple physical machines.