Installing and uninstalling IBM App Connect in a Kubernetes environment
You can install IBM® App Connect on a Kubernetes cluster with internet access or within an air-gapped environment
(that is, a restricted or disconnected network with no connection to the internet). The installation
of the Operator is managed by Helm and is command-line based. This installation provides an
Operator-based release of the IBM App Connect Enterprise certified
container.
About this task
Before you install the IBM App Connect Operator into your cluster, you must set up the environment with automated certificate management.
A Helm chart is supplied for the Operator in the IBM Helm Chart Repository on GitHub, and you use this chart to install the Operator by running helm commands. In an online environment, you typically pull the App Connect container images, which are needed to deploy the Operator, directly from the IBM Entitled Registry. In an air-gapped environment, you need to first mirror the images to a private or local registry in your cluster to make the images available for deployment.
When you install the IBM App Connect Operator, custom resources for the App Connect components are provided as APIs that can be used to create instances. To make each instance that you create accessible from the internet, you need to create an ingress resource to route external traffic to the internal service in the cluster.
You can use identity and access management (IAM) to control access to the authoring and runtime environments that App Connect provides. To do so, you will need to install and configure a self-managed deployment of Keycloak in your cluster. For more information, see Implementing identity and access management in IBM App Connect by using a self-managed Keycloak solution on Red Hat OpenShift or Kubernetes.
Use the following information to prepare your Kubernetes environment and install App Connect.