Sizing your environment

Adjust your test and production environments by sizing the Kafka and OpenSearch servers, and the Flink storage space and cluster.

About this task

For heavy-load use cases, also set up your test environment for a workload that is similar to what you expect in your production environment. Such setup helps you correctly size your IBM Business Automation Insights deployment according to the number of events that are ingested and processed in production.

Procedure

Size the Kafka and OpenSearch servers so that they can process all events that Business Automation Insights emitters send.
For more information, see the Cloud Pak foundational services documentation.
Size the storage space for Apache Flink.

The storage space needed is proportional to the sum of concurrently open artifacts or assets that originate IBM Business Automation products, such as BPM processes and activities, cases, and more.

Tip: To size persistent volumes for production, you can start from the storage consumption in your test environment.

Also, consider increasing the storage capacity of the persistent volumes and remember to take local disk space for temporary files into account.
Size your Apache Flink cluster as instructed in the following iterative process.
1. Check whether some back pressure is exerted from OpenSearch to Apache Flink.
2. Look up how many events are processed by the Flink jobs and compare that number to how many events are sent to Kafka.
3. If IBM Business Automation Insights consumes fewer events than are sent to Kafka, scale IBM Business Automation Insights as explained in Scaling an Business Automation Insights system.
4. Repeat the process from step 3.a.

What to do next

When you operate your cluster, you might want to regularly monitor whether your system is still correctly configured and sized for your current usage.

In a production environment, it is not a safe practice to use self-signed certificates. Rather, use the HTTPS protocol with trusted certificates.