(Red Hat® OpenShift) Determining routes for service access

After you configure and deploy your containers, you can use Red Hat OpenShift Cloud Platform to determine the routes you use to access the services in your content services environment.

About this task

As of IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation 21.0.3, most traffic, by default, goes through the Cloud Pak Platform UI(Zen) front door. Clients of CP4BA applications need to use a URL that goes through the Zen front door route followed by an application-specific prefix.

The Zen front door route can be determined by running the command: oc get routes | grep cpd. Using the Zen front door has several implications, which include the application URLs, HTTP response headers, and authentication. The following table shows the URLs for each component for IBM FileNet® Content Manager:

Component URL Path Prefix
Content Platform Engine /cpe
GraphQL /content-services-graphql
Task Manager /tm

Some non-Zen routes are provided for batch and other not user-centric applications. The full list of routes can be viewed in the icp4adeploy-cp4ba-access-info configmap found under Workloads > ConfigMaps under your project namespace in the OCP console.

If an application is looking for a load-balancing pattern that uses round-robin where session affinity is not enforced, then the Zen route that contains the application prefix that is shown in the previous table can be used or a non-Zen route that is named with 'stateless' can be used.

If an application needs session affinity, it cannot use the Zen route. Instead, it uses the routes without the 'stateless' in the name. This ensures that the load balancing for the back-end services provide for sticky session affinity based on the client IP.

Applications interacting with the Content Platform Engine that need to use sticky session affinity perform metadata authoring followed (within 2 minutes) by CRUD, which attempts to use the newly authored metadata. These applications must use the non-Zen routes without 'stateless' in the name. Examples of applications that need the sticky route are Content Platform Engine tools such as the FileNet Deployment Manager and FileNet Process Designer.

Applications interacting with the Content Platform Engine that do not do metadata authoring operations or are not looking for other benefits that are gained from session affinity, such as enhanced performance due to using the same backend pod between RPCs, would use the Zen that route contains the application prefix or the non-Zen route with 'stateless' in the name.

The FileNet Content Manager components can now have either stateless or sticky routes, depending on the component:

Table 1. Routes
Component Route
Content Platform Engine One sticky route, one stateless route
GraphQL One stateless route
Content Management Interoperability Service One sticky route

You can find these routes in the xxx-access-info configmap. For more information, see Option 2: Installing a production deployment in the OpenShift console.

To determine your routes, you can use either the console settings or the command line.

Procedure

To determine your service routes:

  • Determine the route that uses the OpenShift® Container Platform console:
    1. From the console, go to the project where your content services containers are deployed.
    2. Go to Networking > Routes.
    3. Start the route for the service that you want to access.
      For example, use the following root additions to the route:
      • To access the Administration Console for Content Platform Engine, add /acce to the end of the URL for the route that is not 'stateless'.
  • Determine the route by using the command line:
    1. Log in to your cluster:
      oc login
    2. Access the project where your containers are deployed:
      oc project <Deployed Project>
    3. Get the routes for the project:
      oc get routes
    4. Start the route for the service that you want to access.
      For example, use the following root additions to the route:
      • To access the Administration Console for Content Platform Engine, add /cpe/acce to the URL for the route that uses the Zen front door.