Architecture of a cloud deployment

Architecture

The IBM Netcool Operations Insight cluster is made up of a set of virtual machines, which are deployed as control plane nodes or worker nodes. The control plane nodes provide management, proxy and boot functions, and the worker nodes are where the Kubernetes pods are deployed.

The following figure shows the architecture of a deployment of Netcool Operations Insight on OpenShift.

IBM Netcool Operations Insight on OpenShift cluster

The IBM Netcool Operations Insight cluster is deployed as containerized IBM Netcool Operations Insight applications within pods on Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform. Each pod has one or more containers.

Kubernetes orchestrates communication between the pods, and manages how the pods are deployed across the worker nodes. Pods are only deployed on worker nodes that meet the minimum resource requirements that are specified for that pod. Kubernetes uses affinity to ensure that pods that must be deployed on different worker nodes are deployed correctly. For example, affinity rules ensure that the primary ObjectServer is deployed on a different worker node to the backup ObjectServer.

Interaction with the cluster is managed by the controller node, as follows.

• Administration of the cluster is performed by connecting to the controller node, either with the catalog UI, or with the Red Hat OpenShift command-line interface, oc.
• Users log in to applications provided by the pods and containers within the cluster, such as WebGUI and Cloud GUI. These GUIs are accessed by browsing to a URL made up of the controller node hostname and the port number that is used by the relevant application.

If you require multiple independent installations of IBM Netcool Operations Insight, then you can create namespaces within your cluster and deploy each instance into a separate namespace.

For more information, see the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.16.4 documentation.

Routes

A Netcool Operations Insight on OpenShift deployment requires several routes to be created; to direct traffic from clients such as web browsers to the Netcool Operations Insight services, and also for services to communicate internally. For a full list of routes, run the command oc get routes on a deployed instance of Netcool Operations Insight.

Commonly used URLs:

• Cloud GUI: https://netcool-release_name.fqdn
• WebGUI: https://netcool-release_name.fqdn/ibm/console
• Netcool/Impact GUI: https://impact-release_name.fqdn/ibm/console

• <release_name> is the name of your deployment, as specified by the value used for name (Operator Lifecycle Manager UI Form view), or name in the metadata section of the noi.ibm.com_noihybrids_cr.yaml or noi.ibm.com_nois_cr.yaml files (YAML view).
• fqdn is the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the cluster's controller node. The FQDN takes the form apps.clustername.*.*.com

For more information, see Logging into Netcool Operations Insight.

Storage

Storage must be created before you deploy Netcool Operations Insight on OpenShift. For more information, see Storage.