Planning for product installation and metering

Before you install IBM® Business Automation Configuration Container and any IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud product, it is important to understand the entitlement of each license, and how you can measure the usage of your deployments. Usage metrics help you to ensure that the sum of all CPU limits do not exceed the Virtual Processing Cores (VPC) entitlements on all virtual servers.

About this task

Various roles are expected to be involved in the installation of IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud: developers, system administrators, operations, and DevOps teams. Each of these teams, interact with the infrastructure in a distinct way.

The system administration team is responsible for configuring the physical infrastructure for running an IBM Cloud Private cluster. The operations team maintains the cluster through patching, upgrading, and scaling. DevOps teams configure continuous delivery activities, monitoring, logging, rolling upgrades, and deployments. Developers consume the API and the resources that are exposed by the infrastructure.

An IBM Cloud Private Cluster Administrator is likely to create teams of users that have access to certain resources based on the Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. An IAM role defines the actions that a user can take on the team resources. A team of users, for example, might be granted access to the IBM Cloud Private catalog. For more information, see Role-based access control (RBAC).

The minimum RBAC role that is needed to install IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud is the Operator role. However, if redeployment and cleanup are needed then the user needs to have the Administrator role.

To run stateful applications, developers need to store the persistent data in a managed storage that is backed by some physical storage. Physical storage can be: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Google Compute Engine (GCE) Disk, internet Small Computer Serial Interface (iSCSS) disks, or a Network File System (NFS). To create the storage, administrators need to provision persistent volume (PV) for Business Automation Configuration Container. PVs are pre-provisioned storage resources that can be used by an application. To use a PV, a persistent volume claim (PVC) is needed to consume the storage resources declared in a PV. A PVC is a special volume type that specifies a storage requirement, such as 1 Gigabyte.

The following diagram shows that an administrator is likely to set up a pool of PVs, and either they or a developer claims a PV by referencing the claim in a deployment.

Note: Multiple instances of Business Automation Configuration Container can use the same claim by defining different deployment folders, or they can use different claims. Only one instance of a product can be installed by an instance of Business Automation Configuration Container as each product has a defined subdirectory name.

In IBM Cloud Private, namespaces can be used to isolate workloads and allow a cluster to be used by multiple users without undesired interaction. The namespace is a parameter that you enter as part of the configuration, and is used for the deployment that is installed by Business Automation Configuration Container.

At the beginning of a project, the administrator might encourage developers to use a namespace that is in their own name as they are likely to be short-lived and do not need to be metered. In the long term and for tracking purposes, it makes sense to divide up workloads into dedicated namespaces for your product lifecycle stages, such as development, preproduction, and production.

If you deploy all of your IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud capabilities at the same lifecycle stage into a targeted namespace, you can then filter the usage reports by the namespace and the platform label or GroupName.

Procedure

Set up namespaces for each of your lifecycle stages.
Install a Business Automation Configuration Container Helm release in each of these namespaces and create a separate PVC for each.
You can choose not to install Business Automation Configuration Container in each namespace and even share a PVC between multiple instances. However, having different instances of Business Automation Configuration Container to provision the products in different namespaces helps to clarify their objectives.
Use the Business Automation Configuration Container releases to deploy your licensed capabilities into the respective namespaces.
Generate usage reports each month with the IBM Cloud Private metering service.
Use the namespaces and GroupName to filter the production containers from non-production containers.
Add the total of Capped Cores or CCores, which is the equivalent of Virtual Processing Cores (VPC) in IBM Cloud Private, to measure your usage compared to your license information.

Example

The following table shows example namespaces (DBAMC_DEV, DBAMC_PREPROD, DBAMC_PROD) to help you collect metrics from the containers in different environments.

Note: IBM Business Automation Workflow is not integrated into IBM Cloud Private in the same way as the other capabilities.

Product and label (GroupName)	Development deployments	Preproduction deployments	Production deployments	Metering
IBM Business Automation Configuration Container	Example namespace: DBAMC_DEV	Example namespace: DBAMC_PREPROD	Example namespace: DBAMC_PROD	N/A
IBM FileNet® Content Manager GroupName: IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud	Example namespace: DBAMC_DEV	Example namespace: DBAMC_PREPROD	Example namespace: DBAMC_PROD	Metering service in IBM Cloud Private
Business Automation Insights GroupName: IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud - Business Automation Insights	Example namespace: DBAMC_DEV	Example namespace: DBAMC_PREPROD	Example namespace: DBAMC_PROD	Metering service in IBM Cloud Private
IBM Operational Decision Manager GroupName: IBM Digital Business Automation for Multicloud	Example namespace: DBAMC_DEV	Example namespace: DBAMC_PREPROD	Example namespace: DBAMC_PROD	Metering service in IBM Cloud Private
IBM Business Automation Workflow on Cloud Automation Manager GroupName: IBM Business Automation Workflow Enterprise	Content Runtime environment with a single VM template	Content Runtime environment with a multiple VM template	Content Runtime environment with a multiple VM template	Metering service in IBM Cloud Private For 18.0.0 IBM License Metric Tool