Planning for a CP4BA Process Federation Server production deployment

Required components

The following diagram shows the components that are required for Process Federation Server. You need to prepare for all the required components. For information about what other components that IBM Automation foundation includes, see Capabilities for production deployments.

Process Federation Server capability diagram

The following table describes the foundation components that are optional or always included with a Process Federation Server deployment.

Table 1. Installed foundation components with Process Federation Server
Components	Installed
Application Engine (AE) (data persistence optional)	Optional
Resource Registry (RR)	Always
Default foundational services, which include IBM Cloud Pak Platform UI (or Zen UI) MongoDB Identity Management (IM) Common Web UI Service License Service Certificate management	Always
Elasticsearch	Always
Business Teams Service (BTS)	Optional
IBM Business Automation Navigator	Optional

System requirements

Process Federation Server containers are based on Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI), and are Red Hat and IBM certified. To use the image, the administrator must make sure that the target cluster on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform has the capacity for Process Federation Server. For information about system requirements for the optional components and more detailed information about system considerations, see Multi-pattern system requirements.

The Detailed system requirements page provides a cluster requirements guideline for IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation.

The minimum cluster configuration and physical resources that are needed to run the Cloud Pak include the following elements:

Hardware architecture: Intel (amd64 or x86_64 the 64-bit edition for Linux® x86) on all platforms, Linux on IBM Z, or Linux on Power.
Node counts: Dual compute nodes for nonproduction and production clusters. A minimum of three nodes is needed for medium and large production environments and large test environments. Any cluster configuration needs to adapt to the size of the projects and the workload that is expected.

Based on your cluster requirement, you can pick a deployment profile (sc_deployment_profile_size) and enable it during installation. Cloud Pak for Business Automation provides small, medium, and large deployment profiles. You can set the profile during installation, in an update, and during an upgrade.

The default profile is small. Before you install the Cloud Pak, you can change the profile to medium or large. You can scale up or down a profile anytime after installation. However, if you install with a medium profile and another Cloud Pak specifies a medium or large profile then if you scale down to size small, the profile for the foundational services remains as it is. You can scale down the foundational services to small only if no other Cloud Pak specifies a medium or large size.

Attention: The values in the hardware requirements tables were derived under specific operating and environment conditions. The information is accurate under specific conditions, but results that are obtained in your operating environments might vary significantly. Therefore, IBM cannot provide any representations, assurances, guarantees, or warranties regarding the performance of the profiles in your environment.

The following table describes each deployment profile.

Table 2. Deployment profiles and estimated workloads
Profile	Description	Scaling (per 8-hour day)	Minimum number of worker nodes
Small (no HA)	For environments that are used by 10 developers and 25 users. For environments that are used by a single department with a few users; useful for application development.	Supports failover StatefulSet provides high availability (HA)	8
Medium	For environments that are used by 20 developers and 125 users. For environments that are used by a single department and by limited users.	Supports HA and failover Provides at least two replicas of most services, if configuring failover	16
Large	For environments that are used by 50 developers and 625 users. For environments that are shared by multiple departments and users.	Supports HA and failover Provides at least two replicas of most services, if configuring failover	32

You can use custom resource templates to update the hardware requirements. The following tables provide the default resources for each profile size.

Attention: The values in the hardware requirements tables were derived under specific operating and environment conditions. The information is accurate under the given conditions, but results that are obtained in your operating environments might vary significantly. Therefore, IBM cannot provide any representations, assurances, guarantees, or warranties regarding the performance of the profiles in your environment.

Table 3. Operator default requirements for all profile sizes
Operator	CPU Request (m)	CPU Limit (m)	Memory Request (Mi)	Memory Limit (Mi)	Number of replicas
Process Federation Server operator	100	500	20	1024	1
Cloud Pak for Business Automation	500	1000	256	2048	1
Cloud Pak for Business Automation Foundation operator	500	1000	256	2048	1

Table 4. Cloud Pak for Business Automation operator default requirements for a small profile
Component	CPU Request (m)	CPU Limit (m)	Memory Request (Mi)	Memory Limit (Mi)	Number of replicas	Pods are licensed for production/nonproduction
Resource Registry	100	500	256	512	1	No
Process Federation Service	200	1000	512	1024	1	No
Elasticsearch Service	500	800	820	2048	1	No

Table 5. Cloud Pak for Business Automation operator default requirements for a medium profile
Component	CPU Request (m)	CPU Limit (m)	Memory Request (Mi)	Memory Limit (Mi)	Number of replicas	Pods are licensed for production/nonproduction
Resource Registry	100	500	256	512	3	No
Process Federation Service	200	1000	512	1024	2	No
Elasticsearch Service	500	1000	3512	5120	3	No

Table 6. Cloud Pak for Business Automation operator default requirements for a large profile
Component	CPU Request (m)	CPU Limit (m)	Memory Request (Mi)	Memory Limit (Mi)	Number of replicas	Pods are licensed for production/nonproduction
Resource Registry	100	500	256	512	3	No
Process Federation Service	200	1000	750	1512	2	No
Elasticsearch Service	1000	2000	3512	5128	3	No

For all profile sizes, Process Federation Server also creates the jobs in the following table.

Job	CPU Request (m)	Memory Request (Mi)
pfs-ums-job	200	256
workplace-job	200	128

Storage considerations

To run stateful applications, you need to store the persistent data in a managed storage that is backed by some physical storage. Volumes allow a state to persist across pods.

The supported storage providers for a deployment of Process Federation Server include the IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks. For more information, see IBM Documentation and Why IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks.

The following table lists the capabilities disk space requirements for production deployments. Ranges are for small to large environments.

Note: For information about sizing and storage options for the foundational services, see Hardware requirements and recommendations and Storage options.

The following table provides storage requirements for the required components. Kubernetes access modes include Read Write Once (RWO), Read Write Many (RWX), and Read Only Many (ROX).

Table 7. Storage requirements
Deployment	Storage type	Disk space	Access mode	Number of persistent volumes for non-HA/HA	Posix compliance
Resource Registry	File	5 - 16 GB	RWX	1	Posix compliance not needed
Process Federation Service	File	6 GB	RWO	2 (output store, log store)	Posix compliance not needed
Elasticsearch Service (for Cloud Pak)	File	60 GB	RWO for data store, RWX for snapshot store	2 (data store, snapshot store)	Posix compliance not needed
Elasticsearch Service (for stand-alone Business Automation Workflow on containers)	File	40 GB	RWO for data store, RWX for snapshot store	2 (data store, snapshot store)	Posix compliance not needed

For storage considerations for the optional components, see Security considerations.

Other considerations

For more information about what you might need, see the following topics: