Preparing to install Operational Decision Manager

Before you install Operational Decision Manager, you must prepare your environment.

About this task

The preparation includes reading and accepting the license agreement, configuring a database for persistence, configuring the PodSecurityPolicy or SecurityContextConstraints in your cluster, customizing the installation, and configuring Rule Designer.

Procedure

Configure the persistence.

Operational Decision Manager must persist data in a database.
1. Optional: Create and configure a database.
  
  You have three ways to persist the data: use the PostgreSQL internal database; use a supported external database, which can be Db2®, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle: or use a custom external database. For more information, see Configuring the database.
2. Create a database credentials secret.
  To secure access to the database, you must create a secret that encrypts the database user and password before you install the Helm release.
  1. Log in to your Certified Kubernetes cluster with an administrator user.
    For example, on OpenShift, use the oc login command:
```
$ oc login https://CLUSTERIP:8443 --token=<hidden>
```
  2. Create the secret by running the following kubectl command.
```
$ kubectl create secret generic <odm-db-secret> --from-literal=db-user=<user-name> --from-literal=db-password=<password>
secret "<odm-db-secret>" created
```
  3. Reference this secret during the installation. For more information, see Installing a Helm release of ODM for production. Depending on the type of database, enter the name of the secret for the internal database (internalDatabase.secretCredentials) or external database (externalDatabase.secretCredentials).
3. Optional: Create a Persistent Volume.
  
  If you plan on using the internal database with a predefined PVC, you must have a persistent volume (PV) before you install the Operational Decision Manager containers. PV represents an underlying storage capacity in the infrastructure. PV must be created with accessMode, ReadWriteOnce, and storage capacity of 5Gi or more. For more information about how to create a PV, see your cluster provider instructions.
If you want to customize the installation, refer to the tasks under Customizing ODM for production.
If you want to create your own decision services from scratch, install Rule Designer from the Eclipse Marketplace.

What to do next

After you complete the setup of your environment, go to Installing a Helm release of ODM for production.