Business Automation

Full Silver topology consists of an Authoring, Sandboxes, a Pre-prod and a Production environment.    

Schema of a full ODM Silver topology (fig. 1) 

There is one Decision Center to govern all Decision Servers.  All environments have their own authentication process (Zen) and Identity Management through the IBM Cloud Pak foundational services (CPfs) which is called a dedicated topology. In Silver topology context, the databases are externalized.  

Silver topology is best suited for applications with medium production constraints (HA, Pre-Prod, ...). For more information about ODM environments and the topologies, see CP4BA ODM topologies on OpenShift. 

2. Installing ODM Silver topology 

Silver topology is based on default Bronze topology with additional customization to allow several ODM environments within the same cluster. To install ODM Silver topology, it is recommended to start with ODM Bronze topology for 24.0.1 to setup the cluster and then obtain a baseline Cloud Pak for Business Automation deployment Custom Resource (CR) YAML file. Use this CR file and customize it per ODM environment. Other settings such as IM configuration and certificates management are discussed in the later part of this article. 

For more information about downloading your CASE package, see Preparing a client to connect to the cluster. 

2.1 Procedure: 

2.2 Silver environments: 

 
2.2.1 Authoring environment  
Authoring environment consists of Decision Server Console, 2 Decision Center and 2 Decision Runner.   
Edit your Authoring custom CR file install these components. To have a better clarity while reading the CR, all of the parameters are laid out with their default values. 

For example: 

See Performance Check List of OCP for CP4BA 24.0.1 to perform some additional tuning to this Production or Pre-Production environment. 

3. Configuring and validating your Silver topology 

To ensure that the environments are well deployed, a number of different verification processes exist:  

3.1 Validating the Silver topology using post-install script 

The next sections will illustrate on a sample Silver topology, what would the post-install validation scripts look like. This script is located in the CASE package. 

Output example of the Authoring environment status from script execution:  

./cp4a-post-install.sh --status 

3.2.2 Check LDAP service 

The default user with Administrator role is cpadmin. One can find its password in a dedicated secret “ibm-iam-bindinfo-platform-auth-idp-credentials”. With those credentials, try and log in CPD route. The cpadmin user should land in the Zen homepage.  

At this stage, cpadmin does not have any access to ODM endpoints. The ODM permissions are managed via the Zen UI, one need to configure the proper permissions for this user.  

For more information about ODM roles, read managing user permissions documentation page.  

For more information about Zen and the user access architecture for ODM, refer to Configuring user access. 

Now, the cpadmin user has access to ODM endpoints. 

Repeat this operation on each Silver deployment: Authoring, Sandbox and Production. 

Repeat this operation for each LDAP user or group in ZEN order to set the proper permissions. 

3.2.3 Check Basic Authentication users 

By default, a basic registry with the following users is provided in the form of a webSecurity.xml file: 

For more information, refer to Optional user access configurations. 

On each of the Silver deployment, one can check that the basic authentication is functional with the following steps. 

Authoring environment: 

3.2.4 Run Diagnostic of your Decision Center 

 This step is only applying to the Authoring environment. It can be performed by log in to the Decision Center deployed in the Authoring environment with cpadmin. 

3.2.5 Run Diagnostic of your Decision Server Console: 

This step applies to each environment. It can be performed by log in to the Decision Server Console deployed in each environment with cpadmin. 

3.2.6 Test your Authoring environment connection to Decision Runner 

This step consists in testing the Decision Runner deployed in the Authoring environment.  

First, we test the “Test and Simulation Execution” server: 

Then, we execute a test suite by running the section “Ruleset Test & Simulation ” of our dedicated blog post: community How do I validate my ODM topology with CP4BA 24.0.1?  

You should end up with a Test report at 100% success. 

3.2.7 Configure your Authoring environment connection to Sandbox Decision Server Console 

For the Silver topologies, you must configure and validate your Authoring environment to be able to establish connections to publish Decision Services to the Sandbox.  

By default, a secured connection between Decision Center in Authoring environment to Decision Server Console in another environment, leads to an error like the following one: 

javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: java.security.cert.CertificateException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors 

To overcome this issue, you need to import the certificate of Sandbox environment to Authoring environment. Here are the steps: 

3.2.8 Test your Authoring environment connection to Sandbox Decision Server Console 

This step consists in testing the deployment from the Authoring environment (Decision Center) to Sandbox Decision Server Console. 

First, we need to add a Deployment server to establish this connection. We start with creating a server “RES Sandbox” for the user cpadmin by following the section “Configure and test your environment connections” of our dedicated blog post: community How do I validate my ODM topology with CP4BA 24.0.1?  

Then, we make a deployment to “Res Sandbox” of the decision imported in section 3.2.6 of the current article. And, last but not least, we make a local execution by following the Step 4 of ODM tutorial: https://github.com/DecisionsDev/odm-for-container-getting-started/blob/master/doc/topics/tut_icp_gs_test_ruleset_lsn.md#task-4-exploring-and-testing-the-ruleset  

3.2.9 Test your Production environment 

For the Silver topologies, it is likely to have a CI/CD in place so that the ruleset promotion follow a specific flow. In such a topology, a ruleset would be edited, built and tested in Decision Center ( Authoring environment), then deployed and tested in the Sandbox, and finally, pushed to Production. 

For more information about setting up a CI/CD, check this blog entry: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-automated-cicd-pipelines-ibm-odm-peter-warde/ 

Important: until you have a CI/CD in place, to publish directly from the Authoring environment (Decision Center) to the Production environment (Decision Server Console), you must import the certificate of the Production environment to the Authoring environment. To do so, follow the same steps as in section “3.2.7 Configure your Authoring environment connection to Sandbox Decision Server Console”. 

In this section, we need to make sure that the deployed and tested ruleapp in section 3.2.8, can be executed in Production 

The RuleApp is now in the Production Decision Server Console, and can be tested. For a local execution, follow the Step 4 of ODM tutorial: https://github.com/DecisionsDev/odm-for-container-getting-started/blob/master/doc/topics/tut_icp_gs_test_ruleset_lsn.md#task-4-exploring-and-testing-the-ruleset  

NB: This validation procedure is only to be done once, it ensure that your Production environment is fully functional before starting to use it. 

3.3 Completing post-installation tasks for Operational Decision Manager 

3.3.1 Identifying the services 

Each Operational Decision Manager component that you deploy is exposed by a service to let external clients reach the component. 

There are two ways to get the details to access the services. 

Using the post-install script, ./cp4a-post-install.sh --Console (located in the CASE package). 

Output example of the Authoring environment service details from script execution: