WebSphere Application Server & Liberty

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Deploy and manage applications on Kubernetes with the new WebSphere Liberty Operator

By Leo Christy Jesuraj posted Thu June 09, 2022 01:57 PM

  
 
WebSphere Liberty Operator
version 1.0.0 was released on June 9th, 2022, as an IBM Certified Container Software and is now available on the IBM Operator Catalog!!
 
WebSphere Liberty Operator allows you to deploy and manage containerized Liberty applications securely and easily on Red Hat OpenShift as well as other Kubernetes-based platforms in a consistent way. You can also perform Day-2 operations such as gathering traces and memory dumps easily using the operator.
 
     
WebSphere Liberty Operator in IBM Operator Catalog

This new operator builds on top of the existing Open Liberty Operator but enhances the experience with new capabilities such as:
  • integration with IBM License Service to automatically track the usage of WebSphere licenses
  • enables several key secure capabilities out-of-the-box:
    • end-to-end encrypted communication from external sources all the way to the application (pod) using cert-manager or OpenShift's Certificate Manager
    • control network communication
    • run applications with restricted security context constraints
  • available configurations to change or modify the default behavior to fit the needs of many different enterprise applications
  • integrates with Prometheus to monitor applications
  • supports Knative for serverless deployments
  • implements the relevant Service Binding Specification to allow applications and services to connect and provides many more functionalities

Watch the recordings of these IBM Expert TV sessions to learn more about this new operator and see it in action! 
In addition to your valuable feedback, we would love to hear about your challenges and requirements which will shape the future development of this operator.

Key features provided by the operator are listed below. You can find more information in the documentation

Simplified license tracking:
Specify the edition and the product entitlement source for your applications and the operator will automatically add the necessary WebSphere license metadata on the deployed workloads. You can use the IBM License Service to view the aggregated license usage information for all applications.

Integration with Certificate Managers:
The cert-manager APIs when available on the cluster will be used to generate certificates for the application. Otherwise, on Red Hat OpenShift, the operator will generate certificates using OpenShift's Certificate Manager. The operator will automatically provision TLS certificates for applications' pods as well as routes and they are automatically refreshed when the certificates are updated.

Control network communication:
Network policies are created for each application by default to limit incoming traffic to pods in the same namespace that are part of the same application. Only the ports configured by the service are allowed. The network policy can be configured to allow either namespaces and/or pods with certain labels. On OpenShift, the operator automatically configures network policy to allow traffic from ingress, when the application is exposed, and from the monitoring stack.

Exposing metrics to Prometheus:
Expose the Liberty application's metrics via the Prometheus Operator. You can pick between a basic mode, where you simply specify the label that Prometheus is watching to scrape the metrics from the container, or you can specify the full ServiceMonitor spec embedded into the WebSphereLibertyApplication's .spec.monitoring field to control configurations such as poll interval and security credentials.

Single Sign-On (SSO):
Liberty runtime provides capabilities to delegate authentication to external providers. Your application users can log in using their existing social media credentials from providers such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, and any OpenID Connect (OIDC) or OAuth 2.0 clients. WebSphere Liberty Operator allows you to easily configure and manage the single sign-on information for your applications.

Easily mount logs and transaction directories:
Do you need to mount the logs and transaction data from your application to an external volume such as NFS (or any storage supported in your cluster)? Simply specify the volume size and the location to persist and the operator takes care of the rest.

Service Binding:
Your runtime components can expose services by a simple toggle. We take care of the heavy lifting such as creating Kubernetes secrets with information other services can use to bind. We also keep the bindable information synchronized, so your applications can dynamically reconnect to their required services without any intervention or interruption.

Integration with Knative (OpenShift Serverless):
Deploy your serverless runtime component using a single toggle. The operator will convert all of its generated resources into Knative resources, allowing the application to automatically scale to 0 when it is idle.

Application Lifecycle:
You can deploy your Liberty application container by either pointing to a container image, or an OpenShift ImageStream. When using an ImageStream the operator will watch for any updates and will automatically re-deploy the new image.

Custom RBAC:
This Operator is capable of using a custom Kubernetes service account from the caller, allowing it to follow RBAC restrictions. By default, it creates a service account if one is not specified, which can also be bound with specific roles.

Environment Configuration:
You can configure a variety of artifacts with your deployment, such as labels, annotations, and environment variables from a ConfigMap, a Secret, or a value.

Routing:
Expose your application to external users via a single toggle to create a Route on OpenShift or an Ingress on other Kubernetes environments. Advanced configuration, such as TLS settings, are also easily enabled. Renewed certificates are automatically made available to the Liberty server.

High Availability via Horizontal Pod Autoscaling:
Run multiple instances of your application for high availability. Either specify a static number of replicas or easily configure horizontal auto-scaling to create (and delete) instances based on resource consumption.

Persistence and advanced storage:
Enable persistence for your application by specifying simple requirements: just tell us the size of the storage and where you would like it to be mounted and we will create and manage that storage for you. This toggles a StatefulSet resource instead of a Deployment resource, so your container can recover transactions and state upon a pod restart. We offer an advanced mode where you can specify a built-in PersistentVolumeClaim, allowing you to configure many details of the persistent volume, such as its storage class and access mode. You can also easily configure and use single storage for serviceability-related day-2 operations, such as gathering server traces and dumps.

Integration with OpenShift's Topology UI:
We set the corresponding labels to support OpenShift's Developer Topology UI, which allows you to visualize your entire set of deployments and services and how they are connected.
  

 
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