Deploying Axual

Instance, cluster and client level services

When we talk about platform services that together form Axual, we use the terms Instance level, Cluster level, Client level and Management Level regularly. The different levels form either a logical of physical segregation that is either needed for security or availability purposes.

Instance Level

Every tenant has at least 1 instance, e.g. "tenant-prod" in which all instance level services are running. Typically, tenants have 2 instances, DTA (Development, Test, Acceptance) and PROD (Production). Instance level services are:

  • Discovery API

  • Distribution

  • Schema registry

  • Instance API

Cluster Level

All services that are bound to a cluster are considered cluster level services. Those services are not related to any tenant or instance. Cluster level services are:

  • Broker

  • Cluster API

  • Cluster Browse

  • Distributor

  • Exhibitor

  • Platform Metric Provider

Client Level

Client services like Connect are not bound to specific cluster they are running on, they behave like true Kafka Clients. Those service will be connected to other Kafka Clusters than the one they’re running on as they get the configuration from Discovery API. Client services are:

  • REST Proxy

  • Connect

Management Level

Management Level services are on top of all other services Cluster Level, Instance Level and Client Level . Management level services themselves are not related to any tenant or any instance and are used to manage Cluster Level and Instance Level services. Management services are:

  • Management UI

  • Management API

  • Keycloak (If applicable)

  • Stream Browse

  • Operation Manager

  • Vault

  • Metrics Exposer (Optional) Only available with HELM deployment

Monitoring Level

Monitoring starts the machine and docker monitoring services for that machine. The metrics provided by these services are collected by the prometheus server.

  • Cluster

  • Instance

  • Client

  • Mgmt

Performing a deployment of Axual

Starting from platform version 2022.4 we are dropping the support to Axual CLI: this means that we only support kubernetes installation via HELM charts.

Deploying Axual via Virtual Machine can still be achieved, but it is not supported anymore by Axual.

To deploy the platform on kubernetes, a combination of Axual Operator and Helm Charts are used. Follow the links below for more information.