Axual Helm Charts

Platform charts

Axual Platform deployment and upgrade is done in two parts. Axual Operator Chart is used for the deployment of Apache Kafka (Strimzi), whereas Axual Helm Chart is used for the deployment of all other platform components.

Axual Operator Chart

Axual Operator is a forked version of Strimzi Operator to manage Kafka resource over a Kubernetes cluster.

Axual Helm Chart

Axual Platform is a helm chart for setting up all the Axual platform components over a Kubernetes cluster.

Axual Helm Charts: understanding the platform layers

The helm charts are organized in different platform layers, which are explained below.

Instance Level

Every tenant has at least one instance, e.g. "tenant-prod" in which all instance level services are running. Typically, tenants have two 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 services 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:

  • Platform UI

  • Platform Manager

  • Keycloak

  • 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

  • Management