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Using IBM Cloud Satellite for Event Streams

Using IBM Cloud Satellite for Event Streams

The IBM Cloud Satellite® plan for IBM® Event Streams for IBM Cloud® deploys functionality similar to the Enterprise plan into Satellite locations of your choice. Using IBM Cloud Satellite®, you can create a hybrid environment that brings the scalability and on-demand flexibility of public cloud services to the applications and data that run in your secure private cloud.

For a detailed comparison of the Event Streams plans and the functionality of each, refer to Choosing your plan.

The Event Streams Satellite plan does not yet provide the compliance certifications that the Enterprise or Standard plans conform to.

Overview

To deploy Event Streams into a Satellite location, the following high-level steps must be completed and are detailed in Provisioning Event Streams for Satellite:

  1. Provision a Satellite location and its control plane in your account. It enables you to bring your own hosts to the IBM Cloud® and provision IBM Cloud services onto your hosts.

  2. Set up service-to-service authorization between Event Streams and Satellite in your account.

  3. Provision and attach host compute infrastructure to your Satellite location. Event Streams uses the hosts when it is provisioned. Event Streams provides high availability by using multi-zone region deployment to protect against single points of failure. You must provision and balance the host compute infrastructure for the zones in your Satellite location. Host compute requirements are listed in the provisioning details.

  4. Provision an Event Streams service instance in your account and a service cluster in your Satellite location.

  5. Configure block storage for your Satellite location that Event Streams then allocates during the service instance provision process. Event Streams uses the block storage for the retention of your message data.

    The block storage capacity cannot be scaled up for the initial release of Satellite plan for Event Streams.

    Event Streams stores three replicas of your message data to ensure the highest level of resilience across three availability zones. When Event Streams is provisioned for Satellite, 2 TB of storage is allocated from your configured block storage infrastructure for each of the three replicas (availability zones). This is equivalent to deploying 6 TB of storage if you run your own Apache Kafka cluster with the same replication policy enabled.

    In addition to the message data retention block storage, storage is allocated by Event Streams for managing your message data and for monitoring the operation of the Event Streams service instance.

    Specific block storage capacity amounts and supported storage classes are detailed in the following description.

  6. Provisioning of Event Streams service instance completes and is ready to use.

Before you begin

  1. Refer to the Satellite usage requirements.

  2. Set up the IBM Cloud command line interface (CLI), the plug-in for Satellite commands, and other related CLIs.

  3. Event Streams uses block storage for retention of message data, management of message data, and for monitoring the operation of the Event Streams service instance. During the provision of the Event Streams service instance, the block storage configuration completes. To prepare for that configuration, review the following information.

    1. The performance of the hosts, network latency, and block storage performance can all impact maximum throughput. As you review the following block storage information and select a storage class to achieve a maximum throughput, select block storage that provides a minimum of 4 IOPS per GB of storage and that can support 75 MB/s disk writes and 25 MB/s disk reads concurrently.

    2. To configure block storage, Satellite provides configuration templates for several storage infrastructure providers. The Understanding Satellite storage templates information explains how the storage templates work and how to configure them using the IBM Cloud CLI. The Event Streams service instance provision helps simplify the configuration by prompting for the needed configuration. To prepare for the configuration, complete the following steps:

      1. Review the supported block storage classes in the Storage class reference.
      2. Identify the block storage classes available for your storage infrastructure provider.
      3. When available, select a block storage class that has a Volume Binding Mode = WaitForFirstConsumer.
      4. The following table outlines the amount of block storage that is allocated by Event Streams.
      Table 1. Block storage usage
      Usage Amount allocated Total
      Message data retention 2 TB x 3 replicas/availability zones 6 TB total
      Message data management 250 GB x 3 replicas/availability zones 750 GB total
      Service instance monitoring 125 GB x 3 replicas/availability zones 375 GB total

      The information regarding the amount of storage is for a single Event Streams Satellite service instance. If multiple Event Streams Satellite instances are required, the information applies to each instance of Event Streams.

To provision Event Streams, complete the steps in Provisioning Event Streams for Satellite.

For an example how to connect your provider to Satellite, see Connecting applications running outside AWS with VPN access to the Satellite location.