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A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Decision Manager

Chapter 1. Overview of Red Hat Decision Manager on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

You can deploy Red Hat Decision Manager into a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform environment.

In this solution, components of Red Hat Decision Manager are deployed as separate OpenShift pods. You can scale each of the pods up and down individually, providing as few or as many containers as necessary for a particular component. You can use standard OpenShift methods to manage the pods and balance the load.

The following key components of Red Hat Decision Manager are available on OpenShift:

  • Decision Server, also known as Execution Server or KIE Server, is the infrastructure element that runs decision services and other deployable assets (collectively referred to as services) . All logic of the services runs on execution servers.

    You can freely scale up a Decision Server pod, providing as many copies as necessary, running on the same host or different hosts. As you scale a pod up or down, all its copies run the same services. OpenShift provides load balancing and a request can be handled by any of the pods.

    You can deploy a separate Decision Server pod to run a different group of services. That pod can also be scaled up or down. You can have as many separate replicated Decision Server pods as necessary.

  • Business Central is a web-based interactive environment for authoring services. It also provides a management console. You can use Business Central to develop services and deploy them to Decision Servers.

    Business Central is a centralized application. However, you can configure it for high availability, where multiple pods run and share the same data.

    Business Central includes a Git repository that holds the source for the services that you develop on it. It also includes a built-in Maven repository. Depending on configuration, Business Central can place the compiled services (KJAR files) into the built-in Maven repository or (if configured) into an external Maven repository.

    Important

    In the current version, high-availability Business Central functionality is for Technology Preview only. For more information on Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Scope.

You can arrange these and other components into various environment configurations within OpenShift.

The following environment types are typical:

  • Authoring or managed environment: An environment architecture that can be used for creating and modifying services using Business Central and also for running services on Decision Servers. It consists of pods that provide Business Central for the authoring work and one or more Decision Servers for execution of the services. Each Decision Server is a pod that you can replicate by scaling it up or down as necessary. You can deploy and undeploy services on each Decision Server using Business Central. For instructions about deploying this environment, see Deploying a Red Hat Decision Manager authoring or managed server environment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
  • Deployment with immutable servers: An alternate environment for running existing services for staging and production purposes. In this environment, when you deploy a Decision Server pod, it builds an image that loads and starts a service or group of services. You cannot stop any service on the pod or add any new service to the pod. If you want to use another version of a service or modify the configuration in any other way, you deploy a new server image and displace the old one. In this system, the Decision Server runs like any other pod on the OpenShift environment; you can use any container-based integration workflows and do not need to use any other tools to manage the pods. For instructions about deploying this environment, see Deploying a Red Hat Decision Manager immutable server environment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

You can also deploy a trial or evaluation environment. This environment includes Business Central and a Decision Server. You can set it up quickly and use it to evaluate or demonstrate developing and running assets. However, the environment does not use any persistent storage, and any work you do in the environment is not saved. For instructions about deploying this environment, see Deploying a Red Hat Decision Manager trial environment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

To deploy a Red Hat Decision Manager environment on OpenShift, you can use the templates that are provided with Red Hat Decision Manager.