Chapter 1. Getting started with AMQ Interconnect on OpenShift Container Platform
AMQ Interconnect is a lightweight AMQP 1.0 message router for building large, highly resilient messaging networks for hybrid cloud and IoT/edge deployments. AMQ Interconnect automatically learns the addresses of messaging endpoints (such as clients, servers, and message brokers) and flexibly routes messages between them.
This document describes how to deploy AMQ Interconnect on OpenShift Container Platform by using the AMQ Interconnect Operator and the Interconnect Custom Resource Definition (CRD) that it provides. The CRD defines an AMQ Interconnect deployment, and the Operator creates and manages the deployment in OpenShift Container Platform.
If you are unable to use the AMQ Interconnect Operator, you can deploy AMQ Interconnect in OpenShift by using the AMQ Interconnect application templates provided in the OpenShift catalog. For more information, see Deploying AMQ Interconnect on OpenShift.
1.1. What Operators are
Operators are a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. They take human operational knowledge and encode it into software that is more easily shared with consumers to automate common or complex tasks.
In OpenShift Container Platform 4.0, the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) helps users install, update, and generally manage the life cycle of all Operators and their associated services running across their clusters. It is part of the Operator Framework, an open source toolkit designed to manage Kubernetes native applications (Operators) in an effective, automated, and scalable way.
The OLM runs by default in OpenShift Container Platform 4.0, which aids cluster administrators in installing, upgrading, and granting access to Operators running on their cluster. The OpenShift Container Platform web console provides management screens for cluster administrators to install Operators, as well as grant specific projects access to use the catalog of Operators available on the cluster.
OperatorHub is the graphical interface that OpenShift Container Platform cluster administrators use to discover, install, and upgrade Operators. With one click, these Operators can be pulled from OperatorHub, installed on the cluster, and managed by the OLM, ready for engineering teams to self-service manage the software in development, test, and production environments.
Additional resources
- For more information about Operators, see the OpenShift documentation.
1.2. Provided Custom Resources
The AMQ Interconnect Operator provides the Interconnect Custom Resource Definition (CRD), which allows you to interact with an AMQ Interconnect deployment running on OpenShift Container Platform just like other OpenShift Container Platform API objects.
The Interconnect CRD represents a deployment of AMQ Interconnect routers. The CRD provides elements for defining many different aspects of a router deployment in OpenShift Container Platform such as:
- Number of AMQ Interconnect routers
- Deployment topology
- Connectivity
- Address semantics
