Chris Phillips’ Blog - API, Integration and Governance

Helm is the de facto standard for deploying to Kubernetes. OpenShift does not ship with helm but instead provides their own system called Templates. Thus far I have never used OpenShift Templates and so I focus on helm. This article does not go through the differences but just shows how to get helm v2 up and running.

VMWARE ESXI is a free VMWare hosting system. The primary differences between this and the full vSphere are support, limit to one host and no of supported cpus.

TLDR : Use (Rufus)[https://rufus.ie] on Windows not DD or anything else.

WARNING: What is covered in this article is not supported. It is recommended that this is only used for a POC where Helm 2.x cannot be used.

This is a work around to a problem I have seen a couple of times. I expect this problem to be fixed in a future release of APIConnect.

When APICUP (the API Connect Installer) configures a DataPower Gateway to be deployed it internally generates a Helm chart. This Helm chart includes a stateful set that includes both an init container as well as the main container.

Out of the box the DataPower init container is set to be a busy box image deployed on docker hub. Therefore if the environment that is being used to host the Kubernetes deployment does not have internet access then it fails.

Thanks to Sara Hagger

DataPower is the gateway/runtime for API Connect. In order for API Connect to synchronise APIs with the Gateway it uses a new DataPower piece of function called the API Connect Gateway Service. When you deploy DataPower in Kubernetes with APIC UP a special log target is configured to store the API Connect Gateway Service logs. However on all other forms of DataPower this is needs to be enabled.

I have reuploaded my APIC Profiler video as Asciinema deletes videos after a week if there is not an owner assigned.

API Connect allows an Application to subscribe to one plan for a product. This is traditionally used to determine which rate limit they are allowed to subscribe to. A couple of years ago Chris wrote an article on how to use this for plan variable to route to specific endpoints. Istio provides the facility to route to different endpoints depending on header variables. This article shows how you can take the plan from a context variable and set it to a header to be picked up by Istio.