Preparing a Kubernetes Cluster

Prepare an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster:

1. Create an AKS cluster that meets the following requirements:

   • A supported version of Kubernetes is used in this cluster. To learn which Kubernetes versions are supported by CloudBlue Commerce, see Appendix: Supported Kubernetes Versions.

     Note: If you need to upgrade your AKS cluster, follow these instructions.

   • This cluster has enough resources to run CloudBlue Commerce components.

   • This cluster includes at least three worker nodes, and each node has at least 8 CPU cores and at least 4 GB of RAM per CPU core. For example, you can use the D8as v4 virtual machine size for the worker nodes of your cluster.

   To learn how to create AKS clusters, please refer to the Azure documentation.

   Important: Pod Security Policies are not supported in the current CloudBlue Commerce version. Do not enable them in your cluster.

   Note: We recommend that you use ephemeral OS disks for your AKS cluster to improve the overall performance of your CloudBlue Commerce installation. Disks of this type are created on the local virtual machine (VM) storage and are not saved to the remote Azure Storage. They provide lower read/write latency, along with faster node scaling and cluster upgrades. On a new AKS cluster, ephemeral OS disks are used by default. To use ephemeral OS disks on an existing AKS cluster, you need to create new node pools and remove the old ones. For details on how to do this, please refer to the Azure documentation.

2. Add this cluster to the resource group that you prepared for CloudBlue Commerce resources.

3. In the cluster, create the following namespaces:

   • cbc: for CloudBlue Commerce components

   • infrastructure: for infrastructure components such as ingress controllers, log management and analytics solutions, and monitoring and alerting solutions

   • connectors: for APS connectors

4. Obtain and save a kubeconfig file with the administrator credentials of this cluster. To do this, use the az aks get-credentials command. You can learn more about using this command in the Azure documentation.