I was fortunate to finally get a chance to visit my team in Kochi and had a fantastic few days with them, it was so great to be able to spend some time face to face after working together remotely for several years. I travelled to Kochi via Chennai with British Airways. In Chennai this meant I arrived through the international terminal and then had to clear immigration and head over to the domestic terminal next door. Immigration all went smoothly but then at the domestic terminal they didn't recognise my boarding pass for the Indigo codeshare that British Airways had given me, so I had to get help at the check in desks. Once this was all resolved I had to pass through security again and all went smoothly, efficient boarding and a short flight later I arrived in Kochi around 9 in the morning and was met by Akhil and Midhun at the airport to take me to the office.

I didn't have very much time to explore Kochi, with arriving on Monday morning and heading back over to Chennai on the Thursday night to spend a day with the team there on Friday but we managed to get away earlier one afternoon and head to the coast - then on the way it poured with rain so we ended up at a nice spot, Old Lighthouse Lounge, overlooking the coast where we could get some food and drink.

I tried a lot of different foods (whilst sticking to the less spicy options) heading to different places with the team each day I was there - I think my favourite was the local fish wrapped with spices and baked in a banana leaf followed closely by parotta (a flakey layered flatbread) and some of the different paneer based dishes.

There was a real buzz in the office there and it was fantastic seeing the sense of community there and the collaboration that went on within the teams. I managed to have a lot of conversations with different groups across the team, a few one on ones and a couple of full team meetings, but there's lots more that could easily taken another week as the time flew by too quickly. I hope to see them all again soon!

This post should guide you through the steps on how to deploy a datapower gateway to use as a remote gateway with API Connect Reserved instance, optionally configuring the inbound management traffic through IBM Cloud Satellite Connector.

Installing the Operators

To install the operators in your cluster, the steps are as described in the documentation on how to install the operators

Set up certificates

Again follow the steps for creating certificates in the documentation.

Deploy the Gateway Cluster

Deploying the gateway cluster into Openshift is just a case of creating the GatewayCluster CR - you can start from this template.

• Create a pull-secret with access to download the datapower images and reference it under imagePullSecrets. You can download the image to mirror to your registry from the 'Download Gateway' button in the reserved instance Config Manager.

• Create a secret containing the password for the datapower admin user and ensure it is referenced under adminUser - you can use the following command to create this:

  oc create secret generic admin-secret --from-literal=password={SET-PASSWORD-HERE!}

• Update imageRegistry to point to your image registry.

• Update the jwksUrl for your reserved instance, this needs to be the platform api endpoint for the reserved instance followed by /api/cloud/oauth2/certs - you can find the platform api endpoint url from the 'Download Clients' link in the API Manager interface.

• Select and configure the appropriate profile for your cluster.

• Create a secret with the CA the reserved instance endpoints are signed by - Let's Encrypt X2 Root CA (Download from the Let's Encrypt site) and ensure the secretName for mgmtPlatformEndpointCASecret points to this.

  curl https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrg-root-x2.pem -o isrg-root-x2.pem oc create secret generic isrg-root-x2 --from-file=ca.crt=isrg-root-x2.pem

• [Optional] If you are routing the inbound traffic through IBM Cloud Satellite Connector, you will need to configure the hostname for the gatewayManagerEndpoint to match the private cloud endpoint hostname for your connector - typically c-01.private.{region}.link.satellite.cloud.ibm.com.

• Apply the gateway cluster yaml

• You can check the status of the cluster using oc get gatewaycluster. If you see any issues you can use oc describe gatewaycluster for more details.

Set up Satellite Connector [optional]

Optionally, deploy a satellite connector agent on the same cluster as the remote gateway

• Create a Satellite Connector
• Deploy the agent
• Create a Connector Endpoint for the gateway management interface docs. For the Gateway management endpoint you will need the following details:
  • Destination FQDN: {gateway-cluster-name}-datapower.{namespace}.svc e.g. api-gateway-datapower.apicri-gateway.svc
  • Destination Port: 3000
  • TCP

Register gateway with Reserved Instance

Create TLS Client Profile so that the manager can trust the CA that signs the certificate for the gateway management endpoint. This can be done through the RI Config manager under TLS.

• Create a Trust Store containing the CA Certificate which can be obtained by copying out the ca.crt from the gateway-manager-endpoint-secret and putting it in a file named ca.pem (API Connect needs the .pem extension for the upload to be accepted.)
• Create TLS Client Profile referencing the Trust store created

Create TLS Server profiles to present to clients invoking the APIs:

• Create TLS Key Store containing the certificate and private key to present - typically these would be obtained through an external Certificate Authority.
• Create a Server profile referencing the key store created.

To register the gateway on the 'Gateways' tab you will need the following details:

• URL of management endpoint: If using Satellite, this is the link endpoint URL including the port number. If not, this will be the hostname from the gatewayManagerEndpoint in the gateway cluster CR.
• TLS Client Profile: profile created above
• Base URL of API Invocation endpoint: The host from the gatewayEndpoint in the CR that inbound clients will use
  • TLS Server Profile: profile created above

France 2024

• 13 Aug - Utah Beach, Journey to Fondettes
• 14 Aug - La Membrolle sur Choisille
• 15 Aug - Château de Chenonceau
• 16 Aug - Château d'Ussé - Château de L'Islette
• 17 Aug - Tours
• 18 Aug - Candes-Saint-Martin
• 19 Aug - Le Baud'Rillé
• 20 Aug - Villandry
• 21 Aug - Cherbourg

To finish off the holiday we spent a night in Cherbourg so that we didn't have such an early start for the ferry the next day. We spent a lovely evening exploring along the waters edge and had dinner in the hotel restaurant.