Requirements and Download

This page will give you an overview of everything that you need to get started with both a demo and production Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) installation.

Operating a TSB service mesh requires a good understanding of working with Kubernetes and Docker repositories. For additional guidance, we recommend reading their supporting documentation.

Requirements

To install TSB as a demo, or for production use you will need the following:

	Production TSB	Demo/Quickstart TSB
Kubernetes cluster: EKS 1.16 or above GKE 1.16 or above OpenShift 4.3 or above Docker UCP 3.2.5 or above	✓	✓
Private Docker registry (HTTPS)	✓	✓
Tetrate repository Account and API Key (if you don't have this yet, please contact Tetrate)	✓	✓
Docker Engine 18.03.01 or above, with push access to your private Docker registry	✓	✓
PostgreSQL 11.1 or above	✓
Elasticsearch 6.x or 7.x	✓
LDAP server	✓

For demo purposes a simplified “batteries included” install experience already includes PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch running on Kubernetes. You don’t need to download anything extra to trial TSB.

Production installation note

The size of your Kubernetes clusters is dependent on your platform deployment requirements. A base TSB install does not consume many additional resources. The sizing of storage is greatly dependent on the size of your application clusters, amount of workloads (and their request rate), and observability configuration (sampling rate, data retention period, etc.). For more information see our capacity planning guide.

Demo installation note

You should be able to comfortably test TSB on a cluster with 3-6 nodes with 4 vCPU and 16gb each. Since the demo install runs PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch on Kubernetes, the cluster must have a default storage class set, and the ability for these resources to create Persistent Volume Claims with a minimum size of 100gb for Elasticsearch as well as for PostgreSQL.

Your organization might impose additional (security) restrictions, availability, and disaster recovery requirements on top of the above mentioned environments and applications. For detailed information on how to adjust the TSB installation and configuration please refer to the operator reference guides as well as the how to section of our documentation where you can find descriptions of the configuration options, common deployment scenarios and solutions.

Download

note

The download steps are the same for demo quickstart and production use.

The first step to get TSB up and running is to install our TSB CLI tool tctl. With tctl you can install (or upgrade) the TSB management plane as well as the control planes for your application clusters. It also allows you to interact with the TSB API’s using yaml objects. If having operated Kubernetes deployments, this will be familiar to you. It also makes it easy to integrate TSB with GitOps workflows.

Follow the instruction in the CLI reference pages to download and install tctl.

Sync Tetrate Service Bridge images

note

The image sync steps are the same for demo quickstart and production use.

Now that you have tctl installed, you can download the needed container images and push them into your private Docker repository. The tctl tool makes this easy by providing the image-sync command, which will download the correct versions of each image from Tetrate repository for the targeted TSB install or upgrade version and push it into your private Docker repository. The username and apikey arguments must hold the Tetrate repository account details provided to you by Tetrate to enable the download of the container images. The registry argument must point to your private Docker registry.

tctl install image-sync --username <user-name> \
    --apikey <api-key> --registry <registry-location>

The first time you run this command you will be presented with a EULA which needs to be accepted. If you run the TSB installation from CI/CD or other environment where you will not have an interactive terminal at your disposal, you can add the --accept-eula flag to the above command.

cluster profiles

Operating a multi cluster TSB environment typically involves communicating with multiple Kubernetes clusters. In the documentation we do not make explicit use of kubectl config context and tctl config profiles as they are specific to your environment. Make sure that you have selected the right kubectl context and tctl profile as default or use explicit arguments to select the correct clusters when executing commands with these tools.

Full Installation

For the full installation procedure, please proceed to the management plane installation guide.

Demo Installation

For the basic “batteries included” installation run the following single line command:

tctl install demo --registry <registry-location>

warning

The tctl install demo command will use the current-context from your kubectl configuration. Make sure it is pointing to the correct Kubernetes cluster you wish to install TSB onto.

note

In certain environments (often with limited resources or under heavy load already), the installation might take longer than expected and the tctl tool could exit. The install demo command is idempotent, making it is safe to run again until installation is completed.

When this installation is complete, you will have a management plane and control plane running inside your Kubernetes cluster.

Open the TSB UI using the URL and credentials provided to you at the end of the install command.

Example:

Controlplane installed successfully!
Management Plane UI accessible at: https://31.224.214.68:8443
Admin credentials: username: admin, password: yGWx1s!Y@&-KBe0V