Plan the installation

A working installation has two parts, installed separately: a gateway cluster that your clients call, and G8, the console and server that manage it. This session is about the first part and about what the second needs from it. The guides on this site cover the gateway cluster and the stores beside it, the log store and Prometheus. G8 is added to a gateway cluster that is already running; it does not install the cluster.

Before this session

• You know the four pieces from What G8 is: the gateway, the console, the server and an environment.
• You know which platform the cluster will run on: Docker on virtual machines, OKD or OpenShift, or k3s or another Kubernetes. G8 itself is installed on OKD or OpenShift; it manages a cluster on any of these platforms as long as it can reach the cluster's Admin API.
• You have chosen the slug of the first environment, 3 to 32 lowercase letters, digits or hyphens, production for example. The log store names each day of request records after it and Prometheus labels the counts with it. The guide's observability section asks for it, so it is chosen before the stores are prepared and never changes; Environments says what else hangs on it.

In this session

1. Read How an installation is laid out: the pieces, where each kind of data lives, what keeps serving when something fails and what a backup covers. Then read The gateway cluster below and pick the guide for your platform from the table.
2. Follow that guide. The installation guides are a section of this site of their own, under Install, with one guide per platform; each says what was run and marks what was not. Follow it to the end, verification and the stores beside the cluster included, and give the observability section the slug you chose.
3. Come back with the values G8 needs from the cluster, listed under What to take from the guide.

The gateway cluster

Each cluster is a set of gateway nodes with their configuration store beside them. The configuration store holds the routes, plugins and other objects G8 writes, and every gateway node of the cluster reads them from it. Pick the guide for your platform.

Guide	What it installs	For
Dev on Docker	One gateway node and one configuration store node on one machine, with Docker Compose.	Development and trying things out. Not highly available.
Test on a virtual machine	One gateway node and one configuration store node installed directly on a machine, without Docker.	A test environment where Docker is not an option.
Production on Docker	Three gateway nodes and three configuration store nodes with Docker Compose.	Production on virtual machines.
OKD	Three gateway nodes and three configuration store nodes on OKD or OpenShift.	Production on OKD.
k3s	Three gateway nodes and three configuration store nodes on k3s or another Kubernetes.	Production on Kubernetes.
Request records in OpenSearch	The accounts, the index template and the ingest pipeline for request records, in an OpenSearch that already exists.	An environment whose request records go to OpenSearch rather than Elasticsearch.

The first five guides install the cluster, verify it, and set up an Elasticsearch and a Prometheus beside it. They also cover diagnostics, backup and removal. The OpenSearch guide is for an OpenSearch that already exists, and lists what differs from Elasticsearch.

Each guide says what was run on the machine it names. A section that was not run there is marked Unverified, the steps for request records among them. Only the virtual machine guide shows an upgrade as it ran. The other guides record the upgrade as not drilled or not attempted, and the OKD and k3s guides did not attempt a restore.

What to take from the guide

• The Admin API address of the cluster. The server writes every object through it.
• The admin key of that Admin API.
• The address your clients call, which becomes the environment's Gateway URL.
• The address of the log store and the account the guide created in it, and the address of Prometheus, when the guide set them up beside the cluster. They are connected once the API has traffic, under See what happens.

What you should see

A cluster that answers on the address your clients will call, a configuration store beside it, and the values above written down with the slug. The guide's verification section says what a healthy cluster answers.

Where this leads

The second half of the installation is G8 itself: Install G8 itself. The cluster is not touched again until the first environment is connected to it in First sign-in and the first environment.