Overview of Component Pack architecture

Component Pack for HCL Connections™ is both designed and deployed upon a different software stack from Connections. Therefore, it requires a separate hardware infrastructure.

Component Pack's architecture consists of three main components.

Container manager (Docker)
With containers, everything required to make a piece of software run is packaged into isolated containers by Docker. Unlike VMs, containers do not bundle a full operating system—only libraries and settings required to make the software work are needed. This makes for efficient, lightweight, self-contained systems and guarantees that software will always run the same, regardless of where it’s deployed.
Container orchestrator (Kubernetes)
Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, providing container-centric infrastructure.
Package manager for Kubernetes (Helm)
Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications—Helm charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application.
The installation package relies on Docker container technology and includes HCL proprietary components as well as the following open-source components:
  • MongoDB is an open-source database that uses a document-oriented model rather than a relational data model.
  • Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis Sentinel is used for high availability. Redis is used by Orient Me.
  • Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable, full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. It can be used for search, as an underlying storage mechanism for Orient Me, and by Elastic Stack (if Elastic Stack will be installed).
  • Elastic Stack is a collection of open-source tools that collect log data and help you visualize those logs in a central location. Specific tools in Elastic Stack include Kibana, Logstash, FileBeat, and Elasticsearch Curator. Starting with version 7, self-build images for Elastic Stack are not provided as they are no longer needed. Instead, guidance and the documentation on how to set up Elastic Stack, either using the HCL-provided Elasticsearch 7.6.1 or any available Elasticsearch, including AWS native setup.
  • OpenSearch is a community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed open source search and analytics suite that makes it easy to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable, full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. It can be used for search, as an underlying storage mechanism for Orient Me.
  • HAProxy is an open-source load-balancing and proxying solution for TCP-based and HTTP-based applications.
  • NGINX Ingress Controller is built around the Kubernetes Ingress resource, using a ConfigMap to store the NGINX configuration. Ingress exposes HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster. Starting from Component Pack version 7, you can choose between HCL's pre-built NGINX ingress controller or you can use as fully supported the official community NGINX ingress controller with all the extras that it gives you.

All the helm charts provided with the Component Pack are built with Helm v2. Starting with version 7 of Component Pack, Helm v3 is supported.