Deployment overview

A ForgeOps deployment is a deployment of the ForgeRock Identity Platform on Kubernetes based on Docker images, Helm charts, Kustomize bases and overlays, utility programs, and other artifacts you can find in the forgeops repository on GitHub.

You can get a ForgeOps deployment up and running on Kubernetes quickly. After performing a ForgeOps deployment, you can use it to explore how you might configure a Kubernetes cluster before you deploy the platform in production.

A ForgeOps deployment is a robust sample deployment for demonstration and exploration purposes only. It is not a production deployment.

This section describes how to perform a ForgeOps deployment in a Kubernetes cluster and then access the platform’s GUIs and REST APIs. When you’re done, you can use ForgeOps deployment to explore deployment customizations.

Performing a ForgeOps deployment is a good learning and exploration exercise that helps prepare you to put together a project plan for deploying the platform in production. To better understand how this activity fits in to the overall deployment process, refer to Performing a ForgeOps deployment.

Using the ForgeOps artifacts and this documentation, you can quickly get the ForgeRock Identity Platform running in a Kubernetes environment. You begin to familiarize yourself with some of the steps you’ll need to perform when deploying the platform in the cloud for production use:

Standardizes the process—The ForgeOps team’s mission is to standardize a process for deploying the ForgeRock Identity Platform on Kubernetes. The team is made up of technical consultants and cloud software developers. We’ve had numerous interactions with ForgeRock customers, and discussed common deployment issues. Based on our interactions, we developed the ForgeOps artifacts to make deployment of the platform easier in the cloud.

Simplifies baseline deployment—We then developed artifacts: Dockerfiles, Kustomize bases and overlays, Helm charts, and utility programs to simplify the deployment process. We deployed small-sized, medium-sized, and large-sized production-quality Kubernetes clusters, and kept them up and running 24x7. We conducted continuous integration and continuous deployment as we added new capabilities and fixed problems in the system. We maintained, benchmarked, and tuned the system for optimized performance. Most importantly, we documented the process so you could replicate it.

Eliminates guesswork—If you use our ForgeOps artifacts and follow the instructions in this documentation without deviation, you can successfully deploy the ForgeRock Identity Platform in the cloud. ForgeOps deployments take the guesswork out of setting up a cloud environment. They bypass the deploy-test-integrate-test-repeat cycle many customers struggle through when spinning up the ForgeRock Identity Platform in the cloud for the first time.

Prepares you to deploy in production—After you’ve performed a ForgeOps deployment you’ll be ready to start working with experts on deploying in production. We strongly recommend that you engage a ForgeRock technical consultant or partner to assist you with deploying the platform in production.