4 Preparing Your System for ECE Composable Services

You can prepare your cloud native environment by downloading the Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) composable services package, extracting the Helm chart, and loading its images.

Topics in this document:

Tasks for Preparing Your System

As part of preparing your cloud native environment for the ECE composable services, you download the package and then load the necessary images into your Kubernetes container system.

The following shows the high-level tasks:

  1. Download the package from My Oracle Support to your cloud native environment.

  2. Extract the Helm charts from the downloaded package.

  3. Load the images into your container runtime.

  4. Create the required user IDs, passwords, and Secrets.

  5. (Optional) Create Secrets for your container registry.

Downloading the Deployment Package

To download the ECE composable services package, go to the My Oracle Support website (https://support.oracle.com). Search for and then download ECE Interim Patch 15.2.0.0.2.

Table 4-1 lists the packages in the downloaded archive file. Replace version with the release number. For example, for release 15.2 Patch Set 2, the file name for the Charging Gateway Function composable service would be oc-ccs-charging-gateway-15.2.0.0.2.tar.

Table 4-1 ECE Composable Service Packages

Package Name File Name

Charging Manager

oc-ccs-nchf-converged-charging-version.tar

Charging Gateway Function

oc-ccs-charging-gateway-version.tar

Database Client

 oc-ccs-db-client-version.tar

NRF Management

oc-ccs-nrf-management-version.tar

ECE Composable Services Helm Chart

oc-ccs-15.2.0.0.2+d9e763dc.tgz

Extract the Helm chart by running this command:

tar -xvzf oc-ccs-15.2.0.0.2+d9e763dc.tgz

Loading ECE Composable Service Images

The images shipped with the ECE composable services package are in the form of TAR files. After downloading the TAR files, load them as images into your container runtime.

For example, to load the Charging Gateway Function image into a Docker system, you would perform the following steps:

  1. Download the oc-ccs-charging-gateway-version.tar file to the system where Docker is installed, where version is the release number, such as 15.2.0.0.2.

  2. Load the image into Docker by entering this command:

    docker load --input oc-ccs-charging-gateway-version.tar

  3. Verify that the image is loaded correctly by entering this command:

    docker images charging-gateway:version

    The image details should be listed in one row.

If you use an internal registry to access images from different Kubernetes nodes, push the images from the local system to the registry server. For example, if the registry is identified by RepoHost:RepoPort, you would push the image to the registry like this:

  1. Tag the image with the registry server by entering this command:

    docker tag charging-gateway:version RepoHost:RepoPort/oracle/cagbu/ccs/charging-gateway:version

  2. Push the image to the registry server by entering this command:

    docker push RepoHost:RepoPort/oracle/cagbu/ccs/charging-gateway:version

Creating Users and Secrets for the ECE Composable Services

To create the users and Secrets required to deploy the ECE composable services:

  1. As the database administrator, create the CGF service user name and password that the CGF uses at runtime to connect to the CGF database schema.

  2. Create a Kubernetes Secret that contains the CGF service user credentials.

  3. Create a Kubernetes Secret that contains the database administrator credentials.

For information about creating Kubernetes Secrets, see Managing Secrets in the Kubernetes documentation: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configmap-secret/.

Creating Secrets for Container Registry Authorization

You can automatically pull images from your private container registry by creating an ImagePullSecrets, which contains a list of authorization tokens (or Secrets) for accessing a private container registry. You then add references to the ImagePullSecrets in your override-values.yaml file for the Helm chart. This allows pods to submit the Secret to the private container registry whenever they want to pull images.

To automatically pull images from a private container registry, create a Secret outside of the Helm chart by entering this command:

kubectl create secret docker-registry SecretName --docker-server=RegistryServer --docker-username=UserName --docker-password=Password -n NameSpace

where:

  • SecretName is the name of your Kubernetes Secret.

  • RegistryServer is the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of your private container registry (repoHost:repoPort).

  • UserName and Password are the user name and password for your private container registry.

  • NameSpace is the namespace you will use for installing the ECE composable services Helm chart.

For example:

kubectl create secret docker-registry cgbu-docker-registry --docker-server=mydockerimages.com:0000/ --docker-username=xyz --docker-password=password -n CCS