Deployment architecture of external services
Externalizing services from Pega Platform™ provides performance, security, and maintenance benefits. The Pega database has always been externalized from Pega Platform. Pega manages the Constellation UI service. Externalizing and managing third-party services, such as Kafka, Elastic Search, and Cassandra, enables you to maintain them outside your Pega applications with vendor support.
As a Lead System Architect (LSA), understand the deployment architecture for these external services to manage third-party solutions efficiently.
Deployment architecture
The deployment architecture for client-managed cloud environments includes externalized third-party services. The following diagram shows how externalized services interact with Pega Platform in a client‑managed cloud environment:
Pega Platform manages Pega Constellation™ and SRS as back-end services. Elastic Search, Kafka, and Cassandra are fully externalized.
The deployment of these externalized services depends on whether you use a virtual machine (VM) deployment or a cloud environment. As an LSA, you require awareness that future releases will transition to exclusively containerized deployments. Pega Platform supports containerized deployments with Docker images and Helm charts.
For more information, see Install and update Pega Platform.
External Elasticsearch deployment
SRS uses Elasticsearch. The SRS backing service provides search and reporting functionality for Pega Platform. Configure SRS for containerized deployments by setting the required parameters in your Pega Platform environment. After configuration, SRS manages communication between Pega nodes and your Elasticsearch service.
Before installation, update parameters in the Pega Helm chart (values.yaml) to configure SRS for containerized deployments. The SRS backing service runs as a dedicated pod in your Kubernetes namespace and communicates with Pega Platform pods and your external Elasticsearch or OpenSearch service over the cluster network. To secure service‑to‑service communication, configure Kubernetes network policies and allow the required traffic flows.
For more information, see External Search in your deployment.
External Kafka deployment
Externalize all Kafka services and make them accessible to Pega pods over the network. Define stream service parameters in the values.yaml file of the Helm chart in the stream section to configure Kafka connectivity. After you apply the Helm upgrade, Kubernetes distributes the configuration to all Pega pods to provide consistent connectivity across the deployment.
For more information, see External Kafka in your deployment.
External Cassandra deployment
Externalize the Cassandra service so that the Decision Data Store is accessible from your containerized Pega deployment. You can run the Cassandra service in the same Kubernetes cluster by using community Helm charts or as an external managed service. Configure the connection parameters in the Pega Helm chart so that Pega pods can communicate with the Cassandra cluster over the network.
Cassandra is necessary only for Pega Customer Decision Hub™ and Pega Process AI™ deployments.
For more information, see External Cassandra in your deployment.
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