Private Mendix Platform Quick Start Guide

Introduction

This document provides a comprehensive guide for installing Private Mendix Platform, along with its optional components, in your own Kubernetes environment.

Private Mendix Platform supports using secret storage. If required, you can store some configuration in a secret vault (for example, AWS, Azure, or Hashicorp) without setting up a storage plan, database plan, PCLM admin and Mendix admin info in the Private Mendix Platform installer.

Overview

Before you start the installation process, review the following considerations:

FIPS Compliance

Private Mendix Platform can run with FIPS-compliant encryption across the entire Platform, including Mendix Runtime, Private Mendix Platofrm itself, Mendix Operator, and Studio Pro.

Installation Method

You can perform the installation by using one of the following methods:

• With GUI, where you manually install Private Mendix Platform components
• With Helmfile, where you use Helmfile to automatically install Private Mendix Platform components.

Installation Order

Start the process by installing the Mendix Operator before you install the components. Components are dependent on the Operator. Because of that, if you try to install a component without installing the Operator, the installation process fails and displays an error message.

Installing Components

Only the Private Cloud License Manager (PCLM) component is required. All other components are optional.

The following components must be installed in the same namespace as Private Mendix Platform:

• PCLM
• Svix
• Maia
• LLM Gateway
• Private Cloud components

Other components, such as the Build agent and PDF DocGen module, can be installed in any namespace.

If you add any components after installing Private Mendix Platform, you must re-run the Platform installer. For more information, see Adding Additional Components After Installing the Private Mendix Platform.

Prerequisites

Private Mendix Platform depends on Mendix on Kubernetes for the installation and deployment of Mendix apps.

Before starting the installation process, make sure that you have all the necessary prerequisites:

• A Kubernetes instance where the target namespace has already been created. For more information, see Supported Providers: Supported Versions.

• A database. For more information, see Supported Providers: Databases.

• File storage. For more information, see Supported Providers: File Storage.

• A registry. For more information, see Supported Providers: Container Registries.

• A domain.

• For the PCLM component:

  • Mendix Operator in version 2.21.0 or above
  • A dedicated Postgres or SQLServer database server.

• Optionally, if your Private Mendix Platform app requires its own certificate: a TLS certificate with HTTPS support.

• An environment to run installer tools with the following requirements:

  • A kubeconfig file with administrator privileges for your Kubernetes or OpenShift platform
  • A command line terminal that supports the console API and mouse interactions. In Windows, this can be PowerShell or the Windows Command Prompt.
  • For OpenShift clusters, OpenShift CLI. For more information, see Getting started with the CLI.
  • Kubectl installed if you are deploying to another Kubernetes platform. For more information, see Install and Set Up kubectl.

• Optionally, if you plan to install the Svix component:

  • An existing PostgreSQL database instance.
  • An optional Redis server version 6.2.0 or higher, for the task queue and cache. Using Redis is recommended for high availability, where you expect a high volume of webhook calls, or if you have multiple Svix servers. As a best practice, enable persistence in Redis so that tasks are persisted across Redis server restarts and upgrades.

• If you plan to use the AWS Secret Manager, install an AWS provider at your cluster, as described in Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI Driver.

• If you plan to use Azure Key Vault, see Configuring a Secret Store with Azure Key Vault.

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