Questionnaire: Deploying in a Customer-Controlled Cluster—STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE) Questions

The following questions are part of the Questionnaire for Deploying Solace Cloud in a Customer-Controlled Cluster. If you are planning to deploy Solace Cloud using an STACKIT Kubernetes Engine cluster, you must first complete the Common Questions, and then answer the following questions related to your deployment:

Solace provides a Terraform that provisions most SKE infrastructure automatically, including the cluster, node pools, storage classes, and networking. This questionnaire focuses on pre-deployment requirements and known compatibility considerations.

This questionnaire, including the mandatory common questions, is available as single PDF, or Excel spreadsheet:

SKE Cluster

You must answer the following questions about your STACKIT SKE cluster.

Question Possible Answers How Solace Uses This Information Links to Related Documentation

Are your cluster’s VPC and Subnets properly sized to support the number of event broker services you’d like to create?

Yes

The Solace Terraform creates a STACKIT Network Area (SNA) with IP addresses allocated from your network CIDR block. Before running the Terraform, verify your STACKIT account has sufficient IP capacity for: 1 IP per worker node, 5 IPs per load balancer service, 1 IP for the router interface, plus additional IPs for rolling updates.

Consider the size of your cluster’s network carefully, as it is not possible to change its size after creation.

IP Address Allocation in Installing Solace Cloud in STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE)

SKE Messaging Connectivity

Question Possible Answers How Solace Uses This Information Links to Related Documentation

Do you require a load balancer service plan higher than P10?

Yes
or

No

The Solace Terraform provisions load balancers using the P10 service plan by default. If your deployment requires higher throughput, contact Solace before running the Terraform to request a higher service plan (P50, P250, or P750).

Load Balancer Configuration in Installing Solace Cloud in STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE)

Load Balancing in the STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE) documentation

Are there any additional annotations required in your environment (beyond the standard ones) that must be used on the LoadBalancer service for proper operation?

Yes
or

No

Solace requires the extra service annotations to configure the Mission Control Agent so it can create event broker services.

SKE supports annotations with the lb.stackit.cloud/ prefix, including: service-plan-id, external-address, internal-lb, tcp-proxy-protocol, session-persistence-with-source-ip, and tcp/udp-idle-timeout.

Solace event broker services do not support TCP PROXY protocol. While the lb.stackit.cloud/tcp-proxy-protocol annotation is available in SKE, it cannot be used with Solace brokers as it causes the broker pods to fail their health checks and prevents proper message routing.

Load Balancer Configuration in Installing Solace Cloud in STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE)

Load Balancing in the STACKIT Kubernetes Engine (SKE) documentation