IBM details self-managed Bob deployment for OpenShift

IBM has published deployment documentation for running its Bob software-development assistant as a self-managed workload on Red Hat OpenShift, giving platform teams a concrete path to keep the service and its supporting data inside customer-controlled infrastructure. IBM says the on-premises edition can share an existing OpenShift cluster with other applications rather than requiring a dedicated cluster. IBM Bob overview

What IBM supports

The current requirements identify Bob on-premises 2.0.0, paired with Bob IDE 2.2.0 and Bob Shell 2.0.5. IBM lists OpenShift Container Platform 4.20, 4.21 and 4.22 as tested and supported, with 4.20 the minimum, and currently limits the workload to amd64. Mixed-architecture clusters are possible if administrators constrain Bob to amd64 nodes themselves. System requirements

IBM positions the deployment as a tenant footprint rather than a complete cluster design. Its production reference for the core stack calls for about 36.5 vCPU, 53.4 GiB of memory and roughly 50 GiB of persistent storage after scheduling headroom. Optional retrieval-augmented generation and Z Understand components add substantially to that footprint; IBM labels the Z Understand sizing as provisional while benchmark testing continues. The supported storage choices listed are managed NFS and OpenShift Data Foundation, with block storage required for PostgreSQL, OpenSearch and Redis volumes. System requirements

The platform-team work does not disappear

The installation uses an IBM release bundle, entitled container images and a bobctl utility. IBM splits cluster-scoped resources from namespace-scoped application resources so that a cluster administrator or security team can review the generated CRDs and cluster RBAC before applying them; subsequent installation work is confined to operator and operand namespaces. The prerequisites also call for cert-manager 1.14 or later, with Red Hat's cert-manager Operator recommended for OpenShift. Installation prerequisites

Customers must separately provide supported inference and guardrail model endpoints. IBM says provisioning, scaling and maintaining those models are outside the Bob core installation, as are security-event logging and the surrounding audit and monitoring controls. Installation prerequisites

That division of responsibility is the important architectural detail. Self-management gives regulated or disconnected organizations more control over residency and network boundaries, but it also makes Bob another production tenant that platform teams must capacity-plan, secure, back up and connect to model infrastructure. Teams evaluating it should start with supported OCP versions, storage latency and the model-network path rather than treating the IDE extension as the whole deployment. IBM Bob overview