On-premise connector hosts

Purpose

Learn how to leverage On-Premise Connector Hosts for your integrations.

Prerequisites

To learn about Connector Hosts in Tulip, first review this article.

Overview

This article intends to serve as a point of reference for On-Premise Connector Hosts (OPCH) in Tulip. The Connector Host is a service used to facilitate connections from Tulip to external web services, databases, and OPC UA servers. All Tulip instances have a Cloud Connector Host by default.

There are several considerations to make when determining if an On-Premise Connector Host is the correct architecture fit.

Key Considerations for On-Premise Connector Host

The considerations for an On-Premise Connector Host can be broken down into a few categories:

1. Networking
2. Infrastructure management
3. Performance

Networking

The most common rationale for deploying an On-Premise Connector Host is for the advantages it offers when connecting to systems hosted within a local network. With the on-premise offering, all connections from Tulip to external systems start from within your local network. All connections from your network are outbound to Tulip via a secure WebSocket.

This contrasts with Cloud Connector Hosts, which require inbound access to the services. This is typically an IT decision to allow inbound secure WebSocket connections from Tulip's cloud to the service, often times using port forwarding rules on the WAN router/firewall.

Infrastructure Management

To deploy an On-Premise Connector Host, there are several infrastructure components that the customer is responsible for. Below is a basic roles and responsibilities matrix:

The customer will ideally be comfortable with the technologies they use to deploy the Connector Host, as well as using technologies like Docker for container management.

Requesting Credentials

Reach out to Tulip Support (support@tulip.co) to request On-Premise Connector Host credentials using the following template, filling in any details enclosed in brackets.:

Hello,  
  
This is a request to create a new On-Premise Connector Host.  
  
Tulip instance: <your-instance.tulip.co>  
OPCH name: <CompanyName>-<InstanceName>-<OptionalIdentification>-CH

Tulip will create and share credentials through a secure, temporary password link. Details should be transferred to an internally managed credential storage and include the following:

• Factory
• UUID
• Machine Secret

Available On-Premise Connector Host Versions (Tags)

Tulip uses Docker image tags to version Connector Host images. Below is a list of actively supported On-Premise Connector Host tags that can be used in conjunction with Docker run and pull commands.

Please note that OPCH tags are case-sensitive.

Upgrading your Connector Host

Please see here for the technical details for the upgrade.

Using Connector Environments to Test Your Upgrade

Each connector have three different environments (production, pre-production and development) and each of these environments can have their own connector host and they can be of different versions.
Depending on the state of the application (development version, pending approval, published) a different environment can be used.
The expected process to do connector host validation should be:

1. Upgrade your development OPCH
2. Upgrade your validation connector host (pre-production environment points at dev here)
   1. Test your connector in the connectors page, or in development mode of your application
3. When validation testing is complete, upgrade the production connector host

See How To Run A Connector Function in Multiple Environments for more information.

Alternatively, you can upgrade your OPCH on your development instance, and then confidently upgrade the production environment.

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