Overview of 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.

Performance

As a recommendation for best practices, Tulip recommends also using an On-Premise Connector Host when connecting an OPC UA server. While it is possible to use the cloud solution, there can be a large bandwidth demand on the network as the number of subscribed OPC UA tags grows.

Deploying an On-Premise Connector Host

Technical Standards

When the decision is made to deploy an on-premise solution, Tulip recommends a self-service route using a distributed Docker image. The easiest way to to accomplish this would be to use a virtual machine with a distribution of Linux (Ubuntu is preferred).

Tulip also recommends to host only one On-Premise Connector Host per virtual machine to avoid a single point of failure for sites.

Virtual machine requirements:

• RAM - 4 GB
• ROM - 8-16GB disk size
• CPU - 2 core
• Docker version - 20.10+

For networking requirements, the On-Premise Connector Host has the following:

• An IP address
• DNS resolution to <your-instance.tulip.co>
• Outbound access on port 443 to Tulip (IPs listed here)
• Outbound access to the Docker repository here
• Outbound access to all relevant external systems with ports

Review the complete list of network requirements here

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.

Deployment

The following section outlines how to deploy an On-Premise Connector Host in a variety of environments. AWS and Azure both offer container services capable of running the Docker image.

• AWS:

  • Use the Web UI and this instruction set: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/deploy-docker-containers/

• Azure:

  az container create \
    -g <NAME OF THE RESOURCE GROUP IN AZURE> \
    --name <NAME FOR THE CONTAINER> \
    --cpu 2 \
    --memory 3 \
    --restart-policy Always \
    --image bckca2dh98.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/public/connector-host:<TAG> \
    -e TULIP_UUID='<UUID>' \
    TULIP_FACTORY='https://<YOUR SITE>.tulip.co' \
    TULIP_MACHINE_SECRET='<SECRET>' \
    TULIP_DEVICE_TYPE='onprem' \
    CONNECTORS_HTTP_PROXY='' \
    CONNECTORS_HTTPS_PROXY=''
  

• Linux VM:

 ```
docker run -d \  
    --name tulip-connector-host \  
    -e TULIP_FACTORY='https://<FACTORY>.tulip.co' \  
    -e TULIP_UUID='<UUID>' \  
    -e TULIP_MACHINE_SECRET='<SECRET>' \  
    -e TULIP_DEVICE_TYPE='onprem' \  
    -e CONNECTORS_HTTP_PROXY='' \  
    -e CONNECTORS_HTTPS_PROXY='' \  
    -e EXIT_ON_DISCONNECT=true \  
    --restart=always \  
    --net=host \  
    --mount type=volume,source=tuliplog,target=/log \  
   bckca2dh98.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/public/connector-host:<TAG>
```

Upgrading an On-Premise Connector Host

Tulip releases updates to the On-Premise Connector Host in accordance to our long term support (LTS) release schedule. To upgrade the service, following the below instructions:

1. Obtain the latest version of the On-Premise Connector Host Docker image.

   docker pull bckca2dh98.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/public/connector-host:<TAG>
   

2. Run the below command to get the Docker container ID.

   docker ps
   

3. If you have access to the TULIP_FACTORY, TULIP_UUID, and TULIP_MACHINE_SECRET, go to step 4. If not, run the following command and store the output of this command in a secure location.

   docker exec <container-id> env
   

4. Stop the existing Docker container.

   docker stop <container-id>
   

5. Remove the existing Docker container.

   docker rm <container-id>
   

6. Run the standard Docker run command leveraging the set of credentials stored.

```
docker run -d \  
    --name tulip-connector-host \  
    -e TULIP_FACTORY='https://<FACTORY>.tulip.co' \  
    -e TULIP_UUID='<UUID>' \  
    -e TULIP_MACHINE_SECRET='<SECRET>' \  
    -e TULIP_DEVICE_TYPE='onprem' \  
    -e CONNECTORS_HTTP_PROXY='' \  
    -e CONNECTORS_HTTPS_PROXY='' \  
    -e EXIT_ON_DISCONNECT=true \  
    --restart=always \  
    --net=host \  
    --mount type=volume,source=tuliplog,target=/log \  
   bckca2dh98.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/public/connector-host:<TAG>
```

7. Confirm the new Docker container is active.

   docker ps
   

Additional References

Enabling Log-Rotations for Docker

For existing On-Premise Connector Hosts that are not using Docker log-rotations, follow the instructions documented here to ensure disk-space is properly maintained.

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