Overview
Introduction to IBM Bob on-premises, including deployment architecture, infrastructure ownership, and differences from the SaaS offering.
IBM Bob on-premises provides a self-managed deployment of the Bob AI code assistant platform on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). It is designed for organizations that require control over data residency, security boundaries, network access, or deployment in disconnected environments.
With the on-premises offering, you manage the backend infrastructure, services, and integrations within your own environment while developers continue to use the same Bob IDE extensions and bob-shell experience available in the SaaS offering.
Differences between Bob on-premises and SaaS deployments
| SaaS | On-premises | |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Hosted and managed by IBM | Managed by you on your OpenShift cluster |
| Operations | IBM handles upgrades, scaling, and availability | You are responsible for lifecycle operations |
| Security controls | IBM-managed | You configure networking, storage, and identity |
| Data residency | IBM-managed regions | Full control within your environment |
| Developer experience | Bob IDE extensions and bob-shell | Same Bob client tools and workflows |
Bob on-premises uses the Bob Kubernetes Operator for lifecycle management, Helm charts to deploy platform components, and customer-managed OpenShift clusters for hosting backend services. This deployment model provides greater control over operational and compliance requirements while maintaining a consistent developer experience.
Deployment architecture
Bob on-premises is deployed as a standard OpenShift workload and can coexist with other applications running on the same cluster. A dedicated cluster is not required.
The deployment consists of two primary namespaces:
| Namespace | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Operator namespace | Hosts the Bob Operator and required dependency operators. |
| Instance namespace | Hosts Bob application services, databases, authentication services, and supporting workloads. |
Bob can coexist with other workloads on a shared cluster provided that sufficient compute, memory, and storage resources are available. For sizing requirements, see System requirements.
Security event logging and monitoring for Bob on-premises are managed at the OpenShift platform level and are not provided by Bob. You are responsible for configuring, operating, and retaining security logs in accordance with your organizational security, audit, and compliance requirements.
Requesting SIEM integration
Learn how to request SIEM integration for your IBM Bob Enterprise organization and what information you must share when opening a case.
System requirements
Before an on-premises installation of Bob, ensure that your environment meets the supported platform, architecture, compute, storage, and networking requirements.