Understanding your responsibilities when you use Event Streams

Learn about the management responsibilities and terms and conditions that you have when you use IBM® Event Streams for IBM Cloud®. For a high-level view of the service types in IBM Cloud® and the breakdown of responsibilities between the customer and IBM for each type, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud offerings.

Review the following sections for the specific responsibilities for you and for IBM when you use IBM® Event Streams for IBM Cloud®. For the overall terms of use, see IBM Cloud® Terms and Notices.

Incident, operations, and cluster management

Responsibilities for incident, operations, and cluster management
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Monitor environment	Event Streams performs continuous review, service improvements, code updates, and operational monitoring. This includes automatic, no downtime upgrades of the environment.
High availability	Event Streams provides high availability by multi-zone region deployment to protect against single points of failure, up to and including a data center loss to achieve the IBM SLA detailed in the IBM Cloud® terms and conditions.
Deploy Event Streams environment	Event Streams is deployed with IBM recommended best practice configuration options. For example, replication factor, minimum in sync replicas, throttling, and rack awareness.
Supported client		Customer is responsible for maintaining a supported version of the Kafka client. For more information, see Support summary for all recommended clients.
Client configuration, deployment, and lifecycle		Customer is responsible for managing client configuration, deployment, and lifecycle by following IBM best practice documentation.
Cluster management		Customer is responsible for managing the provided resource capacity of their clusters across their organizational user base.
Satellite cluster management	Event Streams deploys a service instance and cluster that consists of all required Event Streams components onto the customer-provided infrastructure. Event Streams is responsible for monitoring the health of the Event Streams cluster and recovery of that cluster, unless recovery requires customer infrastructure actions.	Satellite incident and operations management.

Security and regulation compliance

Responsibilities for security and regulation compliance
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Maintain controls	Event Streams maintains controls commensurate with various industry compliance standards for which we are certified.
IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)	Event Streams provides security and access control service with IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Security and vulnerability patch updates to cluster	Event Streams applies the provided security and vulnerability patch updates to the client cluster, according to IBM X-Force timeframes.
Manage users and access		Customer is responsible for managing your organizational account users and related access to the Event Streams instance.
Compliance controls		Customer is responsible for maintaining your organizational compliance controls.
Satellite compliance and security	The Event Streams Satellite plan is not yet certified for the same standards as the Event Streams Enterprise plan. See What is supported for specific compliance standards information. For more information, see IBM Cloud Service Description.	For more information, see Satellite security and regulation compliance.

IBM Cloud infrastructure and managing the environment

Responsibilities for IBM infrastructure and managing the environment
Task	IBM Cloud Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Deploy	Event Streams deploys an instance that consists of all required Event Streams components and storage.	Customer is responsible for deciding which region to deploy, selecting capacity of cluster and setting any cluster configuration parameters available at deployment, for example private and public endpoints, IP allowlisting.
Monitor and repair	Event Streams monitors and repairs infrastructure nondisruptively.
Manage and configure		Customer is responsible for using the provided APIs, CLI, or console to manage topics and configuration.
Satellite infrastructure and environment	Event Streams deploys a service instance and cluster that consists of all required Event Streams components onto the customer-provided infrastructure. Event Streams is responsible for monitoring the health of the Event Streams cluster and recovery of that cluster, unless recovery requires customer infrastructure actions.	For more information, see Satellite incident and operations management and Satellite change management.

Disaster recovery

If you configured your Event Streams instance in a multi-zone region, a regional disaster is unlikely. However, we recommend that customers plan for such circumstances. If due to such an event, a customer's instance is no longer available (and a remote DR instance was not already set up), the customer should consider configuring a new instance in a new region.

Responsibilities for disaster recovery
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Disaster recovery		Customer is responsible for maintaining and executing a disaster recovery plan if the service is lost. The plan might include provisioning a new cluster in a new region if a disaster occurs and restoring any configuration or data to that cluster, or, pre-provisioning a cluster in another region and using the Event Streams Mirroring feature.
Mirroring		Customer can use the Event Streams Mirroring feature, or choose to manage their own mirroring solution.
Message payload data backup		The customer is also responsible for the backup of message payload data. Although this data is replicated across multiple Kafka brokers within a cluster, which protects against most failures, this replication does not cover a location-wide failure.
Topic name and data backup		It is recommended good practice that a customer stores their topic names and configuration data for those topics in the same repository as their application source code. This way the topics can be restored into a new cluster if a disaster occurs.
Schema Registry		It is recommended good practice that a customer stores their schema in the same repository as their application source code. This way the schema can be restored into a new cluster if a disaster occurs.

App orchestration

Responsibilities for app orchestration
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Integrate with select third-party partnership technologies	Event Streams provides integrations with select third-party partnership technologies, such as IBM Cloud Activity Tracker with LogDNA.
Provide service binding to other IBM services	Event Streams provides the capability for service binding to other IBM services.
Manage, integrate, and monitor		Customer is responsible for using the provided tools and features to manage the lifecycle of customer-owned applications, for integrating with other services, and monitoring the health of the application (for example, Availability Monitoring).

Mirroring

Responsibilities for mirroring
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Clusters	Checking clusters are viable mirroring pairs	Provisioning both clusters.
Setup	Setting up mirroring	Setting up service to service binding.
Enablement and monitoring	Monitoring health and SLA of mirroring link.	Requesting enablement by using the service-instance-update CLI comamnd.
Metrics and applications	Providing metrics to enable customer to understand the current recovery point objective (RPO).	Enabling applications to switch clusters.
IAM		Setting up required access policies.
Failover	Disabling any existing mirroring configurations.	Deciding when to fail over and failover applications.
Failback	Reconfiguring mirroring	Developing and executing failback plan. Coordinating with IBM to reconfigure mirroring.

Support of client-side libraries

IBM does not own Kafka client-side libraries and cannot commit to provide fixes in case issues are found in them. Client-side libraries include the official Apache Kafka clients (Consumer, Producer, Connect, and Streams), as well as third-party clients, libraries, tools, and connectors.

As an active member of the Kafka community, IBM works, on a best effort basis, with communities that own clients-side libraries to help develop and release fixes for critical issues.