What Is Red Hat OpenShift and How Does It Work

Red Hat OpenShift is a container application platform that allows developers to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. It's a game-changer for businesses looking to modernize their application infrastructure.

OpenShift uses a container orchestration system called Kubernetes to manage and automate the deployment and scaling of applications. This means developers can focus on writing code, not worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift provides a single platform for developers to work on, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This makes it easier to collaborate and develop applications, and to deploy them to different environments.

By using OpenShift, developers can create a consistent and repeatable development process, which helps to reduce errors and improve the overall quality of their applications.

Red Hat OpenShift is a comprehensive container application platform that allows developers to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. It's built on top of Kubernetes, the industry-standard container orchestration system.

Red Hat OpenShift is designed to provide a flexible and scalable platform for developing and deploying modern applications. It supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, including Java, Python, and .NET.

With OpenShift, developers can create and manage their own projects, teams, and environments, giving them full control over their application's lifecycle.

Red Hat OpenShift is a container application platform that provides an enterprise-grade environment for developing, deploying, and managing containerized applications. It's built on top of Kubernetes, which is an open-source container orchestration system.

Red Hat OpenShift allows developers to use a variety of programming languages and frameworks, including Java, Python, and .NET. This flexibility makes it a popular choice for organizations with diverse technology stacks.

Red Hat OpenShift provides a scalable and highly available platform for running applications in the cloud or on-premises. This means that users can deploy their applications to a variety of environments, including public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat OpenShift offers a range of features, including automated rollouts and rollbacks, self-healing, and resource management. These features help ensure that applications are always available and running smoothly.

Red Hat OpenShift is widely adopted by enterprises and organizations due to its security, scalability, and manageability features.

Red Hat OpenShift is a powerful platform for managing and deploying applications, and understanding its key features is essential for getting the most out of it. The Overview tab provides a wealth of information about your cluster, including its unique ID, which can be used to issue commands from the command line.

The Cluster ID is a unique identifier for your created cluster, and the Domain prefix is the prefix used throughout the cluster, with the default value being the cluster's name. OpenShift version and Region are also displayed, giving you insight into the platform's configuration.

A cluster's Type shows the OpenShift version it's using, and its Availability shows whether it's a single or multizone cluster. The Version field displays the OpenShift version installed on the cluster, and if an update is available, you can update from this field. The Created at field shows the date and time the cluster was created, and the Owner field identifies who created the cluster and has owner rights.

The Delete Protection field shows whether the cluster's delete protection is enabled, and the Status field displays the current status of the cluster. Total vCPU and Total memory are also displayed, showing the total available virtual CPU and memory for the cluster. The Infrastructure AWS account field shows the AWS account responsible for cluster creation and maintenance.

Additionally, the Overview tab provides information on nodes, cluster autoscaling, and instance metadata service, as well as network and OIDC configuration. The Resource usage section displays resources in use with a graph, and the Advisor recommendations section provides insights into security, performance, availability, and stability.

Here's a summary of the key information displayed on the Overview tab:

Red Hat OpenShift offers a range of benefits and features that make it an attractive choice for businesses and developers.

One of the key benefits of OpenShift is its ability to manage multiple clusters, providing a consolidated view of clusters to enable unified management across on-premises and cloud deployments.

OpenShift also provides scalability, allowing you to quickly scale your applications to thousands of instances across hundreds of nodes.

The platform offers persistent storage, which enables you to run stateful applications, or classical cloud-native stateless applications.

OpenShift has an extensive ecosystem of third-party tools created and integrated by its community, making it a convenient choice for developers.

Here are some of the key features of OpenShift:

Red Hat OpenShift is a powerful platform that offers a wide range of features and capabilities. Management of multiple clusters is one of its key benefits, providing a consolidated view of clusters to enable unified management across on-premises and cloud deployments.

Here are 13 key capabilities of OpenShift Container Platform:

Docker is an open-source platform for building, deploying and managing application containers.

Docker Swarm is Docker's container orchestrator, which compares to OpenShift in terms of container management.

OpenShift is an open-source platform for developing, deploying and managing containerized applications, making Docker Swarm and OpenShift not directly comparable.

Docker Swarm is designed to manage and orchestrate containers at scale, but it's not a direct competitor to OpenShift.

Docker and OpenShift serve different purposes, with Docker focusing on building and managing containers, and OpenShift focusing on containerized application development and management.

In contrast, Docker Swarm is specifically designed to manage and orchestrate containers, making it more similar to OpenShift than Docker.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform. It's a great choice for managing containerized applications, especially for developers who want more control over their infrastructure.

Kubernetes is designed to be highly scalable and flexible, making it a popular choice for large-scale deployments. It's also highly customizable, allowing users to tailor it to their specific needs.

Kubernetes has a steeper learning curve compared to OpenShift, which offers a more user-friendly interface. However, this doesn't mean Kubernetes is difficult to use, especially for those with some experience in container orchestration.

Kubernetes offers a wide range of features, including support for multiple container runtimes and a robust networking model. This makes it a great choice for complex deployments that require a high degree of customization.

OpenShift, on the other hand, offers a more streamlined installation process compared to Kubernetes. This can be a big advantage for users who want to get up and running quickly.

Red Hat OpenShift is a powerful tool for deploying and managing applications, and its architecture is designed to make it easy to get started. It's built on top of Docker and Kubernetes, making it a great choice for developers who want to containerize their applications.

One of the key benefits of OpenShift is its ability to manage source code, images, and applications all in one place. This makes it easy to track changes and updates to your applications, and to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

OpenShift is also highly customizable, thanks to its use of microservices and REST APIs. This means that you can extend the functionality of OpenShift to fit your specific needs, and even script common administrative actions using the API.

Here are some of the key components of OpenShift's architecture:

By understanding how OpenShift works under the hood, you can make the most of its features and capabilities. Whether you're a developer, sysadmin, or IT manager, OpenShift is a powerful tool that can help you deploy and manage applications with ease.

OpenShift uses Kubernetes as its foundation, so it shares the same core principles. To deploy containerized applications across server clusters, the user writes configuration files that define how the applications should deploy. Both Kubernetes and OpenShift support the YAML and JSON configuration languages and offer load-balancing and routing capabilities.

You can run either platform on-premises or in the public cloud. This gives you flexibility in how you deploy your applications.

To access OpenShift Cluster Manager, you need to have an account that is part of an OpenShift organization. This account must also have quota specified by your organization if you're creating a cluster.

Dedicated servers are a type of hosting where a single server is entirely dedicated to a single user or organization.

This setup provides more control and flexibility compared to shared hosting.

In a dedicated server, the user has full root access, allowing them to configure the server to meet their specific needs.

This level of control is not typically found in shared hosting environments.

A dedicated server can be managed on-site or remotely, depending on the user's preference and technical expertise.

OpenShift uses Kubernetes as its foundation, so it shares the same core principles. This means you can write configuration files that define how your applications should deploy, using either YAML or JSON.

Both Kubernetes and OpenShift support load-balancing and routing capabilities. This allows you to distribute traffic evenly and efficiently across your server clusters.

You can run either platform on-premises or in the public cloud. This gives you flexibility in choosing where to deploy your applications.

To deploy containerized applications across server clusters, you'll need to write configuration files. These files should define how your applications should deploy, and what services they need to access.

Using YAML or JSON configuration languages makes it easier to manage your deployments. This is because these languages are easy to read and write, making it simpler to understand and modify your configurations.

Logging and Dashboards are crucial aspects of managing your Kubernetes or OpenShift setup. Kubernetes is compatible with a variety of logging tools, so users can choose how they manage logging.

OpenShift relies on EFK (Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana) for log management. This is a key difference between Kubernetes and OpenShift.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a game-changer for OpenShift storage management, offering a secure and proven solution for enterprise workloads.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, making it a reliable choice for large-scale storage needs.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports various use cases, including file services, databases, and DevOps workloads, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, and storage efficiencies.

By using Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you can simplify storage management for OpenShift Kubernetes clusters, eliminating the need to manage complex solutions like Gluster.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP also supports Kubernetes Persistent Volume provisioning and management requirements, making it an ideal solution for containerized workloads.

With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you can automate OpenShift deployment using Ansible, streamlining the deployment process and reducing complexity.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP removes the complexity around provisioning storage for OpenShift Kubernetes clusters, freeing up your team to focus on more strategic tasks.

In the Access Control tab, you have the ability to set up an identity provider, grant elevated permissions, and assign roles to other users. To do this, you must be the cluster owner or have the correct permissions.

To grant roles, select the Grant role button. You'll then need to enter the Red Hat account login for the user you want to grant a role to. After entering the login, select the Grant role button on the dialog box to confirm the action.

The Machine Pools tab is where you can create or edit machine pools within your cluster.

You can create new machine pools if there's enough available quota, or edit an existing one. The Edit option opens a dialog where you can change the node count per availability zone.

To edit a machine pool, select the > Edit option and make your changes in the "Edit machine pool" dialog. This is where you can also edit node labels and taints.

You can also view any associated AWS security groups from within this dialog.