Getting Started With OpenShift

What is Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, and what does it offer in the way of easier-to-use Kubernetes? It’s an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments. No matter the cloud provider, with Red Hat OpenShift, you can give your developers an open-standards-based container platform on Kubernetes that not only runs your application workloads but provides cloud portability for those workloads. 

This Refcard gets you started on developer usage of Red Hat OpenShift and helps you go hands-on with installing a local development cluster using CodeReady Containers on your own machine. After installation, you’ll see an example of deploying the available data protection and management solution using the operator available on the Operator Hub. 

This is a preview of the Getting Started With OpenShift Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise open source container orchestration platform. It’s a software product that includes components of the Kubernetes container management project, but adds productivity and security features that are important to large-scale companies.  

"OpenShift" refers to the downstream container orchestration technology derived from the OKD open-source project (previously known as OpenShift Origin). "Red Hat OpenShift" refers to the suite of container orchestration products by Red Hat. 

For all that Kubernetes can do, users still need to integrate other components like networking, ingress and load balancing, storage, monitoring, logging, and more. Red Hat OpenShift offers these components with Kubernetes at their core because — by itself — Kubernetes is not enough. 

As a catch-all container platform, Red Hat OpenShift is more than a software product. It can be the key to adopting a DevOps culture, automating routine operational tasks and standardizing environments across an app’s life cycle. 

What Is CodeReady Containers? 

CodeReady Containers is the quickest way to get started building OpenShift clusters. It is designed to run on a local computer to simplify setup and testing, emulating the cloud development environment locally with all of the tools needed to develop container-based applications.  

CodeReady Containers is designed for local development and testing on an OpenShift 4.x cluster. CodeReady Containers brings a minimal, preconfigured OpenShift cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer for development and testing purposes. 

Installing Data Protection and Management 

To demonstrate getting started with the OpenShift development cluster you’ve set up with CodeReady Containers, we’ll install a data protection and management solution from Trilio (TrilioVault) for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. 

TrilioVault is a cloud-native, application-centric data protection platform that was designed from the ground-up to support the scale, performance, and mobility requirements of Kubernetes-based container environments across any public or hybrid cloud environment. 

This example installation is interesting for the cloud-native developer because it’s giving them the control to ensure all elements of their deployed applications are being properly protected, such as data protection and management for: 

• Container images 
• Metadata such as resource definitions and other YAML files 
• Persistent volumes 

You’ll be installing the operator and instantiating one of the offered components in this data protection and management solution. You’ll be provided with links to more information on using and deploying these tools for your applications. 

This is a preview of the Getting Started With OpenShift Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

The basis of installing OpenShift is CodeReady Containers, available on the Red Hat Developer site6 and available for development usage to any registered user. Following the link to install OpenShift on your laptop, which requires a registered user login, you’ll find the page with all three of the steps needed to get started with CodeReady Containers: 

1. Download CodeReady Containers for your operating system (Windows, Linux, or MacOS) 
2. Download a Pull-Secret file (used during installation to set up certificates) 
3. Optionally, follow provided link to the documentation 

The basic steps provided above demonstrate the necessary steps for getting started, but a more detailed, guided getting started experience is available in the next section. 

CodeReady Containers Easy Install 

To make this experience easier when getting started, there is a single project that automates all installation steps and provides proper configuration settings to ensure smooth sailing with your CodeReady Containers installation. 

Before you get started with this installation, understand the following system resources are needed: 

1. HyperKit for OSX, Hyper-V for Windows, or Libvirt for Linux 
2. CodeReady Containers (OpenShift Container Platform 4.6, config 6 cpu and 16 GB ram) 
3. OpenShift Client (oc) v4.6  

This is a preview of the Getting Started With OpenShift Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

For our purposes, the OpenShift web console provides more insights, metrics, and views of our cluster than we can possibly cover. There are a few administrator views of interest and parts of the developer view that we’ll touch on before we actually deploy an example application. 

Administrator Web Console 

As we deploy our example operator and application, there are a few views that might be of interest in the administrator side of the OpenShift web console. After logging in previously, have the Overview selected. 

Select the Projects view by clicking on the left menu options HOME -> Projects. This gives you all existing running projects on the system, and there are quite a few because we are logged in as kubeadmin and have full admin rights. As a developer, you would be creating your own project, so open a console window and login using our OpenShift client tooling and login to create a project as a developer. You point the OpenShift client at the cluster address provided by the installation output, include the port to connect to, and add a username and password as follows: 

$ oc login api.crc.testing:6443 --password=developer --username=developer 

Login successful. 

You don't have any projects. You can try to create a new project, by running 

    oc new-project <projectname> 

This is a preview of the Getting Started With OpenShift Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

It’s time to install an example based on a provided operator, so let’s make use of the provided TrilioVault operator to install a data protection and management platform.9  

Web Console Operator Usage 

In the previous section, the installation was complete, so open the administrator view of Operator Hub and enter TrilioVault in the operator search bar.  

Click on the left box shown tagged with Marketplace. This opens up the pop-up with details of the installation and an install button that you can click to open the actual operator installation of TrilioVault.  

This is a preview of the Getting Started With OpenShift Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

This getting started with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on your local developer machine using CodeReady Containers has provided an easy way to explore a powerful development platform. By presenting an easy install project, we’ve been able to streamline your experience.  

After installing, you’ve started familiarizing yourself with the OpenShift web console, exploring the most common administrator and developer views. This was followed by installing your first operator-based component, a data protection and management platform found in the Operator Hub marketplace called TrilioVault. This installation was done from the OpenShift web console and included installing the operator and installing one of its provided components. Finally, dropping down into a console, you’ve experienced automating that same component installation using the OpenShift command line tooling and a generated YAML file. 

The Red Hat OpenShift provides any organization with a standards-based container platform for your cloud-native workloads to run in any cloud provider while maintaining a consistent application development and deployment process. This is a significant milestone for any development organization and provides them with a valid cloud exit strategy, easy-to-use operator-based applications, and an enhanced Kubernetes platform experience. 

This is a preview of the Getting Started With OpenShift Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.