Understanding Red Hat OpenShift Features

Sep 9, 2024

Red Hat OpenShift Lecture Notes

Introduction

  • Presenter: Abishek
  • Topic: Deep dive into Red Hat OpenShift
  • Focus: Understanding OpenShift, its advantages over Kubernetes, and exploring the interface.

What is OpenShift?

  • OpenShift is an Enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform.
  • Kubernetes: A container orchestration platform.
    • Pods: Group of one or more containers.
    • Deployment: Used to manage pods.
    • Service: For service discovery within Kubernetes.
    • Ingress Resource: Manages incoming traffic.
    • ConfigMap: Stores configuration data.
    • Secrets: Stores sensitive data (API tokens, passwords).
    • Container Network Interface (CNI): Manages pod-to-pod communication.

Why Organizations Prefer OpenShift?

Challenges with Kubernetes:

  1. Lack of Support:
    • Open source nature can make it hard to get timely help when issues arise.
  2. Management Overhead:
    • Not opinionated about deployment environments leading to complexity in managing clusters.

Enterprise Offerings of Kubernetes:

  • Companies adapt open-source Kubernetes to create their own distributions (e.g., Red Hat OpenShift, EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher).

Key Features of Red Hat OpenShift

  1. Self-Managed and Managed Services:
    • Self-managed installation requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
    • Managed offerings available on AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM.
  2. Installation Requirements:
    • High Availability (HA): Requires 3 control plane nodes (32 CPU, 32 GB RAM recommended).
    • Single Node OpenShift (SNO) available for simpler setups (64 GB RAM needed).
  3. MicroShift:
    • Lightweight version for edge computing (2 CPU, 2 GB RAM).

Advantages of OpenShift Over Kubernetes

  • Built-in CI/CD: OpenShift includes CI/CD capabilities out of the box.
  • Inbuilt Networking: Comes with SDN (Software Defined Networking).
  • Observability: Integrated monitoring and alerting.
  • Advanced User Management: Easy integration with SSO and Active Directory.
  • Operators: Simplifies the management of Kubernetes applications.
  • Rich User Interface: More features available compared to other managed offerings.

Exploring OpenShift

  • User Interface vs CLI: User interface is rich and provides ease of management for various components.
  • Workloads Section: Lists running pods and their namespaces.
  • Deployment Configurations: OpenShift-specific configurations for managing deployments.
  • Observability Tab: Out-of-the-box metrics and dashboards for monitoring.
  • User Management: Configuration for SSO and role-based access.
  • Operators Hub: Facilitates the installation and management of Kubernetes controllers.

Operators in Kubernetes

  • Operators manage the lifecycle of applications and configurations to ensure they remain in the desired state.
  • Changes made directly to deployed configurations are reverted by Operators to maintain integrity.
  • Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM): Simplifies the management and upgrading of Operators in OpenShift.

Building Applications in OpenShift

  • Supports automated CI pipelines and container registries.
  • Default CI/CD solutions include Tecton and Argo CD.
  • OpenShift CLI (OC) provides enhanced functionalities compared to kubectl.

Networking in OpenShift

  • Routes: Simplified way to manage external access to services.
    • Supports TLS termination options: Edge, Reencrypt, Pass-through.

Conclusion

  • OpenShift provides a robust solution for managing Kubernetes deployments with added enterprise features.
  • Encouragement to explore further and consider specific feature requests for future videos.