Starting with OpenShift

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a cloud development Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosted by Red Hat. OpenShift is used for making our complete workflow automate. Let’s understand this with one example.

Suppose you are working in a good company and you have to release the new update/version frequently. So what is a duty of a IT admin team here.

Once developer will create a code he will push it in the docker hub. Now as a admin you have to download the code, check the specific version that are supported with this code, create a image from it push it some central repository or local repository then launch some containers and manage those containers. This complete workflow you can easily do with OpenShift.

Before discussing how to do, let think can we do this thing with some other way?

Absolutely yes, you can use jenkins for downloading code and create a image. You can use kubernetes for managing the containers, then why we need OpenShift?

Answer is simple, if you use multiple tools the management becomes more harder, process becomes complex. As a good company we always needs one unified solution for the complete problem or workflow, a tool which is reliable, which can give you self service. Here the role of OpenShift comes.

OpenShift is a tool from RedHat which comes with license. It is also known as Enterprise Great tool. Let’s again think about above situation, your developer have created a code and push it into the GitHub. Now you have to tell OpenShift that this is a GitHub URL. OpenShift go there, download the code, check which language it is written and which version it is supported. It will automatically create a image from it. This complete thing in openshift is known as Build Configuration (BC).

Installing OpenShift

For installing and working on top of openshift we are going to install OKD from minishift. OKD is a open source, community edition of redhat openshift container platform (RHOCP). For installing this we can use minishift.

You can install minishift from here. After installing minishift you can run your openshift cluster.

C:\Users\admin>minishift start --vm-driver virtualbox --network-nameserver 8.8.8.8

Now OpenShift instance is already launched, you have to follow this commands, to set OC CLI & launch openshift console.

Now you can see dashboard is already opened.

Default username = system, password = admin

Now you can easily run your practicals Here.

Note: It is OKD console since we are using community (free) edition, look and feel of RHOCP is slightly different.