OpenShift 4.X Foundations - Overview & Architecture

Going into 2020, its safe to assume that most of us are aware of the benefits of using containerized applications. OpenShift Container Platform is a platform for developing and running containerized applications. As the most uttered and heard word in tech has been "Kubernetes", you might be thinking what is OpenShift offering that is not available in vanilla Kubernetes. This article on OpenShift 4.X will answer that question and provide a product and architecture overview.

Unless you have an army of developer and operations folks, its very challenging to make vanilla Kubernetes work for your production workload. OpenShift Container Platform provides enterprise-ready enhancements to Kubernetes so that you can build, deploy, manage and scale your applications faster and easier. The three key benefits are:

• Hybrid cloud deployments: Option to deploy OpenShift 4.X Container Platform to a variety of public cloud or within your own data centres.
• Open-source development model: The source code is available from public software repositories to foster rapid innovation and development.
• Integrated RedHat software and tools: OpenShift Container Platform uses RedHat Enterprise Linux CoreOS - a container-oriented operating system that combines some of the best features and functions of the CoreOS and Red Hat Atomic Host operating systems. OpenShift 4.X combines many existing RedHat tools that have gone through intense testing and certification initiatives for Red Hat’s enterprise quality software.

Referring to the architecture image above, these are the steps you'd follow to have your applications built, deployed and managed on OpenShift 4.X:

1. Use your choice of cluster installer to install OpenShift and create OpenShift cluster(s).
2. Once cluster creation is a success, your OpenShift administrator will login and use the admin perspective to setup variety of configurations - networking, registry, CI/CD etc.
3. Next, your application developers can login and they'll find developer perspective which will allow them to develop and deploy containerized applications.
4. Cluster Manager will help you register and manager your OpenShift 4.X clusters.
5. Happy serving of your containerized, scalable, secure applications!

Future articles of this series on RedHat OpenShift 4.X will be hands-on. In the next article, we'll learn about OpenShift 4.X's web console and two perspectives it offers for admins and developers.