OpenShift Installation Methods

OpenShift is a comprehensive Kubernetes platform developed by Red Hat that provides a range of tools and services for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications.

For us, Mulesoft Developers and Architects, it is another important technology, because it's one of the supported platforms to host Runtime Fabric.

OpenShift is a Platform as a Service and can be deployed to multiple types of deployment.

In this post, we're going to have a look at the installation methods for OpenShift.

There are 3 installation methods for installing OpenShift

• Installer Provisioned
• User Provisioned
• Laptop/Desktop

Installer Provisioned

This is the method provided by infrastructure providers like:

• AWS
• Azure
• GCP
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP)
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). 

In this method, our infrastructure provider provisions all the necessary infrastructure to run OpenShift and an installer to set it up.
The installer deploys a bootstrap node and then the bootstrap node configures and deploys the master and worker nodes.

So, in theory, this is a very simple installation method, depending on how complex your infrastructure configuration must be.

User Provisioned

In this method, it is us, the user, who provisions the infrastructure for OpenShift. That means we need to provide all the nodes, the networking infrastructure, firewall/firewall rules, permissions, etc and then install OpenShift on top of that infrastructure.
This method supports:

• AWS
• Azure
• GCP
• RHOSP
• VMware VSphere
• IBM Z
• IBM Power
• Bare metal

This is the method that gives us more granularity, fine-tuning and control of the infrastructure. On the flip side, this method is the most complicated.

Laptop/Desktop

This is the easiest way to get an Openshift instance and start learning. It’s mainly built for testing. This method uses CodeReady containers.

What are CodeReady Containers?

• It’s a Virtual Machine.
• It’s a minimal Openshift setup in a single VM
• It’s only for development and testing

The setup is very easy. All you have to do is download the binary, unzip it, and add it to your path and with that you’re ready to use the CodeReady Containers’ CLI to install and interact with the VM.

The caveat of this type of deployment is that it’s ephemeral. All the storage is temporary. But this should not be a problem because what we want to do with it is just testing.

Another limitation is that when you start it up the operators are not enabled, just to speed up the VM startup. The last limitation is that there’s no upgrade path for this installation. If you need to upgrade to another version you basically need to delete the VM and install a new one with the newer version.

So, with all that said, this is NOT an option for Production environments