As prerequisites, we need:
- A Red Hat account and a valid license for OpenShift. We can start with a free trial from here
- An Admin User in AWS to create the cluster
- The OpenShift CLI
Create the OpenShift Admin user in AWS
- For OpenShift to run the installer and be able to create the different resources in our AWS account (VPC, EC2 nodes, load balancers...), we need to create a specific account with admin rights in AWS.
- For that, in your AWS management console, go to the IAM service and, under the Access Management section, click on users and then Create User.
- In Step 1 - The user name we need to create needs to be called osdCcsAdmin. No need to provide access to the management console. Click Next.
- In Step 2 - Set Permissions choose the Attach policies directly option and select the AdministratorAccess policy. Click Next.
- In Review and Create click on Create user
- Once the user is created, click on the user name on the list of users.
- Next, click on the Security credentials tab and scroll down to Access keys. Click on Create access key and then choose the Third-party service. You’ll have to tick the confirmation checkbox and then click Next
- After that click on Create access key
- Lastly, take note of the Access key and Secret access key. We’ll use them in the next steps.
Install the OpenShift CLI
The OpenShift CLI (Command Line Interface), often referred to as
oc, is a powerful tool used for interacting with OpenShift. The CLI provides a command-line interface for managing OpenShift resources, allowing us to perform a wide range of tasks. In the K8s context, it's very similar to kubectl, so you will find that most of the commands to interact with resources and workloads of the K8s are identical. To install it, first download the binary from the official site. In our case, we'll be using the oc tool from a mac:
Once you've downloaded the binary, to run the tool properly the directory where the oc binary is located should be included in the PATH environment variable. For this, we've got two options:
Option 1 - Copy the binary to a directory in your PATH env variable.
- Run the following command to know what directories are defined in your PATH
echo $PATH
- For example, we could move it to /usr/local/bin with the command
sudo mv oc /usr/local/bin/kubectl
Option 2 - Append the directory where you want to have oc to the PATH
- Run the following command
export PATH=$PATH:[/YOUR/OC/PATH]
- Lastly, verify oc is installed and accessible
oc version
With that, we're ready to launch the creation of the K8s cluster in AWS. We'll go through that in the next post of this series: