How to get started building with the new offering—Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud enables enterprises to take on cloud-native development while also easing the pain of security and scale across the whole lifecycle of the software, allowing them to get started on their hybrid cloud journey.

Check out this tutorial video, where I walk you through the new OpenShift integrated experience on the IBM Cloud web console and show you how to create an OpenShift cluster and access all the new features.

Learn more

• IBM and Red Hat
• Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
• VIDEO – IBM + Red Hat
• VIDEO – What is OpenShift?
• VIDEO – Kubernetes and OpenShift: What’s the Difference?
• VIDEO – Intro to Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
• “Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud: Power of Kubernetes, Expertise of IBM“
• “Continuous Availability of Workloads with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud“
• “Push-Button Provisioning, Deployment, and Security“
• “Hardening Kube for Massive Scale and Workload Diversity“
• What is Kubernetes?
• Full playlist of lightboarding videos

Video Transcript

Guided Tour for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

Hi everyone, my name is Sai Vennam with the IBM Cloud team.  

Today, let’s talk about Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

What is OpenShift?

First, OpenShift. It’s an open source application platform that aims to make the Kubernetes experience better for developers and operations team.

What is Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud?

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is a fully managed platform from the ground up. This has a number of advantages which we’ll cover in this video.

It starts with an integrated OpenShift experience. You get automated provisioning of the infrastructure, as well as configuring OpenShift. You can take advantage of features for high availability to ensure your applications will never have any downtime. And finally, for all of your monitoring and logging needs, take advantage of direct integrations with Sysdig and LogDNA.

Creating an OpenShift cluster

Let’s get started by walking through the process of creating an OpenShift cluster.

We’ll navigate through the dashboard and choose an OpenShift cluster.

We see some information about this service, and we’ll go ahead and hit Create. Now, we’re asked to provide some information to start creating this cluster.

We see an option to choose between Kubernetes or OpenShift, so we can go with native Kubernetes but, in this example, we’ll be working with managed OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

So, by choosing OpenShift, we can then scroll down and choose a number of different geographies. 

We have multizone regions worldwide, which enables you to have highly available clusters spread across multiple data centers in the same region.

Next, we have choices for the default worker pool. We can take advantage of either shared or dedicated virtual compute. In addition, there’s options for bare metal and GPU-enabled machines as well.

Finally, we’ll choose the number of workers that we want, and we’ll go ahead and provision that cluster.

The cluster will be ready shortly, but in the meantime, let’s go ahead and jump to a cluster that’s already started.

Overview of a cluster through the IBM Cloud console

Let’s see the IBM Cloud console experience. We can see a basic overview of our cluster.

We can set up something like Key Protect, an encryption key management service to encrypt your applications and data. And this even supports bringing your own key.

Switching to the other tabs, you can fully configure the workers your cluster is using. This includes updating your worker nodes as well as configuring additional worker pools.

OpenShift web console

Let’s get to the good stuff—the OpenShift web console. Here we have the OpenShift Container Platform web console.

Creating a project

We can first start by creating a project. A project is an OpenShift abstraction based on namespaces, but it has user management built-in. This means you get the best practices for security from the start.

With the project, we can start by navigating the catalog or importing an existing project.

Let’s start by browsing the catalog and choosing a Node.js application which comes with a Mongo database attached.

We’ll go ahead and choose the default configuration options and hit Create.

Within minutes, it starts to provision our application, the database, the access, and even sets up some routes for us.

Looking at an existing project with an application running

This build is going to take a couple of minutes. So let’s go ahead and switch to a project where I’ve already got this application running.

Well, we have a deployment, but the first thing I want to do is actually enable access to it. We’ll go into the routes view and create a new route.

We’ll go ahead and make sure this is connected up to the right service and hit Create.

Let’s test that it works. We’ll go into our routes and hit that host name, and there we go, we can access our Node.js application running in OpenShift.

Tackling Day 2 operations task with the OpenShift CLI

The OpenShift web console makes it easy for Day 1 tasks, like building and configuring applications. For Day 2 operations tasks, we will want to take advantage of the OpenShift CLI.

Let’s take a look at the CLI experience with the OC commands.

After installing the CLI, we’ll grab the login command from the OpenShift web console. We will then open up the terminal and paste in that same login command.

In a few seconds, it will lock us into the cluster and we can get started by first running the OC project and then putting in the name of the project that we just created.

We can run some environment health checks here and verify our running pods in containers. Let’s start by running the oc get nodes command. This will allow us to see the different worker nodes and the hosts that are running within our cluster.

Now let’s see the pods that are running in our application. We can run the oc get pods –o wide parameter. This is going to allow us to see our running pods as well as the node that they’re running in.

Taking advantage of integrations with Sysdig and LogDNA

You can take advantage of integrations with Sysdig and LogDNA. By accessing the observability dashboard on IBM Cloud, you get access to all of this in a single location.

Here you can access your logs with LogDNA and gain rich container visibility using Sysdig.

Red Hat OpenShift is dedicated to making the Kubernetes experience easier

From its onset, Red Hat OpenShift has been focused on making the Kubernetes experience easier and enabling enterprises to take on a cloud-native development.

IBM Cloud builds on open source for advanced capabilities to ease the pain of security in scale, not just on Day 1 building but also Day 2 operations and across the lifecycle of software.

IBM and Red Hat are building an open hybrid cloud foundation

Together, IBM and Red Hat are building an open hybrid cloud foundation, built on open source technologies and principles, to allow you to get started on your hybrid cloud strategy—the right way.