Chapter 1. Understanding Red Hat Container Development Kit

Red Hat Container Development Kit was designed to let you do your container development using the same computer on which you do your other work. CDK can be installed on the following systems:

See the CDK installation procedure for each system for more detailed hardware and software requirements.

Red Hat CDK software is available from the Red Hat Customer Portal to anyone with a valid Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscription or Developer Suite. Joining the Red Hat Developers program provides a path to getting the CDK. See the "Using the Red Hat CDK" chapter for details about Red Hat subscriptions and registration.

This guide provides the following instructions for installing and using the Red Hat CDK to begin developing containerized applications:

The rest of this book describes how to do those things.

Once the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 virtual machine from the Red Hat CDK is running on your chosen system, you can begin exploring the contents. Some services and tools run automatically when you boot up the virtual machine while others will require some configuration. Here is a list of some of those features:

While this document gives you the basics for installing and initially connecting to the features in your Red Hat CDK virtual machine, you should refer to other documentation for more in-depth descriptions for working with the CDK. For example:

Regardless of which platform you choose as the workstation for using CDK, you will use Vagrant to start and manage it. There are a few things you should know about Vagrant before you get started:

While this guide contains separate chapters for installing on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems, some of the components and steps are the same for all installation types. For example, the Red Hat Developer Tools ZIP file you download includes Vagrantfiles that are used on all platforms. Likewise, Vagrant boxes you use are tied to the hypervisor (such as VirtualBox or Libvirt), rather than the operating system. The installation and use of Vagrant plugins is also the same on all operating systems.

Now that you understand the basics of what is inside CDK, choose from one of the next chapters to learn how to obtain CDK and install it on a Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or Fedora system.