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Chapter 1. OpenShift Container Platform 4.16 Documentation

Table of Contents

Welcome to the official OpenShift Container Platform 4.16 documentation, where you can learn about OpenShift Container Platform and start exploring its features.

To navigate the OpenShift Container Platform 4.16 documentation, you can use one of the following methods:

  • Use the left navigation bar to browse the documentation.
  • Select the task that interests you from the contents of this Welcome page.

Start with Architecture and Security and compliance. Next, view the release notes.

1.1. Cluster installer activities

Explore the following OpenShift Container Platform installation tasks:

1.2. Other cluster installer activities

1.3. Developer activities

Develop and deploy containerized applications with OpenShift Container Platform. OpenShift Container Platform is a platform for developing and deploying containerized applications. Read the following OpenShift Container Platform documentation, so that you can better understand OpenShift Container Platform functions:

  • Understand OpenShift Container Platform development: Learn the different types of containerized applications, from simple containers to advanced Kubernetes deployments and Operators.
  • Work with projects: Create projects from the OpenShift Container Platform web console or OpenShift CLI (oc) to organize and share the software you develop.
  • Creating applications using the Developer perspective: Use the Developer perspective in the OpenShift Container Platform web console to easily create and deploy applications.
  • Viewing application composition using the Topology view: Use the Topology view to visually interact with your applications, monitor status, connect and group components, and modify your code base.
  • Create CI/CD Pipelines: Pipelines are serverless, cloud-native, continuous integration and continuous deployment systems that run in isolated containers. Pipelines use standard Tekton custom resources to automate deployments and are designed for decentralized teams that work on microservice-based architecture.
  • Manage your infrastructure and application configurations: GitOps is a declarative way to implement continuous deployment for cloud native applications. GitOps defines infrastructure and application definitions as code. GitOps uses this code to manage multiple workspaces and clusters to simplify the creation of infrastructure and application configurations. GitOps also handles and automates complex deployments at a fast pace, which saves time during deployment and release cycles.
  • Deploy Helm charts: Helm is a software package manager that simplifies deployment of applications and services to OpenShift Container Platform clusters. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A Helm chart is a collection of files that describes the OpenShift Container Platform resources.
  • Understand image builds: Choose from different build strategies (Docker, S2I, custom, and pipeline) that can include different kinds of source materials, such as Git repositories, local binary inputs, and external artifacts. You can follow examples of build types from basic builds to advanced builds.
  • Create container images: A container image is the most basic building block in OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes applications. By defining image streams, you can gather multiple versions of an image in one place as you continue to develop the image stream. With S2I containers, you can insert your source code into a base container. The base container is configured to run code of a particular type, such as Ruby, Node.js, or Python.
  • Create deployments: Use Deployment objects to exert fine-grained management over applications. Deployments create replica sets according to the rollout strategy, which orchestrates pod lifecycles.
  • Create templates: Use existing templates or create your own templates that describe how an application is built or deployed. A template can combine images with descriptions, parameters, replicas, exposed ports and other content that defines how an application can be run or built.
  • Understand Operators: Operators are the preferred method for creating on-cluster applications for OpenShift Container Platform 4.16. Learn about the Operator Framework and how to deploy applications by using installed Operators into your projects.
  • Develop Operators: Operators are the preferred method for creating on-cluster applications for OpenShift Container Platform 4.16. Learn the workflow for building, testing, and deploying Operators. You can then create your own Operators based on Ansible or Helm, or configure built-in Prometheus monitoring by using the Operator SDK.
  • Reference the REST API index: Learn about OpenShift Container Platform application programming interface endpoints.
  • Software Supply Chain Security enhancements: The PipelineRun details page in the Developer or Administrator perspective of the web console provides a visual representation of identified vulnerabilities, which are categorized by severity. Additionally, these enhancements provide an option to download or view Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) for enhanced transparency and control within your supply chain. Learn about setting up OpenShift Pipelines in the web console to view Software Supply Chain Security elements.

1.4. Cluster administrator activities

Manage machines, provide services to users, and follow monitoring and logging reports. Read the following OpenShift Container Platform documentation, so that you can better understand OpenShift Container Platform functions:

1.4.1. Manage cluster components

  • Manage machines: Manage compute and control plane machines in your cluster with machine sets, by deploying health checks, and applying autoscaling.
  • Manage container registries: Each OpenShift Container Platform cluster includes a built-in container registry for storing its images. You can also configure a separate Red Hat Quay registry to use with OpenShift Container Platform. The Quay.io website provides a public container registry that stores OpenShift Container Platform containers and Operators.
  • Manage users and groups: Add users and groups with different levels of permissions to use or modify clusters.
  • Manage authentication: Learn how user, group, and API authentication works in OpenShift Container Platform. OpenShift Container Platform supports multiple identity providers.
  • Manage ingress, API server, and service certificates: OpenShift Container Platform creates certificates by default for the Ingress Operator, the API server, and for services needed by complex middleware applications that require encryption. You might need to change, add, or rotate these certificates.
  • Manage networking: The cluster network in OpenShift Container Platform is managed by the Cluster Network Operator (CNO). The CNO uses iptables rules in kube-proxy to direct traffic between nodes and pods running on those nodes. The Multus Container Network Interface adds the capability to attach multiple network interfaces to a pod. By using network policy features, you can isolate your pods or permit selected traffic.
  • Manage Operators: Lists of Red Hat, ISV, and community Operators can be reviewed by cluster administrators and installed on their clusters. After you install them, you can run, upgrade, back up, or otherwise manage the Operator on your cluster.
  • Understanding Windows container workloads. You can use the Red Hat OpenShift support for Windows Containers feature to run Windows compute nodes in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster. This is possible by using the Red Hat Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO) to install and manage Windows nodes.

1.4.2. Change cluster components

1.4.3. Observe a cluster

  • OpenShift Logging: Learn about logging and configure different logging components, such as log storage, log collectors, and the logging web console plugin.
  • Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform: Store and visualize large volumes of requests passing through distributed systems, across the whole stack of microservices, and under heavy loads. Use the distributed tracing platform for monitoring distributed transactions, gathering insights into your instrumented services, network profiling, performance and latency optimization, root cause analysis, and troubleshooting the interaction between components in modern cloud-native microservices-based applications.
  • Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry: Instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry traces, metrics, and logs to analyze and understand your software’s performance and behavior. Use open source backends like Tempo or Prometheus, or use commercial offerings. Learn a single set of APIs and conventions, and own the data that you generate.
  • Network Observability: Observe network traffic for OpenShift Container Platform clusters by using eBPF technology to create and enrich network flows. You can view dashboards, customize alerts, and analyze network flow information for further insight and troubleshooting.
  • In-cluster monitoring: Learn to configure the monitoring stack. After configuring monitoring, use the web console to access monitoring dashboards. In addition to infrastructure metrics, you can also scrape and view metrics for your own services.
  • Remote health monitoring: OpenShift Container Platform collects anonymized aggregated information about your cluster. By using Telemetry and the Insights Operator, this data is received by Red Hat and used to improve OpenShift Container Platform. You can view the data collected by remote health monitoring.
  • Power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift (Technology Preview): You can use power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift to monitor the power usage and identify power-consuming containers running in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster. Power monitoring collects and exports energy-related system statistics from various components, such as CPU and DRAM. Power monitoring provides granular power consumption data for Kubernetes pods, namespaces, and nodes.

1.5. Storage activities

1.6. Hosted control plane activities

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