Chapter 1. Introducing Red Hat CodeReady Containers
1.1. Understanding CodeReady Containers
Red Hat CodeReady Containers brings a minimal OpenShift 4 cluster to your local computer. This cluster provides a minimal environment for development and testing purposes. It’s mainly targetted at running on developers' desktops. For other use cases, such as headless, multi-developer or team-based setups, use of the full-fledged OpenShift installer is recommended.
You can refer to the OpenShift documentation for a more in-depth introduction to OpenShift.
CodeReady Containers includes the crc command-line interface (CLI) to interact with the CodeReady Containers virtual machine running the OpenShift cluster.
1.2. Differences from a production OpenShift install
Red Hat CodeReady Containers is a regular OpenShift installation with the following notable differences:
- It uses a single node which behaves both as a master and as a worker node.
-
The
machine-configandmonitoringOperators are disabled by default. - These disabled Operators will cause the corresponding parts of the web console to be non functional.
- For the same reason, there is currently no upgrade path to newer OpenShift versions.
- Due to technical limitations, the CodeReady Containers cluster is ephemeral and will need to be recreated from scratch once a month using a newer release.
- The OpenShift instance is running in a virtual machine, which could cause some other differences, in particular in relation with external networking.
