Chapter 23. Configuring for Google Compute Engine

Roles

Configuring GCP for OpenShift Container Platform requires the following GCP role:

delete permissions might also be required if the user is expected to redeploy the environment during testing phases.

You can also create a service account to avoid using personal users when deploying GCP objects.

See the Understanding roles section of the GCP documentation for more information, including steps for how to configure roles.

Scopes and service accounts

GCP uses scopes to determine if an authenticated identity is authorized to perform operations within a resource. For example, if application A with a read-only scope access token can only read, while application B with a read-write scope access token can read and modify data.

The scopes are defined at the GCP API level as https://www.googleapis.com/auth/compute.readonly.

You can specify scopes using the --scopes=[SCOPE,…​] option when creating instances, or you can use the --no-scopes option to create the instance without scopes if you don’t want the instance accessing the GCP API.

See the Scopes section of the GCP documentation for more information.

All GCP projects include a default [PROJECT_NUMBER]-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com service account with project editor permissions.

By default, a newly created instance is automatically enabled to run as the default service account with the following access scopes:

You can specify another service account with the --service-account=SERVICE_ACCOUNT option when creating the instance, or explicitly disabling service accounts for the instance using the --no-service-account option using the gcloud CLI.

See the Creating a new service account section of the GCP documentation for more information.

Integrating OpenShift Container Platform with Google Compute Engine (GCE) requires the following components or services.

See the project resource section in the GCP documentation for more information.

See Create, Modify, or Close Your Billing Account in the GCP documentation for more information.

You can create service accounts with specific permissions, then use them to deploy infrastructure components instead of regular users. You can also create roles to limit access to different users or service accounts.

GCP instances use service accounts to allow applications to call GCP APIs. For example, OpenShift Container Platform node hosts can call the GCP disk API to provide a persistent volume to an application.

Access control to the various infrastructure, service resources, and fine-grained roles are available using the IAM service. For more information, see the Access cloud overview section of the GCP documentation.

You can use existing SSH keys. GCP metadata can help with storing the SSH keys that are injected at boot time in the instances to allow SSH access.

See the Metadata section of the GCP documentation for more information.

GCP disks are created within a zone. Therefore, if a OpenShift Container Platform node host goes down in zone "A" and the pods move to zone "B", the persistent storage cannot be attached to those pods because the disks are in a different zone.

Deploying a single zone of multizone OpenShift Container Platform environment is an important decision to make before installing OpenShift Container Platform. If deploying a multizone environment, the recommended setup is to use three different zones in a single region.

See the GCP documentation on regions and zones and the Kubernetes documentation on multiple zones for more information.

See the GCP documentation on external IP address for more information.

The public cloud DNS zone requires a domain name that you purchased either through Google’s "Domains" service or through a third-party provider. When you create the zone, you must add the name servers provided by Google to the registrar.

See the GCP documentation on Cloud DNS for more information.

There are five types of Load Balancing:

See the GCP documentation on Load balancing for more information.

GCP allows you to create custom instance sizes to fit different requirements. See Creating an Instance with a Custom Machine Type for more information, or see Machine types and OpenShift Container Platform Minimum Hardware Requirements for more information about instance sizes.

For more information, see the GCP documentation on Storage options.

You can configure OpenShift Container Platform for Google Compute Platform (GCP) by modifying the Ansible inventory file at installation time or after installation.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides object cloud storage that OpenShift Container Platform can use to store container images using the OpenShift Container Platform container image registry.

For more information, see Cloud Storage in the GCP documentation.

gsutil mb -c regional -l <region> gs://ocp-registry-bucket
cat <<EOF > labels.json
{
  "ocp-cluster": "mycluster"
}
EOF
gsutil label set labels.json gs://ocp-registry-bucket
rm -f labels.json

See the Creating storage buckets documentation for more information.

[OSEv3:vars]
# GCP Provider Configuration
openshift_hosted_registry_storage_provider=gcs
openshift_hosted_registry_storage_kind=object
openshift_hosted_registry_replicas=1 1
openshift_hosted_registry_storage_gcs_bucket=<bucket_name> 2
openshift_hosted_registry_storage_gcs_keyfile=<bucket_keyfile> 3
openshift_hosted_registry_storage_gcs_rootdirectory=<registry_directory> 4

For more information, see Cloud Storage in the GCP documentation.

$ oc exec \
    $(oc get pod -l deploymentconfig=docker-registry \
    -o=jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')  -i -t -- df -h /registry
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc         30G  226M   30G   1% /registry


$ oc exec \
    $(oc get pod -l deploymentconfig=docker-registry \
    -o=jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')  -i -t -- ls -l /registry
total 0
drwxr-sr-x. 3 1000000000 1000000000 22 Jun 19 12:24 docker

OpenShift Container Platform can use GCP storage using persistent volumes mechanisms. OpenShift Container Platform creates the disk in GCP and attaches the disk to the correct instance.

GCP disks are ReadWriteOnce access mode, which means the volume can be mounted as read-write by a single node. See the Access modes section of the Architecture guide for more information.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage (RHOCS) is a provider of agnostic persistent storage for OpenShift Container Platform either in-house or in hybrid clouds. As a Red Hat storage solution, RHOCS is completely integrated with OpenShift Container Platform for deployment, management, and monitoring regardless if it is installed on OpenShift Container Platform (converged) or with OpenShift Container Platform (independent). OpenShift Container Storage is not limited to a single availability zone or node, which makes it likely to survive an outage. You can find complete instructions for using RHOCS in the RHOCS3.11 Deployment Guide.