What is OpenShift Origin Project?

The OpenShift Origin is a community project used in three main products; OpenShift Online, OpenShift Dedicated, and OpenShift Container Platform. The Origin is improved a lot by an application lifecycle management functionality and DevOps. It provides an open source application container platform. The source code for the Origin project is available under the Apache License on GitHub. Consider looking at freelance tips to find people working on such open projects. It is one of the projects helping the entire development community to integrate and test advanced features developed by them on latest platform.

OpenShift Container Platform:

The OpenShift Container Platform (was earlier called as OpenShift Enterprise) is Red Hat’s on-premise private Platform as a Service (PaaS) product, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This platform provides OS-level virtualization (as is a Server Virtualization) in which the kernel of any OS allows multiple individual user-space instances. Such instances, which are sometimes called containers, software containers, virtualization engines (VEs) or jails, look and feel like a real server. Also, the kernel often provides resource management features to limit the impact of one container’s activities on other containers.

OpenShift Container Platform, version 3.4:

The General Availability (GA release) of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, version 3.4 is announced. This new release provides enhancements to OpenShift to improve the adoption of containers in the enterprise with easy storage provisioning, enhanced multi-tenant capabilities and new reference architectures in hybrid cloud environments.

Red Hat and the others are doing their best to help the users to understand where containers and VMs fit within a broad virtualisation strategy. They also point out that virtual storage is a critical part of a complete virtualised computing environment. To that end, Red Hat stressed virtual storage in this latest release. The other players in this space are IBM, VMware, SUSE, and Oracle. We will see the key features you need to know about the new release.

Cluster Management:

The Kubernetes is a popular and comprehensive open source projects in the container space. Red Hat is a thought leader in the community working on this project and a company that offers robust and enterprise-ready solutions based on this platform. Cluster Management is an enhanced functionality in the new release.

Easier Container Storage:

In the latest release, the Platform 3.4 offers dynamic provisioning of volumes, allowing for a much richer developer experience. Storage Admin will find an easier volume management with dynamic provisioning. The freelance web developers who work on deploying cloud-based native apps can benefit from faster storage provisioning and the better user experience. The DevOps managers can use the automation and integration through a new deployment tool.

Enhanced Usability:

Filtering and Sorting Project List:

For making things easier for people managing multiple projects, the project list now has a text filter on the name, display name, description, and project creator and also allows sorting on several attributes. Such features are important if you are managing projects where multiple developers are working.

Project Catalogue/Customizable Categories

The Red Hat main Project catalog page now only contains high-level categories viz. ‘Languages’ and ‘Technologies.’ Diving into one of the sub-categories, you can find redesigned tiles for builder images and templates.  They have also taken a hard look at all out of the box images and templates and focused on providing better display names, descriptions, and categorisation.

Build and Deployment Configuration:

It was very difficult to set up a build against a private repository from the console. Earlier you had to import YAML or JSON to create a secret and then edit your build’s YAML to use that secret. Now, creating and adding secrets for Build and Deployment Configuration is added a part of the new release.

New GUI Editor:

There was a GUI editor for build configurations for a few releases, and now they have added one for deployment configurations too with features such as:

  • Change your deployment strategy
  • Make changes to the deployment settings
  • Add, edit, or remove deployment lifecycle hooks
  • Change the deployment image
  • Set a pull secret for the image registry
  • Add, edit, or remove environment variables for the pods

New Quota Warnings:

Unless you check the Quota page, it was difficult to know the Quota warnings earlier. Now you can get Quota warnings while:

  • On the overview, On the overview pod count visualizations
  • While creating something, if you are out of quota for that resource
  • While creating something, if you are going to exceed quota for a resource

The CLI (Command Line Interface) Enhancements:

The usability improvements have considerable efforts put into the CLI to help those who interface directly with OpenShift through the CLI or need to use it to script some tasks.

Reference Architecture:

You can start your project on the right foot and take advantage of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The Reference Architectures combine knowledge and experience of multiple teams to formulate a design and create a stable, highly available environment to run your production applications. There are multiple examples provided by Red Hat on how to use OpenShift with Google, Amazon or other clouds and deployment on hybrid cloud architecture.

Summary:

Kubernetes is an open source container cluster manager. It was a Google Project and later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Its aim is to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers. It usually works with the Docker container tool and coordinates between a wide group of hosts running Docker. If you are into accepting freelance work, consider this release as an opportunity to work on a niche skill.

Red Hat has worked on it a lot and developed the OpenShift Origin Project. The OpenShift Container GA is available now. Red Hat just launched Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, plus Kubernetes and the Docker container runtime. The goal is to deploy container-based applications a microservices on a stable, reliable and more secure enterprise platform.