January 2018, Red Hat acquired CoreOS for 250 million dollars 🤩. CoreOS was one of the leading companies of Linux & Containers market with their wide offer of products:

  • CoreOS Tectonic: container application platform based on Kubernetes.
  • CoreOS Container Linux: lightweight Linux distribution designed to run containerized applications.
  • CoreOS Operators Framework: an open source toolkit designed to manage Kubernetes native applications.
  • CoreOS Quay: a container registry for building, storing, and distributing your private containers.
  • CoreOS rkt: an application container engine developed for modern production cloud-native environments.
  • even more and more..

Red HatOpenShift 3.x was facing many big problems especially in installations and upgrades. It was a real nightmare to install an OCP Cluster. I never heard an OCP Admin talking about upgrading OCP without discussing the problems that they faced. Personally, I worked for two customers from 2017 to 2019 that adopted OCP, and when it comes to cluster upgrades they were dedicating time and they were bringing people from Red Hat to help them do that 😂 Although, the upgrades were guaranteed by Red Hat in all technical and commercial announcements.

At that moment, CoreOS’s Kubernetes platform, called Tectonic, had already a great feature that made it less disturbing: the one click upgrades 🤩 ! Yeah ! I remember the first time I installed a Tectonic cluster (v1.7). I tried to upgrade it to v1.8 with the one click upgrade button in the management console.. and every thing worked like a charm ! 🥳 I felt that it was a kind of a joke, or that were something wrong 🤪🤪

Red Hat OCP was not suffering only from hard installations and upgrades.. it had many issues with the dedicated Docker Registry.. personally, I got it crashed many times, and I remember it also crashed when I was sitting for the OCP Certification that I failed 😂 At the same moment, CoreOS Tectonic is embedding the Quay Containers Registry 😁

This led Red Hat to go fast in acquiring CoreOS.. and they started at the same time talking about OpenShift 4.0 😁

May 1st, 2019, the OpenShift 4.1 was released. Yeah ! There was no 4.0 version for some reasons 😆

Great! What did OpenShift 4.1 bring new ?

OpenShift 4.1 new features

OpenShift brings many great features, starting of the version 4.1 :

  • Installation : a wizard will cover all the installation process steps and heavy tasks. No more painful installation experience ! 👈 CoreOS Tectonic feature 😎

  • Upgrade: the process will be easily done via a one-click operation from the administration console. No more headaches ! 👈 CoreOS Tectonic feature 😎 NOTE: Upgrading from the 3.x to 4.x is not possible, obviously 🤓

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS: immutable OS more suitable for containerization and easily manageable ! No more RHEL administration fever ! 👈 CoreOS Tectonic feature 😎

  • Operators: An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application. A Kubernetes application is an application that is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes APIs and kubectl tooling. 👈 CoreOS Tectonic feature 😎

    Now, most of the OpenShift’s components are now Operators:

    • The registry is now managed by an Operator
    • The networking is now configured and managed by an Operator. The Operator upgrades and monitors the cluster network.
    • The cluster autoscaling is now handled by an Operator. The Operator

  • Enhanced Web console: The new release offers a great revisited Web Console and redesigned Developer Catalog that brings all of the new Operators and existing broker services together, with new ways to discover, sort, and understand how to best use each type of offering. There are also many new management screens that come with the new features.

  • Developer Experience: Red Hat brings a new tool called Code Ready Containers, a local desktop instance of OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 replaces the functions of oc cluster commands, Minishift, and CDK. OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 focuses on ease of access and native experience, with a native installation program on macOS and Microsoft Windows, native hypervisor support, and tray icon integration.

There are many great incoming features, like the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh that we have been waiting for long time 🥳

Playing with OpenShift 4.1 Locally

In the OpenShift 3.x era, we had the great Minishift tool that enables developers to have a local OpenShift Cluster. But as we listed before, OpenShift 4 come with a new tool called Code Ready Containers (aka CRC), that will bring a minimal OpenShift 4.0 or newer cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer.

To install the CRC, you need to go to try.openshift.com and click on Get Started:

Next, you need to log in your Red Hat account; If you don’t have one, you can create it for free in less than 2 minutes.

Next, you will be redirected to the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager dashboard:

From this screen, you can create a cluster on many Cloud provider (Aws, Azure, etc..) or even on your dedicated servers; or on your Laptop, which is what we want to do 😁

Next, click on Laptop button to access the download section:

In this screen, you need to download the CRC binaries and the Pull secret, which is a Red Hat credentials generated for your account to authenticate the downloads that will be made by the CRC tool.

After installing the binaries. You need to place it in your $PATH .. 🤓

Next, we will start playing with the CRC.. the first command to do is

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$ crc setup

INFO Checking if running as non-root              
INFO Caching oc binary                            
INFO Setting up virtualization with HyperKit      
INFO Will use root access: change ownership of /Users/developer/.crc/bin/hyperkit 
INFO Will use root access: set suid for /Users/developer/.crc/bin/hyperkit 
INFO Installing crc-machine-hyperkit              
INFO Will use root access: change ownership of /Users/developer/.crc/bin/crc-driver-hyperkit 
INFO Will use root access: set suid for /Users/developer/.crc/bin/crc-driver-hyperkit 
INFO Setting file permissions for /etc/resolver/testing 
INFO Will use root access: create dir /etc/resolver 
INFO Will use root access: create file /etc/resolver/testing 
INFO Will use root access: change ownership of /etc/resolver/testing 
INFO Setting file permissions for /etc/hosts      
INFO Will use root access: change ownership of /etc/hosts 
INFO Unpacking bundle from the CRC binary         
Setup is complete, you can now run 'crc start' to start a CodeReady Containers instance

Next, as mentioned in the log, you need just to type crc start  to start a CRC instance 😁

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$ crc start

INFO Checking if running as non-root              
INFO Checking if oc binary is cached              
INFO Checking if HyperKit is installed            
INFO Checking if crc-driver-hyperkit is installed 
INFO Checking file permissions for /etc/resolver/testing 
INFO Checking file permissions for /etc/hosts     
? Image pull secret [? for help]

Now you need to past the pull secret that you grab from the Red Hat portal in the previous steps.

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? Image pull secret [? for help] ************************
*********************************************************
*********************************************************

INFO Loading bundle: crc_hyperkit_4.1.11.crcbundle ...
INFO Extracting bundle: crc_hyperkit_4.1.11.crcbundle ...
INFO Creating VM ...
INFO Verifying validity of the cluster certificates ...
INFO Restarting the host network
INFO Check internal and public dns query ... 
INFO Copying kubeconfig file to instance dir ...
INFO Adding user's pull secret and cluster ID ...
INFO Starting OpenShift cluster ... [waiting 3m] 
INFO To access the cluster using 'oc', run 'eval $(crc oc-env) && oc login -u kubeadmin -p 78UVa-zNj5W-YB62Z-ggxGZ https://api.crc.testing:6443'
INFO Access the OpenShift web-console here: https://console-openshift-console.apps-crc.testing
INFO Login to the console with user: kubeadmin, password: 78UVa-zNj5W-YB62Z-ggxGZ
CodeReady Containers instance is running

Great ! So our CRC instance is running and we get some informations in the log:

  • The OpenShift CLI login command: oc login -u kubeadmin -p 78UVa-zNj5W-YB62Z-ggxGZ https://api.crc.testing:6443

  • The OpenShift web-console URL: https://console-openshift-console.apps-crc.testing

  • The OpenShift web-console credentials:

    • login: kubeadmin
    • password: 78UVa-zNj5W-YB62Z-ggxGZ

If you have noticed, the URLs of the web-console or the Master node URL are made based on an *.testing domain name. This is a custom DNS name that is pointing on a local IP address..

In the log of the crc setup command, there some lines handling the /etc/hosts file..

If you ping a the domain name, you will get a local IP address like mine for example: 192.168.64.3

Now, go to https://console-openshift-console.apps-crc.testing to access the OpenShift web-console:

Click on the kube:admin  and you need to type the credentials listed in the log of the crc start command:

Yoppa ! You will be redirected to the Web Console Dashboard:

Yooopaa !🥳🤩  Now every thing is up ! 🥳🤩 Let’s deploy a sample application 😁

First of all, click on Create Project:

Next, click on Browse Catalog:

Next, choose Apache HTTP Server (httpd) and click on Create Application:

In the next form, click on the Try Sample, and tick the Create route and click Create:

Next, you will see the Project Status screen:

When the deployment is finished. Scroll down to in the menu and click on Routes in the Networking section:

In this screen, we will get the Route URL created for our Hello World application:

Now, click on the Location URL: http://httpd-hello-world.apps-crc.testing/ and you will see the application:

Hakuna matata ! 🥳🤩🥳

We can also enter the OpenShift command: to check if every thing is ok 🧐 This command will show the Route URL that we got before from the Web Console:

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$ oc get routes -n hello-world httpd -o jsonpath='{.spec.host}'

httpd-hello-world.apps-crc.testing

Cool ! Everything is working like a charm ! Yeah ! I’m wonderful 😂

Conclusion

I’m really happy with the OpenShift 4 ! I really appreciate the product revolution ! I have the feeling that I’m dealing with a totally different product 😁