Five OpenShift development environments in five minutes

It has been over two months since I spoke at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, and now that the dust has settled, I thought you might be interested in reading a brief summary of my talk on five OpenShift development environments in five minutes.

In the presentation, I spoke about five different ways you can create an OpenS hift development environment within minutes. This included oc cluster up, Vagrant All in One Box, Minishift, a Fabric8 technology, and the Red Hat Development Suite. My goal through the presentation was to get developers up and working with OpenShift very quickly.

oc cluster up

This is included in OpenShift Origin 3.3+ and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.3+, which allows you to create a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform environment in a containerized environment. It’s actually creating a containerized platform in a container. It has a lot of flexibility and runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

This is the only option that we have here that allows you to use both Origin, which is the upstream version of OpenShift, and the enterprise-grade Red Hat version as well. It's very simple, and all you really need to run is Docker and the OpenShift client tool (oc). If you have those installed, it's a simple oc cluster up command and you have an environment ready to start running.

$ oc cluster up --use-existing-config \                 
               --host-data-dir=/usr/data \
               --metrics=true \
               --image=registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose \
               --version=latest 

Vagrant all-in-one box

This is a virtual machine created by the OpenShift community using Vagrant. Vagrant is a tool for building and managing VMs. This was a very well received project and it’s one of the initial projects to be able to create these development environments for OpenShift. It's still a valid method if you have a Vagrant environment. However, the OpenShift Origin community is now shifting, pun intended, to Minishift, which we'll talk about next.

It has to be understood that this specific Vagrant box is going to stay at version 3.3. It's not going to be upgraded, but there are other Vagrant boxes available.

$ vagrant init openshift/origin-all-in-one

$ vagrant up --provider=virtualbox  

Minishift

Minishift is gaining a lot of traction and popularity within the community. It doesn't matter if you're running on Windows, Linux, or Mac. This tool runs OpenShift locally using a single node OpenShift cluster in a virtual machine using a driver, such as kvm, xhyve, or Hyper-V. Many people find value with Minishift, as it provides parameters for customizing settings such as disk size, CPU, and memory.

$ minishift start --cpus=2 --disk-size=20g --memory=2048

Fabric8 Maven Plugin

This is an open source microservices platform that uses Kubernetes, OpenShift, Jenkins, and docker. In fact, through this microservice type of framework, you can create your own OpenShift environment easily. I was specifically calling out this Maven Plugin mostly because I wanted to show that it's easy to spin up OpenShift inside a Maven project. In turn, this calls Minishift behind the scenes. You get all the functionality of Minishift within your Maven environment, as well.

$ mvn fabric8:cluster-start -Dfabric8.cluster.kind=openshift

Red Hat Development Suite

The Red Hat Development Suite is available through the Red Hat Developer Program, and is currently only available for Windows and Mac. I spoke of the Red Hat Development Suite as it has a simple installer, which allows you to pick all the components that you don't have installed in your system and also configures everything for you. Within minutes, you can have your VirtualBox, your Vagrants, and your Red Hat Container Development Kit installed and ready to start using as an OpenShift environment.

If you're using Linux, you can still get the same functionality by using the Red Hat Container Development Kit, you just don't get the installer.

I concluded my talk with a demo of my favorite option, oc cluster up, which requires little upfront preparation, runs in a containerized environment, and allows full use of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5. Check out my 90 second oc cluster up demo.

Next steps and documentation

• oc cluster up

• Vagrant All-in-one

• Minishift

• Fabric8-maven-plugin

• Red Hat Development Suite

Jason Meyer is the team lead for the Cloud Success Architecture (CSA) program in North America. The CSA team focuses on building long-term, confident, and capable customers by ensuring efficient adoption of Red Hat’s Enterprise Cloud products through proactive engagements. Products of focus are Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and Red Hat CloudForms. CSA is part of Red Hat’s world class Customer Experience and Engagement organization and provides proactive advice and guidance to help you identify and address potential problems before they occur.

A Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a specialized product expert who works collaboratively with IT organizations to strategically plan for successful deployments and help realize optimal performance and growth. The TAM is part of Red Hat’s world class Customer Experience and Engagement organization and provides proactive advice and guidance to help you identify and address potential problems before they occur. Should a problem arise, your TAM will own the issue and engage the best resources to resolve it as quickly as possible with minimal disruption to your business.

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