Creating Custom Operator Hub Catalogs

Introduction

By default every new OpenShift cluster has a fully populated Operator Hub, filled with various Operators from the Kubernetes community and Red Hat partners, curated by Red Hat. These Operators can be installed by the cluster administrator in order to expand the features and functions of a given cluster. While this is great in many cases, not all enterprises want these Operators made available for install. OpenShift OperatorHub is fully configurable, and some of the various options on how to work with the Operator Catalog will be the topic of this blog post.

May 18, 2022

Creating ExternalIPs in OpenShift with MetalLB

Introduction

Since the 3.0 release of OpenShift it has come with what is called the OpenShift Routes. This can be thought of as a Layer 7 load balancer for TLS or HTTP applications in your cluster. This layer 7 load balancer works great for web applications and services that use HTTP, HTTPS using SNI, or TLS using SNI. However not all applications are HTTP-based, and some will use protocols other than TCP such as UDP and even SCTP. How do you make these applications available to consumers outside of your OpenShift Cluster? You might try using NodePort which will open a port on all worker nodes for your given service and forward that traffic onto the proper application. You can also manually configure ExternalIP and IP Failover to make an external IP available for your application in a highly available configuration, however, this is a time-consuming process.

May 11, 2022

Understanding OpenShift MachineConfigs and MachineConfigPools

Introduction

OpenShift 4 is built upon Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS), and RHCOS is managed differently than most traditional Operating Systems. Unlike other Kubernetes distributions where you must manage the base Operating System as well as your Kubernetes distribution, with OpenSHift 4 the RHCOS Operating System and the Kubernetes platform are tightly coupled, and management of RHCOS including any system-level configurations is managed by MachineConfigs, and MachineConfigPools. These constructs allow you to manage system configuration and detect configuration drift on your Control Plane and Worker nodes.

April 6, 2022

Using Citrix Netscaler with OpenShift

Introduction

The OpenShift platform is a “batteries included” distribution of Kubernetes. It comes with EVERYTHING you need to run a Kubernetes platform from a developer and sysadmin-friendly UI, to monitoring, alerting, platform configuration, and ingress networking. OpenShift was one of the first Kubernetes distributions to realize that having a Kubernetes platform that solved how to load-balance incoming requests for applications was important. OpenShift achieved this through the use of “Routes”. Upstream in Kubernetes this need has been implemented through the use of Ingress, and more recently Gateway API.