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.