Preface

When we first began developing OpenShift in Action, it was going to be a book focusing on the ops side of DevOps in OpenShift. Existing books focus on OpenShift’s developer experience, and we wanted to be their counterpoint. As we continued to work on the content and look at what we wanted to teach, it became apparent that we didn’t want to be a counterpoint. We didn’t want to represent one side of anything. Instead, we decided to create a complete example of OpenShift with a strong experience for both operators and developers. OpenShift in Action takes a holistic view of OpenShift, giving equal weight to both perspectives represented in DevOps.

We think this is important, because the ultimate goal of DevOps is to enable and enhance communication between developer and operations teams that historically have been placed in adversarial (at best) relationships. To accomplish this, the two authors each specialize in one of these roles. For us, writing this book has been an amazing learning experience in how DevOps can work for just about anything, including writing a book.

We can’t cover every OpenShift topic in a single book. But we hope OpenShift in Action gives you the fundamental knowledge from both developer and operation perspectives to allow you to deploy and successfully use OpenShift in your own environments. We also hope you can use OpenShift to accomplish meaningful work using containers. Most important, we hope the content in this book expands your knowledge through hands-on experience with OpenShift and becomes a reference for you for years to come.

OpenShift has a great web-based user interface, powerful command-line utilities, and a robust API. Almost any of the examples we go through in OpenShift in Action can be accomplished using any of those interfaces. We try to give you examples using all of these methods, but you’ll notice as you read and work through the examples that we tend to focus on command-line workflows to accomplish tasks. There are two primary reasons we did this:

• With the electronic versions of the book, you can copy and paste most of the examples directly into the command line to run them.
• In our experience at Red Hat, working with hundreds of customers and helping them effectively use OpenShift, the command line is the most common interface for power users.

OpenShift in Action was written using the experience we’ve gained helping countless Red Hat customers over the years. We cover a wide range of topics, and we’ve done our best to organize them in a way that will be relevant and useful as you begin this exciting journey. We hope this book is as helpful to you as the process of writing it has been to us.