OpenShift is secure, stable, and scalable. It offers consistency and stability everywhere you operate.

OpenShift relies on Kubernetes, which is the de facto standard in terms of container orchestration. Installing and maintaining a Kubernetes cluster can be very challenging, especially when dealing with underlying resources such as networking, routing, storage, security, and monitoring. OpenShift provides all these out of the box, providing consistency across environments easily and at speed. With such features and integrations, operational teams can work on adding new nodes, scaling applications, and creating new clusters.

OpenShift provides two main control tools:

• Web console
•  CLI

We will describe all the functionalities that these tools give to administer your OpenShift cluster later in the chapter.

OpenShift comes in three different flavors:

• OpenShift Enterprise, which requires a Red Hat subscription
• OpenShift Origin, which is the open source community project (renamed OKD since August 2018)
• OpenShift Online, which is powered by Red Hat and available only online with various plans

For ease of use, and of course for free cost control, in this book, we will use the open source community flavor OKD; from now on, any OpenShift wording will refer to OKD, if not otherwise specified. All source code for the OKD project is available under the Apache License (version 2.0) on GitHub.