Learn how you can use CodeReady Containers to set up the latest version of Openshift Local just on your computer.
At this time, we all know that the default deployment mode for any application we would like to launch will be a container-based platform and, especially, it will be a Kubernetes-based platform.
But we already know that there are a lot of different flavors of Kubernetes distributions, I even wrote an article about it that you can find here:
Some of these distributions try to follow as close as they could the Kubernetes experience but others are trying to enhance and increase the capabilities the platform provides.
Because of that sometimes it is important to have a way to really test our development in the target platform without waiting for a server-based developer mode. We know that we have in our own laptop a Kubernetes-based platform to help do the job.
minikube is the most common option to do this and it will provide a very vanilla view of Kubernetes, but something we need a different kind of platform.
Openshift from RedHat is becoming one of the de-facto solutions for private cloud deployments and especially for any company that is not planning to move to a public-cloud managed solution such as EKS, GKE, or AKS. In the past we have a similar project as minikube known as minishift that allow running in their own words:
Minishift is a tool that helps you run OpenShift locally by running a single-node OpenShift cluster inside a VM. You can try out OpenShift or develop with it, day-to-day, on your localhost.
The only problem with minishift is that they only support the 3.x version of Openshift but we are seeing that most of the customers are already upgrading to the 4.x release, so we can think that are a little alone in that duty, but this is far from the truth!
Because we have CodeReady Containers or CRC to help us on that duty.
Code Ready Containers purpose is to provide to you a minimal Openshift cluster optimized for development purposes. Their installation process is very very simple.
It works in a way similar to the previous VM and OVA distribution mode, so you will need to get some binaries to be able to set up this directly from Red Hat using the following direction: https://console.redhat.com/openshift/create/local
You will need to create an account but it is free and in a few steps you will get a big binary about 3–4 GB and your sign code to be able to run the platform and that’s it, in a few minutes you will have at your disposal a complete Openshift Platform ready for you to use.
You will be able to switch on and off the platform using the commands crc start and crc stop.
As you can imagine this is only suitable for the local environment and in no way for production deployment and also it has some restrictions that can affect you such as:
- The CodeReady Containers OpenShift cluster is ephemeral and is not intended for production use.
- There is no supported upgrade path to newer OpenShift versions. Upgrading the OpenShift version may cause issues that are difficult to reproduce.
- It uses a single node that behaves as both a master and worker node.
- It disables the
monitoringOperator by default. This disabled Operator causes the corresponding part of the web console to be non-functional. - The OpenShift instance runs in a virtual machine. This may cause other differences, particularly with external networking.
I hope you find this useful and that you can use it as part of your deployment process.
