Containers Archives

How to run Kafka on Openshift, the enterprise Kubernetes, with AMQ Streams

By Hugo Guerrero October 29, 2018October 29, 2018

On October 25th Red Hat announced the general availability of their AMQ Streams Kubernetes Operator for Apache Kafka. Red Hat AMQ Streams focuses on running Apache Kafka on Openshift providing a massively-scalable, distributed, and high performance data streaming platform. AMQ Streams, based on the Apache Kafka and Strimzi projects, offers a distributed backbone that allows microservices and other applications to share data with extremely high throughput. This backbone enables:

Publish and subscribe: Many to many dissemination in a fault tolerant, durable manner.
Replayable events: Serves as a repository for microservices to build in-memory copies of source data, up to any point in time.
Long-term data retention: Efficiently stores data for immediate access in a manner limited only by disk space.
Partition messages for more horizontal scalability: Allows for organizing messages to maximum concurrent access.

One of the most requested items from developers and architects is how to get started with a simple deployment option for testing purposes. In this guide we will use Red Hat Container Development Kit, based on minishift, to start an Apache Kafka cluster on Kubernetes.

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How to install Ansible Tower on Red Hat OpenShift

By Michele Naldini October 26, 2018

In this article, I will show how to install and manage Red Hat Ansible Tower on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Ansible Tower helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments, and improve productivity. You can centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, and it provides role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications, graphical inventory management, and more.

As you may know, Ansible Tower 3.3, the latest release of this automation platform, was released a few weeks ago and added new features. From the release notes you’ll see that Ansible Tower 3.3 added support for a container-based installation on top of OpenShift or Kubernetes.

In this blog, we’ll see how easy it is to set up Ansible Tower 3.3 on OpenShift and have it running as a container in just a few minutes.

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Welcome Apache Kafka to the Kubernetes Era!

By Hugo Guerrero October 25, 2018October 30, 2018

We have pretty exciting news this week as Red Hat is announcing the General Availability of their Apache Kafka Kubernetes operator. Red Hat AMQ Streams delivers the mechanisms for managing Apache Kafka on top of OpenShift, our enterprise distribution for Kubernetes.

Everything started last May 2018 when David Ingham (@dingha) unveiled the Developer Preview as new addition to the Red Hat AMQ offering. Red Hat AMQ Streams focuses on running Apache Kafka on OpenShift. In the microservices world, where several components need to rely on a high throughput communication mechanism, Apache Kafka has made a name for itself for being a leading real-time, distributed messaging platform for building data pipelines and streaming applications.

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Deploying MicroProfile apps on Microsoft Azure using the Azure Open Service Broker

By James Falkner October 17, 2018October 22, 2018

At the recently concluded Microsoft Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando, I had the honor of presenting to a crowd of Java developers and Azure professionals eager to learn how to put their Java skills to work building next-gen apps on Azure. Of course, that meant showcasing the technology coming out of the popular MicroProfile community, in which Red Hat plays a big part (and makes a fully supported, productized MicroProfile implementation through Thorntail, part of Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes).

We did a demo too, which is the main topic of this blog post, showing how easy it is to link your Java MicroProfile apps to Azure services through the Open Service Broker for Azure (the open source, Open Service Broker-compatible API server that provisions managed services in the Microsoft Azure public cloud) and OpenShift’s Service Catalog.

Here’s how to reproduce the demo.

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EventFlow: Event-driven microservices on OpenShift (Part 1)

By Hugo Hiden and Matthias Wessendorf and Simon Woodman October 15, 2018October 14, 2018

This post is the first in a series of three related posts that describes a lightweight cloud-native distributed microservices framework we have created called EventFlow. EventFlow can be used to develop streaming applications that can process CloudEvents, which are an effort to standardize upon a data format for exchanging information about events generated by cloud platforms.

The EventFlow platform was created to specifically target the Kubernetes/OpenShift platforms, and it models event-processing applications as a connected flow or stream of components. The development of these components can be facilitated through the use of a simple SDK library, or they can be created as Docker images that can be configured using environment variables to attach to Kafka topics and process event data directly.

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Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.6 now available

By Mike Guerette October 9, 2018October 9, 2018

We are pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK) 3.6. CDK 3.6 is based on Minishift 1.24.0, a command-line tool to quickly provision an OpenShift and Kubernetes cluster on your local machine for developing cloud- and container-based applications. You can run CDK/Minishift on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

Today, we are also announcing the availability of Red Hat Developer Studio 12.9 and JBoss Tools 4.9 for Eclipse 2018-09. You can develop cloud/container-based applications with a familiar desktop IDE that has integrated tooling for CDK/Minishift.

Here’s a summary of the new features in CDK 3.6:

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Are App Servers Dead in the Age of Kubernetes? (Part 2)

By Ken Finnigan October 2, 2018October 3, 2018

Welcome to the second in a series of posts on Kubernetes, application servers, and the future. Part 1, Kubernetes is the new application operating environment, discussed Kubernetes and its place in application development. In this part, we explore application servers and their role in relation to Kubernetes.

You may recall from Part 1 that we were exploring the views put forth in Why Kubernetes is The New Application Server and thinking about what those views mean for Java EE, Jakarta EE, Eclipse MicroProfile, and application servers. Is it a curtain call for application servers? Are we seeing the start of an imminent decline in their favor and usage?

Before answering that, we need to discuss the use case for application servers. Then can we decide whether it’s still a valid use case.

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Running Microsoft SQL Server on Red Hat OpenShift

By Tom Deseyn September 25, 2018September 25, 2018

In this blog post, we’ll set up Microsoft SQL Server on Red Hat OpenShift. We’ll use SQL Server to store data for a simple ASP.NET Core application running in a container deployed on OpenShift that manages a list of contacts. When we have that set up, we’ll use SQL Operation Studio to connect to the server running on OpenShift from our developer machine.

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Kubernetes is the new application operating environment (Part 1)

By Ken Finnigan September 5, 2018October 18, 2018

This is the first in a series of articles that consider the role of Kubernetes and application servers. Do application servers need to exist? Where does the current situation leave developers trying to choose the right path forward for their applications?

Why Kubernetes is the new application server

By now you’ve likely read “Why Kubernetes is The New Application Server” and you might be wondering what that means for you. How does it impact Java EE or Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile? What about application servers or fat JARs? Is it the end as we’ve known it for nearly two decades?

In reality, it doesn’t impact the worldview for most. It’s in line with the efforts of a majority of vendors around Docker and Kubernetes deployments over the last few years. In addition, there’s greater interest in service mesh infrastructures, such as Istio, and how they can further assist with managing Kubernetes deployments.

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Intro to Podman (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Beta)

By Alessandro Arrichiello August 29, 2018October 18, 2018

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.6 Beta was released a few days ago and one of the first new features I noticed is Podman. Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo by offering an experience similar to the Docker command line: allowing users to run standalone (non-orchestrated) containers. And Podman doesn’t require a daemon to run containers and pods, so we can easily say goodbye to big fat daemons.

Podman implements almost all the Docker CLI commands (apart from the ones related to Docker Swarm, of course). For container orchestration, I suggest you take a look at Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.

Podman consists of just a single command to run on the command line. There are no daemons in the background doing stuff, and this means that Podman can be integrated into system services through systemd.

We’ll cover some real examples that show how easy it can be to transition from the Docker CLI to Podman.

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Blog Articles

Why Kubernetes is the new application server