Operating OpenShift: An SRE Approach to Managing Infrastructure

The OpenShift build infrastructure lets you easily build and deploy an application to an OpenShift cluster, as long as it fits one of the default S2I images or a Dockerfile is all it needs.

However, sometimes your deployment strategy requires you to run a more complex series of execution steps between the time a change hits version control and when the updated application begins running in production. These steps depend heavily on your organizational structure and strategy: do you want to automatically run unit and integration tests to verify that the code works as expected? Do you want to deploy to different stages before production or do canary deployments?

There are many different options to consider when it comes to how best to deploy your application. Such a series of executed steps is usually referred to as a deployment pipeline.

An example pipeline for a service like the highscore service could include the following steps:

• Check out main
• Run unit tests
• Build container image
• Publish container image
•  Run integration tests
• Deploy service

OpenShift comes with a CI/CD solution called Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines that easily can be installed and used to build pipelines like this. Continuous integration usually means whatever is currently checked into version control will automatically be validated and deployed to some kind of environment, whether a test environment or production.