Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Developers have a lot of choices when deciding how to start using OpenShift and Kubernetes locally --- without going through a native OS installation. We all need to have a development environment as close as possible to production (to prevent defects caused by environmental differences), but ideally we need to do this without spending a lot of time to setup and a lot of computational resources (cpu, memory and disk space). This post will present four alternatives to create a...

Welcome to the fifth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. The previous posts of this series have focused on how to package ZNC in a way that exposes run-time configurability into the immutable world of containers. But forget about ZNC -...

In the microservices landscape, the API provides an essential form of communication between components. To allow secure communication between microservices components, as well as third-party applications, it's important to be able to consume API keys and other sensitive data in a manner that doesn't place the data at risk. Secret objects are specifically designed to hold sensitive information, and OpenShift makes exposing this information to the applications that need it easy. In this post, I'll demonstrate securely consuming API keys...

Welcome to the fourth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. In Part 3, we looked at how to customize the configuration of ZNC using an expect script and environment variables. But forget ZNC, because we’re really talking about That App You...

Red Hat Developers and author N. Harrison Ripps have just released the first pieces of a ten-part series ("That app you love") in which Harrison describes the process of deploying an application using containers into a clustered environment on the cloud. Using the ZRC IRC client as a sample application, Harrison demonstrates each step in the process of containerizing software, dealing with issues like statelessness, security, and robustness that are typically architectural hurdles for most development teams moving to a...

Welcome to the second installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a connection. In our last post, we met my ZNC container, good ol’ znc-cluster-app - but don’t fret about ZNC because we’re really talking about That App You Love - whatever it happens...

I am going to show you how I took an everyday, off-the-shelf application and turned it into a cluster-ready juggernaut of persistent usefulness. Along the way, I’ll share the pitfalls that I hit in getting this all working so that you can chuckle at my misfortune and avoid having to make the same mistakes yourself. This series will run every Tuesday and Thursday until we've accomplished our goals, so stay tuned in, subscribe, and thanks for reading! Meet “That App...

Fuse Integration Services (FIS) is a great product bringing routing (Apache Camel), SOAP and Rest services (CXF) and messaging (JMS) to the modern age of containers and PaaS and all its goodies: encapsulation, immutability, scalability and self healing. OpenShift provides the PaaS infrastructure to FIS. A developer may implement a module in isolation on his own machine, but it often makes sense, especially when we talk about integration services, to have the code being validated in a complex integrated environment...

Microservices are becoming a new trend, thanks to the modularity and granularity they provide on top of advantages like releasing applications in a continuous manner. There are various platforms and projects that are rising which aims to make writing and managing microservices easy. Keeping that in mind, I thought, why not make a demo application that can give an example of how microservices are built and how they interact. In this article, I will be building a small application using...

The last 4-5 years have seen the debut of many new software products specifically targeting both infrastructure services and IT automation. The consumerization of IT has caused its architects to take a fresh look at their existing, often times monolithic apps and IT infrastructure and asking: Can we do better? How do I keep IT relevant? How do I keep track of all these VMs and data? How do I scale out my IT environment without a huge budget increase...

UPDATE: Read the new article " How to run systemd in a container" for the latest information. What is the scoop on running systemd in a container? A couple of years ago I wrote an article on Running systemd with a docker-formatted Container. Sadly, two years later if you google docker systemd this is still the article people see --- it's time for an update. This is a follow-up for my last article. docker upstream vs. systemd I have given...

Prior to working at Red Hat, I worked for a software company, building financial software for large institutions. From my experiences I knew that some customers required, or demanded, a very aggressive Service Level Agreement (SLA). If we consider an SLA of 99.999% (generally referred to as “five nines”) then this would allow for a six-second unavailability or downtime over a full week, anything more and penalties would have to be paid. To provide this level of uptime, it is...

In an earlier article, Debugging Java Applications using the Red Hat Container Development Kit, it was discussed how developer productivity could be improved through the use of remotely debugging containerized Java applications running in OpenShift and the Red Hat Container Development Kit. Not only does remote debugging provide real time insight into the operation and performance of an application, but reduces the cycle time a developer may face as they are working through a solution. Included in the discussion were...

The charter of Open Innovation Labs is to help our customers accelerate application development and realize the latest advancements in software delivery, by providing skills, mentoring, and tools. Some of the challenges I frequently hear from customers are those around Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment provisioning and configuration. This article is first in the series of articles that guide you through installation configuration and usage of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This...

You’ve heard of microservices. You’ve heard of OpenShift. You’ve heard of Kubernetes. Actually, you may already have considerable experience with each of these three concepts and tools. But do you know how to combine all of them in order to deploy microservices effectively? If not, this article is for you. Below, I’ll explain how microservices, OpenShift and Kubernetes fit together, and provide an overview of how you can leverage the orchestration tools provided by OpenShift and Kubernetes in order to...

Microservices are standing at the " Peak of Inflated Expectations". It's immeasurable the number of developers and companies that want to bring in this new development paradigm and don't know what challenges they will face. Of course, the challenges and the reality of an Enterprise company that has been producing software for the last 10 or 20 years is totally different from the start-up company that just released its first software some months ago. Before adopting microservices as an architectural...

One of the common requirements for Java based applications on OpenShift is to have these workloads connect back out to an enterprise database that resides outside of the OpenShift infrastructure. While OpenShift natively supports a variety of relational databases (including Postgres and MySQL) as Docker based deployments within the platform, connecting to an existing enterprise database infrastructure is preferred in many large organizations for a variety of reasons including: Inherent confidence in traditional databases due to in house experience around...

If you are using JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) for J2EE development, the CloudBees Jenkins Platform provides an enterprise-class toolchain for an automated CI/CD from development to production. The CloudBees Jenkins Platform now supports integrations with both Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and Red Hat OpenShift across the software delivery pipeline. This enables developers to build, test and deploy applications, with Jenkins-based continuous delivery pipelines in JBoss via JBoss EAP 7 or JBoss EAP 7 on OpenShift. The...

Containerization technology is fundamentally changing the way applications are packaged and deployed. The ability to create a uniform runtime that can be deployed and scaled is revolutionizing how many organizations develop applications. Platforms such as OpenShift also provide additional benefits such as service orchestration through Kubernetes and a suite of tools for achieving continuous integration and continuous delivery of applications. However, even with all of these benefits, developers still need to be able to utilize the same patterns they have...

JBoss EAP 7 was recently released, and brings with it a whole host of new features and support, such as support for Java EE 7, reduced port usage, graceful shutdown, improved GUI and CLI management, optimizations for cloud and containers, and much more. EAP 7's small footprint, fast startup time and support for modern Java and non-Java frameworks make it uniquely suitable for deployment onto PaaS cloud environments, and Red Hat happens to have a leading one: OpenShift. I put...

WildFly Swarm 1.0.0.Final was released this week at DevNation. It allows the developer to package his application and a JavaEE runtime in a "fat- jar" file. To execute the application, the developer will only need a Java SE Runtime installed and have access to the "fat-jar". No other downloads or configurations are needed. Besides being a well known (and consolidated) Java EE runtime, WildFly Swarm is also an excellent choice for Cloud-native Java apps through the "built-in support for third...

The Problem Several months back, our emerging Developer Programs engineering team assembled during the last breaths of Brno's Czech winter and dedicated a full day towards a deceptively complex task: Be a user. Assemble in groups and, using a technology stack of your choosing, conceive of and create an application to be presented to the full team in 6 hours. Keep in mind that I hold my colleagues in extremely high regard; they're capable, creative, and experienced. Surely churning out...

OpenShift 3 is all about Docker containers. More importantly, it is about management orchestration of containerized applications. Red Hat IT was a big consumer of OpenShift 2 and likewise, we are moving as many applications as possible to containers. OpenShift 3 is a big part of this strategy. On a personal note, OpenShift 3 is an incredible product. I even have it installed at home for various services :) Grant Shipley gave his talk on "making applications great again" using...

Red Hat's Peter Larsen, the OpenShift Domain Architect, gave a talk at DevNation, "Developing on OpenShift without the build waits". Developing with the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service can be very compelling: developing and deploying software without having to worry about the infrastructure. When you first try OpenShift, it's quite impressive to see how easy it is to develop and deploy software using the built-in templates that include preconfigured components such as databases and application servers. This allows developers to start coding right...