In the following article, we will show how to quickly boot an OpenShift Container Platform multi-node deployment on AWS using CloudFormation and Ansible based on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform reference architecture.

NEW UPDATES: Insight on AWS quick start & service broker integration updates

Introduction:

Kubernetes has had a sensational market entrance in the container space during 2017 and OpenShift is the icing on the cake. There are a ton of interesting features that the commercial version of Red OpenShift Container Platform adds on top of vanilla Kubernetes like CI/CD workflows, Docker images registry, etc.. you can read more about how Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform extends Kubernetes in its own homepage.

Why this was needed:

Both the engineers at Red Hat and AWS understand customers of all shapes and sizes regularly deploy and destroy test and demo environments. Some customers even do rolling deployments of their production environments. There could be many reasons such as rolling releases, testing, or developing with different orchestration tools.

We also understand that deploying a container platform is no simple or easy task and thus we began working on building an automated deployment solution which harnesses the power of AWS and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Red Hat and AWS wanted to provide an easy method for our customer to get a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform up and running quickly and easily as possible allowing them to deploy into AWS on-demand without worrying too much about complex deployment, resource use/cost, and have it be easily accessible so anyone can access or contribute.

Manually creating your AWS resources adds too many variables and complexities! Manual processes are subject to human error, are a tedious and repetitive, and it can be extremely easy to forget to delete some of the objects scattered in your AWS cloud account.

That’s why AWS and Red Hat have collaborated together with the Open Source community to build the AWS OpenShift Quick Start.

Updates to the AWS OpenShfit Quickstart & Service Broker Integration

This Quick Start sets up a cloud architecture and deploys Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on AWS. It has full Amazon Route 53 and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) support, allowing you to provide fully-qualified domain name spaces and matching certificates for signing and security by adding the desired domain names to the stack parameters.

Updates to the AWS OpenShfit Quickstart & Service Broker Integration

This Quick Start sets up a cloud architecture and deploys Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on AWS. It has full Amazon Route 53 and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) support, allowing you to provide fully-qualified domain namespaces and matching certificates for signing and security by adding the desired domain names to the stack parameters.

The addition of public-facing Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) caters to application management via the OpenShift service catalog for developers and operations teams.
On-premises teams can traverse the Virtual Private Network (VPN) links into Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), or manage applications directly over secure HTTPS connections.

You do not need to configure post provisioning tunneling or port forwarding—just add the CIDR for desired access and the Quick Start completes all the heavy lifting.

By taking advantage of automatic scaling, you can manage the number of nodes processing workloads within the cluster. This is perfect for growing teams or a rapid workload increase. You can scale OpenShift cluster size simply by changing a value.

AWS Service Broker is built around the industry standard Open Service Broker API. Users of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, for example, can provision AWS services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon EMR, and Amazon DynamoDB directly from the platform without interfacing with the AWS API.

Customers with compliance or business requirements dictating the need for solutions to exist behind proxy layers are able to take advantage of version 3.9 full proxy support.

Get your hands on the technology with experts in the room

If you’re attending Red Hat Summit 2018 on May 8th - 10th in San Francisco, the Red Hat & AWS team will be conducting a hands-on lab workshop to demonstrate how Red Hat Openshift Container Platform on AWS can simplify application development. Learn More

If you’re unable to attend Red Hat Summit 2018, you can experience the hands-on lab workshop in a city near you this summer and fall. View the workshop roadshow schedule to learn more. Additional dates and cities will be added throughout the year.