OpenShift is a container platform by RedHat. Many enterprises (especially banks) are looking to leverage the power of OpenShift for running their workloads. This is because OpenShift lends itself quite well towards a more hybrid approach for cloud deployments. In other words, it allows organizations to avoid going out of their own data-centres and still harness the power of cloud. Also, the OpenShift Web Console is an added advantage that allows you to manage your OpenShift applications with ease.

OpenShift is basically built on top of industry standard tools such as Kubernetes and Docker. This makes it quite extensible. Also, easy enough to understand and learn. However, RedHat has also added a significant number of bells and whistles on top to package it as an enterprise-grade solution.

In case you want to learn more about the differences between OpenShift and Kubernetes, I have a detailed post that talks about it.

In this post, we will look at the OpenShift Web Console view and understand the various features available. If you prefer to watch a video, you can also head over to my Youtube channel.

So without wasting any more time, let’s start with the walkthrough.

1 – The Landing Page

Once you login to the OpenShift console, you will see a landing page of sorts. The prominent thing to note here is the Catalog. This Catalog basically lists down all the builder images available with the OpenShift installation. You can think of builder images as some sort of starter images.

openshift web console landing page

In the above screenshot, you can see a list of various tools and technologies. For example, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python are there if you are looking for programming languages or frameworks. We also have some databases such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL and so on. Lastly, we also have web servers such as Nginx and Apache HTTPD. All in all, there is a broad spectrum available to choose from.

2 – OpenShift Project Creation

One of the first activities you will perform in OpenShift is to create a project.

A project in OpenShift is nothing but a Kubernetes namespace. Basically, it allows you to group a set of applications and resources together. The namespace also provides networking capabilities between the various resources that are part of the namespace.

To create a new project, you can click on the Create Project button on the right hand side of the landing page. Next, you can basically fill the dialog box that shows up.

openshift create project

See above screenshot for some of the details that we can fill up. After filling the details, we can click Create to create the project in our OpenShift installation.

Once we create the project, we can see it in our list of projects on the right hand side. Basically, the list shows all the projects where we are members.

openshift project list

We can create as many projects or namespaces as we want within our installation. Also, we can become a part of as many projects or namespaces as we want. If a project is not created by your user id, you need to ask the admin of that project to grant access.

3 – The Project View

Once the project is created, we can open the project view by clicking on the project name.

The project view is quite different from the previous view. Here, we can see all the applications that are deployed within the project. However, when we open it for the first time, it will be like an empty dashboard.

openshift project view

In the center of the page, we have a Browse Catalog button that allows us to select an application type from the in-built catalog.

On the right sidebar, we have a bunch of options for use. The Overview is nothing but the Dashboard view.

Next, we have the Applications tab where we have several options such as Deployments, Pods, Services and Routes. In other words, all the run-time related resources are present in the Applications tab.

The Builds tab deals with build or compile time related entities such as Images and Build Configurations.

Next, we have Resources tab where we can find project resource quota, project memberships and OpenShift secrets.

Lastly, we have some other tabs such as Storage, Monitoring and the Catalog view. Storage deals with database storage or other volumes we may have registered. Monitoring is mainly concerned with having a clear view of all the events happening in our project or namespace. Lastly, the Catalog view again opens the list of in-built builder images.

Conclusion

Basically, we have now taken a very high level view of the OpenShift Web Console view and understood all the features available to us in that view.

We also created a brand-new project for ourselves and looked at the project level view of our namespace.

In the subsequent posts, we will be taking a deeper dive into various OpenShift terminologies.

Categories: BlogOpenShift

Saurabh Dashora

Saurabh is a Software Architect with over 12 years of experience. He has worked on large-scale distributed systems across various domains and organizations. He is also a passionate Technical Writer and loves sharing knowledge in the community.

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