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Learn about OpenShift and basic container concepts used in the OpenShift Dedicated architecture.

About Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The general concept of Kubernetes is fairly simple:

  • Start with one or more worker nodes to run the container workloads.

  • Manage the deployment of those workloads from one or more control nodes.

  • Wrap containers in a deployment unit called a pod. Using pods provides extra metadata with the container and offers the ability to group several containers in a single deployment entity.

  • Create special kinds of assets. For example, services are represented by a set of pods and a policy that defines how they are accessed. This policy allows containers to connect to the services that they need even if they do not have the specific IP addresses for the services. Replication controllers are another special asset that indicates how many pod Replicas are required to run at a time. You can use this capability to automatically scale your application to adapt to its current demand.

To learn more about Kubernetes, see the Kubernetes documentation.

The benefits of containerized applications

Applications were once expected to be installed on operating systems that included all of the dependencies for the application. However, containers provide a standard way to package your application code, configurations, and dependencies into a single unit that can run as a resource-isolated process on a compute server. To run your app in Kubernetes on OpenShift Dedicated, you must first containerize your app by creating a container image that you store in a container registry.

Operating system benefits

Containers use small, dedicated Linux operating systems without a kernel. The file system, networking, cgroups, process tables, and namespaces are separate from the host Linux system, but the containers can integrate with the hosts seamlessly when necessary. Being based on Linux allows containers to use all the advantages that come with the open source development model of rapid innovation.

Because each container uses a dedicated operating system, you can deploy applications that require conflicting software dependencies on the same host. Each container carries its own dependent software and manages its own interfaces, such as networking and file systems, so applications never need to compete for those assets.

Deployment benefits

If you employ rolling upgrades between major releases of your application, you can continuously improve your applications without downtime and still maintain compatibility with the current release.

You can also deploy and test a new version of an application alongside the existing version. Deploy the new application version in addition to the current version. If the container passes your tests, simply deploy more new containers and remove the old ones. 

Since all the software dependencies for an application are resolved within the container itself, you can use a generic operating system on each host in your data center. You do not need to configure a specific operating system for each application host. When your data center needs more capacity, you can deploy another generic host system.

Understanding how OpenShift Dedicated differs from OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift Dedicated uses the same code base as OpenShift Container Platform but is installed in an opinionated way to be optimized for performance, scalability, and security. OpenShift Dedicated is a fully managed service; therefore, many of the OpenShift Dedicated components and settings that you manually set up in OpenShift Container Platform are set up for you by default.

Review the following differences between OpenShift Dedicated and a standard installation of OpenShift Container Platform on your own infrastructure:

OpenShift Container Platform OpenShift Dedicated

The customer installs and configures OpenShift Container Platform.

OpenShift Dedicated is installed through a user-friendly webpage and in a standardized way that is optimized for performance, scalability, and security.

Customers can choose their computing resources.

OpenShift Dedicated is hosted and managed in a public cloud (Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform) either owned by Red Hat or provided by the customer.

Customers have top-level administrative access to the infrastructure.

Customers have a built-in administrator group, though the top-level administration access is available when cloud accounts are provided by the customer.

Customers can use all supported features and configuration settings available in OpenShift Container Platform.

Some OpenShift Container Platform features and configuration settings might not be available or changeable in OpenShift Dedicated .

You set up control plane components such as the API server and etcd on machines that get the control role. You can modify the control plane components, but keep in mind that you are responsible for backing up, restoring, and making control plane data highly available.

Red Hat sets up the control plane and manages the control plane components for you. The control plane is highly available.

You are responsible for updating the underlying infrastructure for the control plane and worker nodes. You can use the OpenShift web console to update OpenShift Container Platform versions.

Red Hat automatically notifies the customer when updates are available. You can manually or automatically schedule upgrades in Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager.

Support is provided based on the terms of your Red Hat subscription or cloud provider.

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