OpenShift Dedicated service definition

Each OpenShift Dedicated cluster requires a minimum annual base cluster purchase and there are two billing options available for each cluster: Standard and Customer Cloud Subscription (CCS).

Standard OpenShift Dedicated clusters are deployed in to their own cloud infrastructure accounts, each owned by Red Hat. Red Hat is responsible for this account, and cloud infrastructure costs are paid directly by Red Hat. The customer only pays the Red Hat subscription costs.

In the CCS model, the customer pays the cloud infrastructure provider directly for cloud costs and the cloud infrastructure account is part of a customer’s Organization, with specific access granted to Red Hat. In this model, the customer pays Red Hat for the CCS subscription and pays the cloud provider for the cloud costs. It is the customer’s responsibility to pre-purchase or provide Reserved Instance (RI) compute instances to ensure lower cloud infrastructure costs.

Additional resources can be purchased for an OpenShift Dedicated Cluster, including:

Customers can create, scale, and delete their clusters from OpenShift Cluster Manager Hybrid Cloud Console, provided that they have already purchased the necessary subscriptions.

Actions available in Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager must not be directly performed from within the cluster as this might cause adverse affects, including having all actions automatically reverted.

OpenShift Dedicated offers OpenShift Container Platform clusters as a managed service on the following cloud providers:

Single availability zone clusters require a minimum of 2 worker nodes for Customer Cloud Subscription (CCS) clusters deployed to a single availability zone. A minimum of 4 worker nodes is required for standard clusters. These 4 worker nodes are included in the base subscription.

Multiple availability zone clusters require a minimum of 3 worker nodes for Customer Cloud Subscription (CCS) clusters, 1 deployed to each of 3 availability zones. A minimum of 9 worker nodes are required for standard clusters. These 9 worker nodes are included in the base subscription, and additional nodes must be purchased in multiples of 3 to maintain proper node distribution.

Worker nodes must all be the same type and size within a single OpenShift Dedicated cluster.

Control plane and infrastructure nodes are also provided by Red Hat. There are at least 3 control plane nodes that handle etcd and API-related workloads. There are at least 2 infrastructure nodes that handle metrics, routing, the web console, and other workloads. You must not run any workloads on the control plane and infrastructure nodes. Any workloads you intend to run must be deployed on worker nodes. See the Red Hat Operator support section below for more information about Red Hat workloads that must be deployed on worker nodes.

OpenShift Dedicated offers the following worker node instance types and sizes on AWS:

OpenShift Dedicated offers the following worker node types and sizes on AWS:

OpenShift Dedicated offers the following worker node types and sizes on Google Cloud that are chosen to have a common CPU and memory capacity that are the same as other cloud instance types:

The following AWS regions are supported by OpenShift Container Platform 4 and are supported for OpenShift Dedicated:

The following Google Cloud regions are currently supported:

Multi-AZ clusters can only be deployed in regions with at least 3 availability zones (see AWS and Google Cloud).

Each new OpenShift Dedicated cluster is installed within a dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in a single Region, with the option to deploy into a single Availability Zone (Single-AZ) or across multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ). This provides cluster-level network and resource isolation, and enables cloud-provider VPC settings, such as VPN connections and VPC Peering. Persistent volumes are backed by cloud block storage and are specific to the availability zone in which they are provisioned. Persistent volumes do not bind to a volume until the associated pod resource is assigned into a specific availability zone in order to prevent unschedulable pods. Availability zone-specific resources are only usable by resources in the same availability zone.

Any SLAs for the service itself are defined in Appendix 4 of the Red Hat Enterprise Agreement Appendix 4 (Online Subscription Services).

When a cluster transitions to a Limited Support status, Red Hat no longer proactively monitors the cluster, the SLA is no longer applicable, and credits requested against the SLA are denied. It does not mean that you no longer have product support. In some cases, the cluster can return to a fully-supported status if you remediate the violating factors. However, in other cases, you might have to delete and recreate the cluster.

A cluster might transition to a Limited Support status for many reasons, including the following scenarios:

If you have questions about a specific action that might cause a cluster to transition to a Limited Support status or need further assistance, open a support ticket.

OpenShift Dedicated includes Red Hat Premium Support, which can be accessed by using the Red Hat Customer Portal.

See the Scope of Coverage Page for more details on what is covered with included support for OpenShift Dedicated.

See OpenShift Dedicated SLAs for support response times.

Cluster audit logs are available through Amazon CloudWatch, if the integration is enabled. If the integration is not enabled, you can request the audit logs by opening a support case. Audit log requests must specify a date and time range not to exceed 21 days. When requesting audit logs, customers should be aware that audit logs are many GB per day in size.

Application logs sent to STDOUT are collected by Fluentd and forwarded to Amazon CloudWatch through the cluster logging stack, if it is installed.

OpenShift Dedicated clusters come with an integrated Prometheus/Grafana stack for cluster monitoring including CPU, memory, and network-based metrics. This is accessible through the web console and can also be used to view cluster-level status and capacity/usage through a Grafana dashboard. These metrics also allow for horizontal pod autoscaling based on CPU or memory metrics provided by an OpenShift Dedicated user.

Red Hat communicates the health and status of OpenShift Dedicated clusters through a combination of a cluster dashboard available in Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager, and email notifications sent to the email address of the contact that originally deployed the cluster.

To use a custom hostname for a route, you must update your DNS provider by creating a canonical name (CNAME) record. Your CNAME record should map the OpenShift canonical router hostname to your custom domain. The OpenShift canonical router hostname is shown on the Route Details page after a Route is created. Alternatively, a wildcard CNAME record can be created once to route all subdomains for a given hostname to the cluster’s router.

Custom domains and subdomains are not available for the platform service routes, for example, the API or web console routes, or for the default application routes.

OpenShift Dedicated includes TLS security certificates needed for both internal and external services on the cluster. For external routes, there are two, separate TLS wildcard certificates that are provided and installed on each cluster, one for the web console and route default hostnames and the second for the API endpoint. Let’s Encrypt is the certificate authority used for certificates. Routes within the cluster, for example, the internal API endpoint, use TLS certificates signed by the cluster’s built-in certificate authority and require the CA bundle available in every pod for trusting the TLS certificate.

OpenShift Dedicated supports the use of custom certificate authorities to be trusted by builds when pulling images from an image registry.

OpenShift Dedicated uses up to 5 different load balancers:

For standard OpenShift Dedicated clusters, network usage is measured based on data transfer between inbound, VPC peering, VPN, and AZ traffic. On a standard OpenShift Dedicated base cluster, 12 TB of network I/O is provided. Additional network I/O can be purchased in 12 TB increments. For CCS OpenShift Dedicated clusters, network usage is not monitored, and is billed directly by the cloud provider.

Project administrators can add route annotations for many different purposes, including ingress control through IP allowlisting.

Ingress policies can also be changed by using NetworkPolicy objects, which leverage the ovs-networkpolicy plugin. This allows for full control over the ingress network policy down to the pod level, including between pods on the same cluster and even in the same namespace.

All cluster ingress traffic goes through the defined load balancers. Direct access to all nodes is blocked by cloud configuration.

Pod egress traffic control through EgressNetworkPolicy objects can be used to prevent or limit outbound traffic in OpenShift Dedicated.

Public outbound traffic from the control plane and infrastructure nodes is required and necessary to maintain cluster image security and cluster monitoring. This requires the 0.0.0.0/0 route to belong only to the internet gateway; it is not possible to route this range over private connections.

OpenShift Dedicated clusters use NAT Gateways to present a public, static IP for any public outbound traffic leaving the cluster. Each subnet a cluster is deployed into receives a distinct NAT Gateway. For clusters deployed on AWS with multiple availability zones, up to 3 unique static IP addresses can exist for cluster egress traffic. For clusters deployed on Google Cloud, regardless of availability zone topology, there will by 1 static IP address for worker node egress traffic. Any traffic that remains inside the cluster or does not go out to the public internet will not pass through the NAT Gateway and will have a source IP address belonging to the node that the traffic originated from. Node IP addresses are dynamic, and therefore a customer should not rely on allowlisting individual IP address when accessing private resources.

Customers can determine their public static IP addresses by running a pod on the cluster and then querying an external service. For example:

OpenShift Dedicated allows for the configuration of a private network connection through several cloud provider managed technologies:

For OpenShift Dedicated clusters that have a private cloud network configuration, a customer can specify internal DNS servers available on that private connection that should be queried for explicitly provided domains.

Network verification checks run automatically when you deploy an OpenShift Dedicated cluster into an existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or create an additional machine pool with a subnet that is new to your cluster. The checks validate your network configuration and highlight errors, enabling you to resolve configuration issues prior to deployment.

You can also run the network verification checks manually to validate the configuration for an existing cluster.

Control plane nodes use encrypted-at-rest-EBS storage.

EBS volumes used for persistent volumes (PVs) are encrypted-at-rest by default.

Persistent volumes (PVs) are backed by AWS EBS and Google Cloud persistent disk block storage, which uses the ReadWriteOnce (RWO) access mode. On a standard OpenShift Dedicated base cluster, 100 GB of block storage is provided for PVs, which is dynamically provisioned and recycled based on application requests. Additional persistent storage can be purchased in 500 GB increments.

PVs can only be attached to a single node at a time and are specific to the availability zone in which they were provisioned, but they can be attached to any node in the availability zone.

Each cloud provider has its own limits for how many PVs can be attached to a single node. See AWS instance type limits or Google Cloud Platform custom machine types for details.

The AWS CSI Driver can be used to provide RWX support for OpenShift Dedicated on AWS. A community Operator is provided to simplify setup. See AWS EFS Setup for OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS for details.

Application and application data backups are not a part of the OpenShift Dedicated service. All Kubernetes objects in each OpenShift Dedicated cluster are backed up to facilitate a prompt recovery in the unlikely event that a cluster becomes irreparably inoperable.

The backups are stored in a secure object storage (Multi-AZ) bucket in the same account as the cluster. Node root volumes are not backed up because Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS is fully managed by the OpenShift Container Platform cluster and no stateful data should be stored on the root volume of a node.

The following table shows the frequency of backups:

Node autoscaling is not available on OpenShift Dedicated at this time.

Customers may create and run DaemonSets on OpenShift Dedicated. In order to restrict DaemonSets to only running on worker nodes, use the following nodeSelector:

In a multiple availability zone cluster, control nodes are distributed across availability zones and at least three worker nodes are required in each availability zone.

Custom node labels are created by Red Hat during node creation and cannot be changed on OpenShift Dedicated clusters at this time.

OpenShift Dedicated is run as a service and is kept up to date with the latest OpenShift Container Platform version.

Refer to OpenShift Dedicated Life Cycle for more information on the upgrade policy and procedures.

Windows containers are not available on OpenShift Dedicated at this time.

OpenShift Dedicated runs on OpenShift 4 and uses CRI-O as the only available container engine.

OpenShift Dedicated runs on OpenShift 4 and uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS as the operating system for all control plane and worker nodes.

Red Hat workloads typically refer to Red Hat-provided Operators made available through Operator Hub. Red Hat workloads are not managed by the Red Hat SRE team, and must be deployed on worker nodes. These Operators may require additional Red Hat subscriptions, and may incur additional cloud infrastructure costs. Examples of these Red Hat-provided Operators are:

All Operators listed in the OperatorHub marketplace should be available for installation. Operators installed from OperatorHub, including Red Hat Operators, are not SRE managed as part of the OpenShift Dedicated service. Refer to the Red Hat Customer Portal for more information on the supportability of a given Operator.

Authentication for the cluster is configured as part of Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager cluster creation process. OpenShift is not an identity provider, and all access to the cluster must be managed by the customer as part of their integrated solution. Provisioning multiple identity providers provisioned at the same time is supported. The following identity providers are supported:

Privileged containers are not available by default on OpenShift Dedicated. The anyuid and nonroot Security Context Constraints are available for members of the dedicated-admins group, and should address many use cases. Privileged containers are only available for cluster-admin users.

In addition to normal users, OpenShift Dedicated provides access to an OpenShift Dedicated-specific group called dedicated-admin. Any users on the cluster that are members of the dedicated-admin group:

As an administrator of OpenShift Dedicated with Customer Cloud Subscriptions (CCS), you have access to the cluster-admin role. While logged in to an account with the cluster-admin role, users have mostly unrestricted access to control and configure the cluster. There are some configurations that are blocked with webhooks to prevent destablizing the cluster, or because they are managed in OpenShift Cluster Manager and any in-cluster changes would be overwritten.

All users, by default, have the ability to create, update, and delete their projects. This can be restricted if a member of the dedicated-admin group removes the self-provisioner role from authenticated users:

Restrictions can be reverted by applying:

OpenShift Dedicated follows common industry best practices for security and controls. The certifications are outlined in the following table.

With OpenShift Dedicated on AWS, AWS provides a standard DDoS protection on all Load Balancers, called AWS Shield. This provides 95% protection against most commonly used level 3 and 4 attacks on all the public facing Load Balancers used for OpenShift Dedicated. A 10-second timeout is added for HTTP requests coming to the haproxy router to receive a response or the connection is closed to provide additional protection.

In OpenShift Dedicated, the control plane storage is encrypted at rest by default and this includes encryption of the etcd volumes. This storage-level encryption is provided through the storage layer of the cloud provider.

You can also enable etcd encryption, which encrypts the key values in etcd, but not the keys. If you enable etcd encryption, the following Kubernetes API server and OpenShift API server resources are encrypted:

The etcd encryption feature is not enabled by default and it can be enabled only at cluster installation time. Even with etcd encryption enabled, the etcd key values are accessible to anyone with access to the control plane nodes or cluster-admin privileges.