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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure support for Red Hat OpenShift agents

Here in this blog, we will learn about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure support for Red Hat OpenShift agents.

Embracing Red Hat OpenShift 4.14’s versatility

OpenShift 4.14 onwards offers two different installation options to users. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure now allows you to install an OpenShift cluster using one of the following methods:

1. An assisted installer based on SaaS

OpenShift provides an assisted installer for users who value a simple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based installation process. This installer offers a graphical user interface-driven, user-friendly method for setting up and managing OpenShift clusters. The installation procedure is made simpler, making it easier for users who might not be very knowledgeable about command line interfaces (CLIs). The Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console can be used to access the assisted installer, which is best suited for environments with internet access and allows your cluster to be connected to a larger online ecosystem.

2. An installer based on an agent and CLI

The flexibility offered by the agent-based installation method allows users to boot their on-premises servers however they see fit. It combines offline features, such as deployment in air-gapped environments, with the user-friendliness of the assisted installation service. This procedure is an OpenShift installer subcommand. It creates a bootable ISO image with a release image that is ready for use, along with all the data required to set up an OpenShift cluster.
The format for the installer-provisioned infrastructure and user-provisioned infrastructure installation methods is the same for the configuration for agent-based installation. Additionally, Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) custom resources can be generated or accepted by the agent-based installer voluntarily, making it easier to provision new edge sites with declarative configurations for bare-metal hardware.

Features of agent-based installers

As an OpenShift user, you can take advantage of the hosted assisted installer service even in environments that are disconnected. The assisted discovery agent and the assisted service are contained in a bootable ISO for the agent-based installation. Although cluster installation requires both components, the latter is only required to run on one host.
An ephemeral ISO is created by the openshift-install agent create image subcommand using manifests like install-config.yaml and agent-config.yaml and user-supplied data. As an alternative, users configuring bare-metal equipment can use ZTP manifests.

About OCI, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

With the full suite of cloud services provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, users can create and execute a variety of applications in a high-performance, highly available environment. Even in multicloud scenarios, users have more control over data residency, locality, and authority thanks to OCI’s distributed cloud.

OCI characteristics

1.  Multicloud capabilities that let users select the ideal cloud provider for their databases and apps
2.  Options for hybrid clouds
3. Public cloud serving data residency and sovereignty requirements with 45 cloud regions spread across 23 countries, including an EU Sovereign Cloud
4.  Oracle Alloy and dedicated cloud regions provide customized cloud services and experiences.

Utilizing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 has released support and certification for OpenShift to operate on OCI. The certified Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine configurations running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute virtual machines and bare metal instances are covered by this support for customer-managed installations.

A summary of OCI’s agent-based installer support

The agent-based installer now supports an additional platform type—external for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provider—with the most recent OpenShift 4.14 release. The following are the prerequisites in order to use this support:

1.  OpenShift 4.14 is the minimum version needed.
2. Only oci can be set as the platformName when utilizing an external platform.
3. The cloudControllerManager needs to be configured to External when utilizing an external platform.
4. The rootfs.img file is loaded dynamically into memory during bootup and can be explicitly created by the agent-based installer or it can generate a minimal ISO.
5. All cluster topologies—connected, disconnected, and dual-stack networking—as well as Single Node OpenShift (SNO), Highly Available (HA), and Compact are supported.

How the agent ISO is generated

1.  Get the install-config.yaml and agent-config.yaml files ready.
2.  Create the YAML manifest files for CSI and CCM.
3.  Get the most recent binary for openshift-install.
4.  To create the ISO image, run./openshift-install agent create image — log-level debug.

Compile and end

This article examined how to integrate Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift’s agent-based installer, creating new opportunities for the effective deployment and management of containerized applications.