We’ve got a design for your next cloud-based container deployment.
An inordinate amount of time can be spent researching and debating architectural decisions, tooling, parameters, or a required sequence of tasks when trying to deploy a project to the cloud. Start your project on the right foot and take advantage of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reference Architecture implementation guides!
Reference Architectures combine the knowledge and experience of multiple cross-functional teams to formulate a best-practices design and simplify the process for creating a stable, highly-available environment on which to run your production applications.
Choose Your Cloud
Red Hat provides, and periodically updates, a comprehensive Reference Architecture document specific to deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on the most popular Cloud Infrastructure Providers: Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Engine (GCE), and VMware vCenter.
Note: A Reference Architecture for Microsoft Azure is targeted to release in February 2017.
In this write-up, I’ll briefly examine each and provide a link to discover more on your own.
Deploying on Red Hat OpenStack Platform
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2743631
A popular deployment scenario, the Reference Architecture by Mark Lamourine, Ryan Cook, and Scott Collier discusses and provides a step-by-step guide for a production-ready deployment of OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) version 3.2 on OpenStack Platform (OSP) version 8.
Note: an updated version covering OCP 3.4 on OSP 10 is targeted to release February 2017.
Understanding that not every infrastructure environment is the same, the guide provides some amount of explanation at common customization points. Topics covered include the following.
- Deployment process overview
- Prerequisites and preparation
- A completely provisioned infrastructure in OpenStack using both manual and Heat orchestration
- Native integration with OpenStack services like Heat, Neutron, Cinder and Ceilometer
- Cinder storage for /var/lib/docker on each node
- A role assigned to instances that will allow OCP to mount Cinder volumes
- Creation of applications
- Validating the environment
- Testing failover
- Auto-scaling OpenShift nodes with Heat and Ceilometer
For this Reference Architecture, the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform service is deployed on infrastructure elements consisting of a single bastion host, three master hosts, and five node hosts that run the Docker containers, as depicted in the following diagram. The five node hosts are split into two types: two nodes running internal OpenShift services (OpenShift Router and the Local Registry), and three nodes dedicated to running the application container processes.
Deploying on Amazon Web Services
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2623521
Written by Ryan Cook and Scott Collier, this cloud provider Reference Architecture describes the best practices deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 on AWS infrastructure and demonstrates how OpenShift can be deployed with High Availability (HA) by taking advantage of the native HA capabilities of Kubernetes and AWS.
The Reference Architecture provides guidance on many topics, including the following.
- Elastic Compute Cloud Instance details
- Elast Load Balancers
- Tooling prerequisites
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Networking
- Security Groups
- Dynamic inventory
- Registry
- Authentication
- Provisioning the infrastructure using Ansible
- Validating the deployment
- Operational management
- Persistent volumes
- Extending the cluster
- Multiple OpenShift deployments
The deployment is broken up into two distinct phases:
Phase 1: Provision the infrastructure on AWS
Phase 2: Provision OpenShift Compute Platform on AWS
and builds on a configuration consisting of three OpenShift Container Platform masters, two OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure nodes, two OpenShift Container Platform application nodes, and native Amazon Web Services integration.
Deploying on Google Cloud Engine
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2751521
Written by Chris Murphy and Peter Schiffer, the cloud provider Reference Architecture focuses on a comprehensive deployment of Red Hat Container Platform 3.3 on GCE infrastructure, dividing the steps into three distinct phases.
Phase 1: Provision the infrastructure on GCE
Phase 2: Provision OpenShift Container Platform on GCE
Phase 3: Post-deployment activities
The combined phases cover a wealth of information, including:
- Configuration of GCE
- Cloud storage / Persistent volumes
- Container registry
- Cloud DNS
- Cloud Identity and Access Management
- Dynamic inventory
- Routing layer
- Authentication
- Tooling prerequisites
- Provisioning the infrastructure using Ansible
- Validating the deployment
- Operational management
- Diagnostics
The infrastructure used for this Reference Architecture, as depicted in the following diagram, consists of three OpenShift masters, two OpenShift infrastructure nodes and two OpenShift application nodes in a multi-zone environment.
Deploying on VMware vCenter
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2745171
Targeted for Systems Administrators and Systems Architects that are experienced with VMware, this Reference Architecture, written by Davis Phillips and Christoph Görn, provides a detailed explanation of deploying Red Hat Container Platform 3.3 on a private VMware vCenter 6.0 cloud. The deployment is split into different phases.
Phase 1: Provision the infrastructure on VMware using Ansible
Phase 2: Provision OpenShift Container Platform on VMware
Phase 3: Post-deployment activities (operational management tasks)
The different phases cover a broad spectrum of topics, including:
- vCenter prerequisites and configuration
- Virtual machine details
- Required software
- Tooling prerequisites
- Network components
- Dynamic inventory
- Registry
- Provisioning the infrastructure with Ansible
- Operational management
- Testing / Troubleshooting
The infrastructure configuration demonstrated in the Reference Architecture consists of three OpenShift masters, two OpenShift infrastructure nodes, two OpenShift application nodes, and native VMware integration. An overview of all architecture components is shown in the following diagram.
Conclusion
On a periodic basis, each of the Reference Architectures will get updated with current information, so continue to check back on them if you are planning a future deployment.
For any questions, concerns or feedback on the Reference Architectures mentioned here, please email refarch-feedback@redhat.com and be sure to visit the Red Hat Publications and Digital Assets for additional Reference Architectures as they are created.
Start a cloud-based container project off right and base it upon a validated Red Hat Reference Architecture. You’ll be glad you did.