Tutorial: What is ROSA

In ROSA, everything you need to deploy and manage containers is bundled, including container management, Operators, networking, load balancing, service mesh, CI/CD, firewall, monitoring, registry, authentication, and authorization capabilities. These components are tested together for unified operations as a complete platform. Automated cluster operations, including over-the-air platform upgrades, further enhance your Kubernetes experience.

In general, cluster deployment and upkeep is Red Hat’s or AWS’s responsibility, while applications, users, and data is the customer’s responsibility. For a more detailed breakdown of responsibilities, see the responsibility matrix.

Visit the ROSA roadmap to stay up-to-date with the status of features currently in development. Open a new issue if you have any suggestions for the product team.

Refer to the product regional availability page for an up-to-date view of where ROSA is available.

ROSA is currently compliant with SOC-2 type 2, SOC 3, ISO-27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS. We are also currently working towards FedRAMP High.

A ROSA customer’s administrator can manage users and quotas in addition to accessing all user-created projects.

ROSA is a managed service which is based on OpenShift Container Platform. You can view the current version and life cycle dates in the ROSA documentation.

Customers can upgrade to the newest version of OpenShift and use the features from that version of OpenShift. For more information, see life cycle dates. Not all OpenShift features are be available on ROSA. Review the service Definition for more information.

You can open a ticket directly from the OpenShift Cluster Manager. See the ROSA support documentation for more details about obtaining support.

You can also visit the Red Hat Customer Portal to search or browse through the Red Hat knowledge base of articles and solutions relating to Red Hat products or submit a support case to Red Hat Support.

Refer to the ROSA SLA page for details.

Red Hat will provide notifications regarding new Red Hat and AWS features, updates, and scheduled maintenance through email and the Hybrid Cloud Console service log.

You can use OSBA with ROSA. However, the preferred method is the more recent AWS Controller for Kubernetes. See Open service Broker for AWS for more information on OSBA.

Customers can stop using ROSA at any time and move their applications to on-premise, a private cloud, or other cloud providers. Standard reserved instances (RI) policy applies for unused RI.

ROSA supports the following authentication mechanisms: OpenID Connect (a profile of OAuth2), Google OAuth, GitHub OAuth, GitLab, and LDAP.

All SRE cluster access is secured by MFA. See SRE access for more details.

ROSA uses several different cloud services such as virtual machines, storage, and load balancers. You can see a defined list in the AWS prerequisites.

There are two credential methods to grant Red Hat the permissions needed to perform the required actions in your AWS account: AWS with STS or an IAM user with admin permissions. AWS with STS is the preferred method, and the IAM user method will eventually be deprecated. AWS with STS better aligns with the principles of least privilege and secure practices in cloud service resource management.

Check for a newer version of the ROSA CLI. Every release of the ROSA CLI is located in two places: Github and the Red Hat signed binary releases.

Refer to the storage section of the service definition.

OpenShift includes the CSI driver for AWS EFS. For more information, see Setting up AWS EFS for Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS.

At installation you can select to deploy to an existing VPC or bring your own VPC. You can then select the required subnets and provide a valid CIDR range that encompasses the subnets for the installation program when using those subnets.

ROSA allows multiple clusters to share the same VPC. The number of clusters on one VPC is limited by the remaining AWS resource quota and CIDR ranges that cannot overlap. See CIDR Range Definitions for more information.

ROSA uses the OpenShift OVN-Kubernetes default CNI network provider.

Cluster admins can customize, and deny, cross-namespace on a project basis using NetworkPolicy objects. Refer to Configuring multitenant isolation with network policy for more information.

You can use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor containers and manage capacity using OpenShift User Workload Monitoring. This is a check-box option in the OpenShift Cluster Manager.

If the Cluster Logging Operator Add-on has been added to the cluster then audit logs are available through CloudWatch. If it has not, then a support request would allow you to request some audit logs. Small targeted and time-boxed logs can be requested for export and sent to a customer. The selection of audit logs available are at the discretion of SRE in the category of platform security and compliance. Requests for exports of a cluster’s entirety of logs will be rejected.

You can use an AWS Permissions Boundary around the policies for your cluster.

ROSA worker nodes use a different AMI from OSD and OpenShift Container Platform. Control Plane and Infra node AMIs are common across products in the same version.

ROSA STS clusters do not have backups. Users must have their own backup policies for applications and data. See our backup policy for more information.

You can define a custom domain for your applications. See Configuring custom domains for applications for more information.

Red Hat infrastructure (Hive) manages certificate rotation for default application ingress.

ROSA does not support an air-gapped, disconnected environment. The ROSA cluster must have egress to the internet to access our registry, S3, and send metrics. The service requires a number of egress endpoints. Ingress can be limited to a PrivateLink for Red Hat SREs and a VPN for customer access.