OpenShift Container Platform architecture

Containers use small, dedicated Linux operating systems without a kernel. Their 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.

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.

Similarly, scaling containerized applications is simple. OpenShift Container Platform offers a simple, standard way of scaling any containerized service. For example, if you build applications as a set of microservices rather than large, monolithic applications, you can scale the individual microservices individually to meet demand. This capability allows you to scale only the required services instead of the entire application, which can allow you to meet application demands while using minimal resources.

OpenShift Container Platform uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), a new container-oriented operating system that combines some of the best features and functions of the CoreOS and Red Hat Atomic Host operating systems. RHCOS is specifically designed for running containerized applications from OpenShift Container Platform and works with new tools to provide fast installation, Operator-based management, and simplified upgrades.

RHCOS includes:

In OpenShift Container Platform 4.1, you must use RHCOS for all control plane machines, but you can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the operating system for compute machines, which are also known as worker machines. If you choose to use RHEL workers, you must perform more system maintenance than if you use RHCOS for all of the cluster machines.

With OpenShift Container Platform 4.1, if you have an account with the right permissions, you can deploy a production cluster in supported clouds by running a single command and providing a few values. You can also customize your cloud installation or install your cluster in your data center if you use a supported platform.

For clusters that use RHCOS for all machines, updating, or upgrading, OpenShift Container Platform is a simple, highly-automated process. Because OpenShift Container Platform completely controls the systems and services that run on each machine, including the operating system itself, from a central control plane, upgrades are designed to become automatic events. If your cluster contains RHEL worker machines, the control plane benefits from the streamlined update process, but you must perform more tasks to upgrade the RHEL machines.

Operators are both the fundamental unit of the OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 code base and a convenient way to deploy applications and software components for your applications to use. By using Operators as the platform foundation, OpenShift Container Platform replace manual upgrades of operating systems and control plane applications. OpenShift Container Platform Operators such as the Cluster Version Operator and Machine Config Operator allow simplified, cluster-wide management of those critical components.

Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) and the OperatorHub provide facilities for storing and distributing Operators to people developing and deploying applications.

CRI-O Container Engine is the streamlined container engine that is is developed in tandem with Kubernetes releases and provides facilities for running, stopping, and restarting containers. It fully replaces the Docker Container Engine in OpenShift Container Platform 4.1.

The Red Hat Quay Container Registry is a Quay.io container registry that serves most of the container images and Operators to OpenShift Container Platform clusters. Quay.io is a public registry version of Red Hat Quay that stores millions of images and tags.

Other enhancements to Kubernetes in OpenShift Container Platform include improvements in software defined networking (SDN), authentication, log aggregation, monitoring, and routing. OpenShift Container Platform also offers a comprehensive web console and the custom OpenShift CLI (oc) interface.

The following figure illustrates the basic OpenShift Container Platform lifecycle:

With OpenShift Container Platform 4.1, the core story remains unchanged: OpenShift Container Platform offers your developers a set of tools to evolve their applications under operational oversight and using Kubernetes to provide application infrastructure. The key change to OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 is that the infrastructure and its management are flexible, automated, and self-managing.

A major difference between OpenShift Container Platform 3 and OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 is that OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 uses Operators as both the fundamental unit of the product and an option for easily deploying and managing utilities that your apps use.