Getting Started with OpenShift 3 to Accelerate Application Development
The whole point of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is to abstract complex (and repeatable) tasks away from developers, freeing them up to focus solely on application development. After all, application development is what they are best at and what is creating value for your overall business.
This means that developers should be able to provision environments on-demand, in the application languages & framework they want, and be able to integrate this in to their existing application development tooling and methods; this is exactly what OpenShift does. It also builds on this to provide operations teams with capabilities to securely and effectively manage these applications in production, at scale.
OpenShift allows developers to quickly develop, host and scale containerised applications in a cloud environment. It builds on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) & RHEL Atomic as it's base operating system, Docker as a container format and Kubernetes for container orchestration. Additionally, to providing all of these technologies pre-integrated, it provides capabilities such as:
- Self-service for developers via web console, command line interface and RESTful API
- Polyglot, Multi-language support (including .NET soon)
- Application centric networking
- Automatic self-healing and scaling of applications
- Team & Project Collaboration
- Choice of private or public cloud infrastructure
But rather than just read about it, you should try it out for yourself...
The simplest way to try out OpenShift is to take it for a "Test Drive" on AWS. The OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat Test Drive lab on Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a free, hands-on experience with tutorials. You'll even be given all the information and code you need to re-create the 2015 Red Hat Summit Keynote demo yourself!
If you want to get in a little bit deeper, then the comprehensive documentation is a great place to start, as well as a free eBook on Kubernetes, if you want to have a look at some of the technology "under the hood". There's also a stack of great new features just around the corner in the OpenShift 3.1 release. Happy tinkering!
