Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes

Chapter 1. Kubernetes and OpenShift Overview

Over the past few years, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard platform for managing, orchestrating, and provisioning container-based cloud native computing applications. Cloud native computing applications are essentially applications that are built from a collection of smaller services (microservices) and take advantage of the speed of development and scalability capabilities that cloud computing environments typically provide. Over time, Kubernetes has matured to provide the controls required to manage even more advanced and stateful workloads, such as databases and AI services. The Kubernetes ecosystem continues to experience explosive growth, and the project benefits greatly from being a multiple-vendor and meritocracy-based open source project backed by a solid governance policy and a level playing field for contributing.

Although many Kubernetes distributions are available for customers to choose from, the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes distribution is of particular interest. OpenShift has achieved broad adoption across a variety of industries; over one thousand enterprise customers across the globe currently use it to host their business applications and drive their digital transformation efforts.

This book focuses on enabling you to become an expert at running both traditional Kubernetes and the OpenShift distribution of Kubernetes in production environments. In this first chapter, we begin with a broad overview of ...