OpenShift for Developers, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. OpenShift Lab

You need an OpenShift cluster to complete the exercises throughout the rest of the book. This chapter explains how to run OpenShift in a virtual machine (VM) on your computer and introduces the basics of interacting with it. It also suggests other ways to access a cluster if you can’t run OpenShift locally.

OpenShift runs on your laptop, on a brigade of aging computers in the home lab of one of this book’s authors, on premises in data centers, and in public clouds. You can step through the examples in this book on any OpenShift cluster of recent vintage, meaning version 4.7 or later. If you don’t already have access to a cluster, this chapter will show you how to set up an OpenShift VM on your computer.

CodeReady Containers

For the scenarios in this book, we recommend using CodeReady Containers (CRC), an OpenShift 4 cluster that runs on your local computer in a single VM. This cluster provides a minimal environment for developing and testing purposes, including everything you need to get started.

The CRC VM is considered a minimal environment because the monitoring and machine-config operators within the cluster are disabled to conserve resources. Unfortunately, this means that all of the various performance monitoring charts within the Web Console are presented as blank space. And of course, CRC is a single-node “cluster,” so it can only emulate multinode scaling or rolling upgrades.

The CRC cluster uses an internal virtual network on your local machine. ...