chapter0.md

Introduction

In this lab, we are going to leverage a process known as oc cluster up. This enables us to quickly stand up a local OpenShift Container Platform to start our evaluation. The key result of oc cluster up is a reliable, reproducible OpenShift environment to iterate on.

Expected completion: 5-10 minutes

Find your AWS Instance

This lab is designed for to accomodate many students. Each student will be given a VM running on AWS. The naming convention for the lab is:

student-<number>.rhte.sysdeseng.com

You will be assigned a number by the instructor.

Retrieve the key from the instructor host so that you can SSH into the instances by accessing the password protected directory from the table above. Download the rhte.pem file to your local machine and change the permissions of the file to 600.

Connecting to your AWS Instance

This lab should be performed on YOUR ASSIGNED AWS INSTANCE as ec2-user unless otherwise instructed.

NOTE: Please be respectful and only connect to your assigned instance. Every instance for this lab uses the same public key so you could accidentally (or with malicious intent) connect to the wrong system. If you have any issues please inform an instructor.

$ ssh -i aws-key.pem ec2-user@student-<number>.rhte.sysdeseng.com

NOTE: For Windows users you will have to use a terminal like PuTTY to SSH using the private key. You will need to download the key and convert it using PuTTYGen, for details see: PuTTY Configuration

Getting Set Up

For the sake of time, some of the required setup has already been taken care of on your AWS VM. For future reference though, the easiest way to get started is to head over to the OpenShift Origin repo on github and follow the "cluster up and down instructions" instructions. The instructions cover getting started on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Since some of these labs will have long running processes, it is recommended to use something like tmux or screen in case you lose your connection at some point so you can reconnect:

$ sudo yum -y install screen
$ screen

In case you get disconnected use screen -x to reattach once you reestablish ssh connectivity.

All that's left to do is run OpenShift by executing the start-oc.sh script in your home directory. First, let's take a look at what this script is doing, it's grabbing AWS instance metadata so that it can conifigure OpenShift to start up properly on AWS:

$ cat ~/start-oc.sh

Now, let's start our local, containerized OpenShift environment:

$ ~/start-oc.sh

The resulting output should be something of this nature

   The server is accessible via web console at:
       https://<public-hostname>:8443

   You are logged in as:
       User:     developer
       Password: developer

You should get a lot of feedback about the launch of OpenShift. As long as you don't get any errors you are in good shape.

OK, so now that OpenShift is available, let's ask for a cluster status & take a look at our running containers:

$ oc cluster status
$ docker ps
$ docker images

We can also check out the OpenShift console. Open a browser and navigate to https://<public-hostname>:8443. Once it loads (and you bypass the certificate error), you can log in to the console using the default developer username/password.

Lab Materials

Clone the lab repository from github:

$ cd ~/
$ git clone https://github.com/tchughesiv/aws-loft-2017-container-lab

OpenShift Container Platform

What is OpenShift? OpenShift, which you may remember as a "PaaS" to build applications on, has evolved into a complete container platform based on Kubernetes. If you remember the "DIY Cartridges" from older versions of Openshift, essentially, OpenShift v3 has expanded the functionality to provide complete containers. With OpenShift, you can build from a platform, build from scratch, whatever you can do in a container, and still get the complete lifecycle automation you loved in the older versions.

You are now ready to move on to the next lab.