openshift

Note: Please note that the Tower Operator this post references is currently in early alpha status, and has no official support from Red Hat. If you are planning on using Tower for production and have a Red Hat Ansible Automation subscription, you should use one of the official Tower installation methods. Someday the operator may become a supported install method, but it is not right now.

I have been building a variety of Kubernetes Operators using the Operator SDK. Operators make managing applications in Kubernetes (and OpenShift/OCP) clusters very easy, because you can capture the entire application lifecycle in the Operator's logic.

I've been working a bit with Red Hat lately, and one of the products that has intrigued me is their OpenShift Kubernetes platform; it's kind of like Kubernetes, but made to be more palatable and UI-driven... at least that's my initial take after taking it for a spin both using Minishift (which works with OpenShift 3.x), and CRC (which works with OpenShift 4.x).

Because it took me a bit of time to figure out a few details in testing things with OpenShift 4.1 and CRC, I thought I'd write up a blog post detailing my learning process. It might help someone else who wants to get things going locally!

CRC System Requirements

First things first, you need a decent workstation to run OpenShift 4. The minimum requirements are 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, and 35 GB disk space. And even with that, I constantly saw HyperKit (the VM backend CRC uses) consuming 100-200% CPU and 12+ GB of RAM (sheesh!).