A Comprehensive List of Public OpenShift Resources

[CJTV]

Hey RHA Community!

With OpenShift being as popular as ever and DO180 (The Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift Class)  entering our stage, you may be looking for ways to learn about OpenShift on your own. I recently finished taking DO180 and at the end of the class the instructor provided us with an awesome list of publicly available resources to play around with. In this post I’ll go through some of the things I was given and what you can do to jump on the OpenShift train! There are a few other threads that were made on this topic but I wanted to make a fresh one for RHA that provided a more comprehensive list of available resources.

---

Open Source OpenShift:

The first resource I’ll go over is basically the “CentOs” of Openshift. ODK, previously known as OpenShift Origin, is the origin community edition of Kubernetes that powers OpenShift. So if you want to deploy “OpenShift” but you don’t want to commit to buying the full fat OpenShift with all of the enterprise-level support then this is what you want.
ODK Homepage

Personal OpenShift Sandbox:

It’s no secret that deploying your own cloud cluster is tough and I’m sure that many of you would just rather have something that’s easy to setup and just gives you a sandbox to play around in. This is where Minishift comes in. Minishift is and ODK single-node cluster that you can deploy locally in a vm on your laptop or desktop. It’s very simple to setup and can be done on Windows, Mac, or Linux using Hypervisors like Hyper-V, xhyve, KVM or Virtualbox.
Minishift Homepage

OpenShift Interactive Learning:

Next on our list is a Red Hat offering. Let’s say you just want to get your feet wet or want some sort of guided exercises for you or a class to go through. Well there’s something for that too. Here you can run through a bunch of different modules and learn more about what OpenShift is and how to use it and again all for free.
OpenShift Interactive Learning Portal

RedHat Hosted OpenShift Trials:

Maybe you already know a little bit about OpenShift and you want to go and experiment with running some apps on fully deployed OpenShift environment. Well you’d be looking for an OpenShift trial. In this area you have two options:
The first give you unlimited access to small OpenShift environment. This option is extremely popular right now so you may struggle to get any hardware provisioned for you but this is the perfect place for individual experimentation.
The next option is a 30-day trial of OpenShift pro tier. Here you can actually deploy apps to production and get the full professional experience for 30 days. After the trial ends rates start at $50 a month for this tier but again this is for a full production-ready cloud-hosted system.
OpenShift Trial

More OpenShift Resources:

You can’t forget the official OpenShift youtube channel and documentation but there are also many awesome guides walkthroughs out there. Some of my favorites are:

• Deploying Multi-Container Applications with Ansible Service Broker
• OpenShift V3 Deep Dive Tutorial

Underlying Technologies: Docker and Kubernetes

So these are some of the public resources out there to learn about OpenShift. If you want to learn about some of OpenShift’s underlying technologies like Docker and Kubernetes they are very well documented and you will definitely do well by going to their respective websites.

---

It’s almost surprising how many resources there are for learning OpenShift but it makes sense with how popular it’s become. I’m sure I left a few things off this list that are awesome resources so be sure to let me and any others on this thread know in the comments. I’ll be updating this post with anything you guys find. I want to thank my Instructor Easwara Periyathamby for and awesome DO180 class and all of these great resources. I hope they can be as helpful for you guys as they have been for me.