{product-title} provides enterprise-ready enhancements to Kubernetes, including the following enhancements:
-
Integrated Red Hat technology. Major components in {product-title} come from {op-system-base-full} and related Red Hat technologies. {product-title} benefits from the intense testing and certification initiatives for Red Hat’s enterprise quality software.
-
Open source development model. Development is completed in the open, and the source code is available from public software repositories. This open collaboration fosters rapid innovation and development.
Although Kubernetes excels at managing your applications, it does not specify or manage platform-level requirements or deployment processes. Powerful and flexible platform management tools and processes are important benefits that {product-title} {product-version} offers. The following sections describe some unique features and benefits of {product-title}.
{product-title} uses {op-system-first}, a container-oriented operating system that combines some of the best features and functions of the CoreOS and Red Hat Atomic Host operating systems. {op-system} is specifically designed for running containerized applications from {product-title} and works with new tools to provide fast installation, Operator-based management, and simplified upgrades.
{op-system} includes:
-
Ignition, which {product-title} uses as a firstboot system configuration for initially bringing up and configuring machines.
-
CRI-O, a Kubernetes native container runtime implementation that integrates closely with the operating system to deliver an efficient and optimized Kubernetes experience. CRI-O provides facilities for running, stopping, and restarting containers. It fully replaces the Docker Container Engine , which was used in {product-title} 3.
-
Kubelet, the primary node agent for Kubernetes that is responsible for launching and monitoring containers.
In {product-title} {product-version}, you must use {op-system} for all control plane machines, but you can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the operating system for compute machines, which are also known as worker machines. If you choose to use RHEL workers, you must perform more system maintenance than if you use {op-system} for all of the cluster machines.
With {product-title} {product-version}, if you have an account with the right permissions, you can deploy a production cluster in supported clouds by running a single command and providing a few values. You can also customize your cloud installation or install your cluster in your data center if you use a supported platform.
For clusters that use {op-system} for all machines, updating, or upgrading, {product-title} is a simple, highly-automated process. Because {product-title} completely controls the systems and services that run on each machine, including the operating system itself, from a central control plane, upgrades are designed to become automatic events. If your cluster contains RHEL worker machines, the control plane benefits from the streamlined update process, but you must perform more tasks to upgrade the RHEL machines.
Operators are both the fundamental unit of the {product-title} {product-version} code base and a convenient way to deploy applications and software components for your applications to use. In {product-title}, Operators serve as the platform foundation and remove the need for manual upgrades of operating systems and control plane applications. {product-title} Operators such as the Cluster Version Operator and Machine Config Operator allow simplified, cluster-wide management of those critical components.
Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) and the OperatorHub provide facilities for storing and distributing Operators to people developing and deploying applications.
The Red Hat Quay Container Registry is a Quay.io container registry that serves most of the container images and Operators to {product-title} clusters. Quay.io is a public registry version of Red Hat Quay that stores millions of images and tags.
Other enhancements to Kubernetes in {product-title} include improvements in
software defined networking (SDN), authentication, log aggregation, monitoring,
and routing. {product-title} also offers a comprehensive web console and the
custom OpenShift CLI (oc) interface.
