For customers coming from OpenShift 3, one thing that gets noticed right away is the change in consoles. While the Administrator perspective is analgous to the cluster console in 3.11, what happened to the default console which was the bread and butter experience for developers?

The good news is that in OpenShift 4 there is a new Developer perspective which provides an alternative experience tailored specifically for Developers out of a unified console. The Developer perspective features include providing a topology view giving an at-a-glance overview of applications in the namespace as well as the ability to quickly add new applications from a variety of sources such as git, container images, templates, helm charts, operators and more.

In this blog we will examine some of these new features and discuss how you can get the most out of the capabilities available in the Developer perspective. While the OpenShift documentation does cover many of these and I will link to the docs when needed, I think it’s worthwhile to review them in a concise form in order to understand the art of the possible with respect to empowering Developers in the OpenShift console.

Many of these features can be accessed by regular users, however some do require cluster-admin rights to use and are intended for a cluster administrator to provision on behalf of their developer community. Cluster administrators can choose the features that make sense for their developers providing an optimal experience based on their organizations requirements.

Labels and Annotations in the Topology View

The topology view provides an overview of the application, it enables users to understand the composition of the application at a glance by depicting the component resource object (Deployment, DeploymentConfig, StatefulSet, etc), component health, the runtime used, relationships to other resources and more.

The OpenShift Documentation on topology goes into great detail on this view however it focuses on using it from a GUI perspective and only mentions anecdotally at the end how how it is powered. Thus I would like to cover this in more detail since in many cases our manifests are stored and managed in git repos rather then in the console itself.

In short, how the topology view is rendered is determined by the labels and annotations on your resource objects. The labels and annotations that are available are defined in this git repo here. These annotations and labels, which are applied to the three Deployments, DeployConfigs, etc, are a mix of recommended kubernetes labels (https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/working-with-objects/common-labels) as well as new OpenShift recommended labels and annotations to drive the topology view.

An example of these labels and annotations can be seen in the following diagram:

using this image as an example, we can see the client component is using the Node.js runtime and makes calls to the server component. The metadata for the client Deployment that causes this to be rendered in this way is as follows:

metadata:
  name: client
  annotations:
    app.openshift.io/connects-to: server
    app.openshift.io/vcs-ref: master
    app.openshift.io/vcs-uri: 'https://github.com/gnunn-gitops/product-catalog-client'
  labels:
    app: client
    app.kubernetes.io/name: client
    app.kubernetes.io/component: frontend
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: client
    app.openshift.io/runtime: nodejs
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: product-catalog

The key labels and annotations that are being used in this example are as follows:

A complete list of all of the labels and annotations can be found here.

Pinning Common Searches

In the Developer perspective the view is deliberately simplified from the Administrator perspective to focus specifically on the needs of the Developer. However predicting those needs is always difficult and as a result it’s not uncommon for users to need to find additional Resources.

To enable this, the Developer perspective provides the Search capability which enables you to find any Resource in OpenShift quickly and easily. As per the image below, highlighted in red, it also has a feature tucked away in the upper right side called “Add to Navigation”, if you click that your search gets added to the menubar on the left.

This is great for items you may commonly look for, instead of having to repeat the search over and over you can just bookmark it into the UI. Essentially once you click that button, the search, in this case for Persistent Volume Claims, will appear in the bar on the left as per below.

CodeReady Workspaces

CodeReady Workspaces (CRW) is included in OpenShift and it provides an IDE in a browser, I typically describe it as “Visual Studio Code on the web”. While it’s easy to install, the installation is done via an operator so it does require a cluster administrator to make it available.

The real power of CRW in my opinion is the ability to have the complete stack with all of the tools and technologies needed to work effectively on the application. No longer does the developer need to spend days setting up his laptop, instead simply create a devfile.yaml in the root of your git repository and it will configure CRW to use the stack appropriate for the application. Clicking on the CodeReady Workspaces icon in the Developer Topology view will open up a workspace with everything ready to go based on the devfile.yaml in the repo.

In short, one click takes you from this:

To this:

In my consulting days setting up my workstation for the application I was working on was often the bane of my existence involving following some hand-written and often outdated instructions, this would have made my life so much easier.

Now it should noted that running an IDE in OpenShift does require additional compute resources on the cluster, however personally I feel the benefits of this tool make it a worthwhile trade-off.

The OpenShift documentation does a great job of covering this feature so have a look there for detailed information.

Adding your own Helm Charts

In OpenShift 4.6 a new feature has been added which permits you to add your organization’s Helm Charts to the developer console through the use of the HelmChartRepository object. This enables developers using the platform to access the Helm Chart through the Developer Console and quickly instantiate the chart using a GUI driven approach.

Unfortunately, unlike OpenShift templates which can be added to the cluster globally or to specific namespaces, the HelmChartRepository object is cluster scoped only and does require a cluster administrator to use. As a result this feature is currently intended to be used by the cluster administrators to provide a curated set of helm charts for the platform user base as a whole.

An example HelmChartRepository is shown below:

apiVersion: helm.openshift.io/v1beta1
kind: HelmChartRepository
metadata:
  name: demo-helm-charts
spec:
  connectionConfig:
    url: 'https://gnunn-gitops.github.io/helm-charts'
  name: Demo Helm Charts

When this is added to an OpenShift cluster, the single chart in that repo, Product Catalog, appears in the Developer Console as per below and can be instantiated by developers as needed. The console will automatically display the latest version of that chart.

If you add a json schema (values.schema.json) to your Helm chart, as per this example, the OpenShift console can render a form in the GUI for users to fill out without having to directly deal with yaml.

If you are looking for a tutorial on how to create a Helm repo, I found the one here, “Create a public Helm chart repository with GitHub Pages”, quite good.

Adding Links to the Console

In many organizations it’s quite common to have a broad eco-system surrounding your own OpenShift cluster such as wikis, enterprise registries, third-party tools, etc to support your platform users. The OpenShift console enables a cluster administrator to add additional links to the console in various parts of the user interface to make it easy for your users to discover and navigate to the additional information and tools.

The available locations for ConsoleLink include:

• ApplicationMenu – Places the item in the application menu as per the image below. In this image we have custom ConsoleLink items for ArgoCD (GitOps tool) and Quay (Enterprise Registry).

  

• HelpMenu – Places the item in the OpenShift help menu (aka the question mark). In the image below we have a ConsoleLink that takes us to the ArgoCD documentation.

  

• UserMenu – Inserts the link into the User menu which is in the top right hand side of the OpenShift console.
• NamespaceDashboard – Inserts the link into the Project dashboard for the selected namespaces.

A great blog entry that covered console links, as well as other console customizations, can be found on the OpenShift Blog.

Web Terminal

This one is a little more bleeding edge as this is currently in Technical Preview, however a newer feature in OpenShift is the ability to integrate a web terminal into the OpenShift console. This enables developers to bring up a CLI whenever they need it without having to have the oc binary on hand. The terminal is automatically logged into OpenShift using the same user that is in the console.

The Web Terminal installs as an operator into the OpenShift cluster so again requiring a cluster admin to install it. Creating an instance of the web terminal once the operator is installed is easily done through the use of a CR:

apiVersion: workspace.devfile.io/v1alpha1
kind: DevWorkspace
metadata:
  name: web-terminal
  labels:
    console.openshift.io/terminal: 'true'
  annotations:
    controller.devfile.io/restricted-access: 'true'
  namespace: openshift-operators
spec:
  routingClass: web-terminal
  started: true
  template:
    components:
      - plugin:
          id: redhat-developer/web-terminal/4.5.0
          name: web-terminal

While this is Technical Preview and not recommended for Production usage, it is something to keep an eye on as it moves towards GA.

In this article we will look at how to build Scala applications in OpenShift. While Scala is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) language, applications written in Scala typically use a build tool called SBT (https://www.scala-sbt.org) which is not currently supported by OpenShift. However the great thing about OpenShift is that it is extensible and adding support for Scala applications is very straightforward as will be shown in this article.

As a quick level set, when building and deploying applications for OpenShift there are typically three options available as follows:

• Source-To-Image. This is a capability available in OpenShift via builder images that enable developers to simply point a builder to a git repository and have the application compiled with an image created automatically by the platform.
• Jenkins Pipeline. In this scenario we leverage Jenkins to create a pipeline for our application and use an appropriate build agent (i.e. slave) for our technology. Out of the box OpenShift includes agents for Maven and Nodejs but not Scala/SBT.
• Build the container image outside of OpenShift and push the resulting image into the internal OpenShift registry. This is essentially treating the platform as a Container-As-A-Service (CaaS) rather then leveraging the Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) capabilities available in OpenShift.

All of the above approaches are perfectly valid and the choice enterprises make in this regard are typically driven by a variety of factors including technology used, toolset and organizational requirements.

For the purposes of this article I am going to focus on building Scala applications using the second option, Jenkins Pipelines which is typically my preferred approach for production applications. Note that this option is not exclusive of Option 1, you can certainly use S2I in a Jenkins pipeline to build your application from source. However I do prefer using a build agent simply because there are a variety of activities (code scanning, pushing to repository, pre-processing, etc) that need to be performed as part of the build process that can often be application specific and a build agent simply gives us more flexibility in this regard.

Additionally I typically recommend to my customers to use Red Hat’s JDK image whenever possible in order to benefit from the support that is provided as part of an OpenShift (or RHEL) subscription. With a build agent this is a natural activity as part of the pipeline, with S2I you would need to use build chaining which isn’t quite as straightforward. Having said that, if you are interested in the S2I approach an example of creating an S2I enabled image is available here and it works well.

Creating the build agent

In OpenShift the provided Jenkins image includes the Jenkins kubernetes-plugin. This plugin enables Jenkins to spin up build agents in the Kubernetes environment as needed to support builds. Separate and distinct build agents are typically used to support different technologies and build tools. As mentioned previously, OpenShift includes two build agents, Maven and Node.js, but does not provide a build agent for Scala or SBT.

Fortunately creating our own build agent is quite easy to do since OpenShift provides a base image to inherit from. If using the open source version of OpenShift, OKD, you can use the base image openshift/jenkins-slave-base-centos7 whereas if using the enterprise version of OpenShift I would recommend using the rhel7 version openshift/jenkins-slave-base-rhel7.

In this example we will use the centos7 version of the image. To create the agent image we need to create a Dockerfile defining the image, our example uses the Dockerfile below. This Dockerfile is also available in the github repo sbt-slave.

FROM openshift/jenkins-slave-base-centos7
MAINTAINER Gerald Nunn <gnunn@redhat.com>
 
ENV SBT_VERSION 1.2.6
ENV SCALA_VERSION 2.12.7
ENV IVY_DIR=/var/cache/.ivy2
ENV SBT_DIR=/var/cache/.sbt
 
USER root
 
RUN INSTALL_PKGS="sbt-$SBT_VERSION" \
 && curl -s https://bintray.com/sbt/rpm/rpm > bintray-sbt-rpm.repo \
 && mv bintray-sbt-rpm.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/ \
 && yum install -y --enablerepo=centosplus $INSTALL_PKGS \
 && rpm -V $INSTALL_PKGS \
 && yum install -y https://downloads.lightbend.com/scala/$SCALA_VERSION/scala-$SCALA_VERSION.rpm \
 && yum clean all -y
 
USER 1001

Notice that this image defines environment variables for the Scala and SBT versions. While the image is built with specific versions pre-loaded, SBT will automatically use the version specified in your build if it differs. To build the image, use the following command:

docker build . -t jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7

After building the image, you can view the image as follows:

$ docker images | grep jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7
 
jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7                                          latest              d2a60298e18d        6 weeks ago         1.23GB

Next we need to make the image available to OpenShift, one option is to directly push it into your OpenShift registry. Another option is to push it into an external registry which is what we will do here by pushing the image into Docker Hub. Note you will need an account on Docker Hub in order to do this. The first step to push the image into Docker Hub (or other registry) is to tag the image with the repository. My repository in Docker Hub is gnunn so that is what I am using here, your repository will be different so please change gnunn to the name of your repository.

docker tag jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7:latest gnunn/jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7:latest

After that we can now push the image, again change gnunn to the name of your repository:

docker push gnunn/jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7:latest

Building the Application in OpenShift

At this point we are almost ready to start building our Scala application. The first thing we need to do is create a project in OpenShift for the example. We can do that using the example below calling the project scala-example.

oc new-project scala-example

Next we need to configure Jenkins to be aware of our new agent image. This can be done in a couple of different ways. The easiest but most manual way is to simply login into Jenkins and update the Kubernetes plugin to add this new agent image via the Jenkins console.

However I’m not a fan of this approach since it is manual and requires the Jenkins configuration to be updated every time a new instance of Jenkins is deployed. A better approach is to update the configuration via a configmap which the Kubernetes plugin in Jenkins will use to set it’s configuration. An example configmap is shown below:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  labels:
    app: cicd-pipeline
    role: jenkins-slave
  name: jenkins-slaves
data:
  sbt-template: |-
    <org.csanchez.jenkins.plugins.kubernetes.PodTemplate>
      <inheritFrom></inheritFrom>
      <name>sbt</name>
      <privileged>false</privileged>
      <alwaysPullImage>false</alwaysPullImage>
      <instanceCap>2147483647</instanceCap>
      <idleMinutes>0</idleMinutes>
      <label>sbt</label>
      <serviceAccount>jenkins</serviceAccount>
      <nodeSelector></nodeSelector>
      <customWorkspaceVolumeEnabled>false</customWorkspaceVolumeEnabled>
      <workspaceVolume class="org.csanchez.jenkins.plugins.kubernetes.volumes.workspace.EmptyDirWorkspaceVolume">
        <memory>false</memory>
      </workspaceVolume>
      <volumes />
      <containers>
        <org.csanchez.jenkins.plugins.kubernetes.ContainerTemplate>
          <name>jnlp</name>
          <image>docker.io/gnunn/jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7</image>
          <privileged>false</privileged>
          <alwaysPullImage>false</alwaysPullImage>
          <workingDir>/tmp</workingDir>
          <command></command>
          <args>${computer.jnlpmac} ${computer.name}</args>
          <ttyEnabled>false</ttyEnabled>
          <resourceRequestCpu>200m</resourceRequestCpu>
          <resourceRequestMemory>512Mi</resourceRequestMemory>
          <resourceLimitCpu>2</resourceLimitCpu>
          <resourceLimitMemory>4Gi</resourceLimitMemory>
          <envVars/>
        </org.csanchez.jenkins.plugins.kubernetes.ContainerTemplate>
      </containers>
      <envVars/>
      <annotations/>
      <imagePullSecrets/>
    </org.csanchez.jenkins.plugins.kubernetes.PodTemplate>

Please note this line in the configuration:

<image>docker.io/gnunn/jenkins-slave-sbt-centos7</image>

The reference here will need to be updated for the registry and repository where you pushed the image. If you are using Docker Hub, again change gnunn to your repository. Once you have updated that line, save it into a file called jenkins-slaves.yaml. We can then add the configmap to our project in OpenShift using the following command:

oc create -f jenkins-slaves.yaml

In order to test the build process we are going to need an application. I’ve forked a simple Scala microservice application to the github repo akka-http-microservice. I’ve made some minor modifications to it, notably updating the versions of Scala and SBT as well as adding the assembly plugin to create a fat jar.

First we will create a new build-config that the pipeline will use to feed the generated Scala artifact into the Red Hat JDK image. This build-config will still use source-to-image but will do so using a binary build since we will have already have built the Scala JAR file using our build agent.

If you are using Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, you can create the build using the existing Java S2I image that Red Hat provides:

oc new-build redhat-openjdk18-openshift:1.2 --name=scala-example --binary=true

If you are using the opensource OpenShift OKD where the above image is not available, you can use the Fabric8 opensource Java S2I image.

oc create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnunn1/openshift-notes/master/fabric8-s2i-java/imagestream.yaml
oc new-build fabric8-s2i-java:3.0-java8 --name=scala-example --binary=true

Next we create a new application around the build, expose it to the outside word via a route and disable triggers since we want the pipeline to control the deployment:

oc new-app scala-example --allow-missing-imagestream-tags
oc expose dc scala-example --port=9000
oc expose svc scala-example
oc set triggers dc scala-example --containers='scala-example' --from-image='scala-example:latest' --manual=true

Note we specify --allow-missing-imagestream-tags because no images have been created at this point and thus the imagestream has no tags associated with it.

Now we need to create an OpenShift pipeline with a corresponding pipeline in a Jenkins file, below is the pipeline this example will be using.

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: BuildConfig
metadata:
  annotations:
    pipeline.alpha.openshift.io/uses: '[{"name": "jenkins", "namespace": "", "kind": "DeploymentConfig"}]'
  labels:
    app: scala-example
    name: scala-example
  name: scala-example-pipeline
spec:
  triggers:
    - type: GitHub
      github:
        secret: secret101
    - type: Generic
      generic:
        secret: secret101
  runPolicy: Serial
  source:
    type: Git
    git:
      uri: 'https://github.com/gnunn1/akka-http-microservice'
      ref: master
  strategy:
    jenkinsPipelineStrategy:
      jenkinsfilePath: Jenkinsfile
    type: JenkinsPipeline

Save the pipeline as pipeline.yaml and then create it in OpenShift using the following command, a Jenkins instance will be deployed automatically when you create the pipeline:

cc create -f pipeline.yaml

Note that the pipeline above is referencing a Jenkinsfile that is included in the source repository in git, you can view it here. This Jenkins file contains a simple pipeline that simply compiles the application, creates the image and then deploys it. For simplicity in this example we will do it all in the same project where the pipeline lives but typically you would deploy the application into separate projects representing individual environments (DEV, QA, PROD, etc) and not in the same project as Jenkins and the pipeline.

At this point you can now build the application, got to the Builds > Pipelines menu on the left and select the scala-example-pipeline and click the Start Pipeline button.

At this point the pipeline will start though it may take a couple of minutes to start and perform all of it’s tasks so be patient, however once the pipeline is complete you will see the application running.

Once the pipeline is complete the application should be running and can be tested, to do so click on the route. You will see an error because the service doesn’t expose a service at the context root, add /ip/8.8.8.8 at the end of the URL and you should see a response as per below.

From time to time I have customers expressing interest in running WebLogic on OpenShift. Having worked extensively with WebLogic in my previous career as an Oracle consultant, it’s immediately obvious that there are a number of copmplexities in getting the WebLogic domain structure working in a dynamic environment like OpenShift or Kubernetes. To Oracle’s credit, they are working on this and have written an article “WebLogic on Kubernetes, Try It!” with an example based on the Oracle docker images.

This post will discuss the basic steps needed to get this working in OpenShift. While OpenShift is based on Kubernetes, there are some differences particularly around security that require some tweaks. Additionally, the article and associated sample has some issues associated with it that I wanted to cover.

The instructions in the article are clear for the most part, here are the items that require tweaking to work:

a. Before you create the docker image in the wls-12213-domain directory, you will need to edit the file container-scripts/provision-domain.py. This file creates the managed servers ahead of time to support the statefulset, however it creates the listen address as ms-X.wls-subdomain.default.svc.cluster.local. The issue here is that it is hard-coding the default namespace which means you would need to deploy this sample in the default project in OpenShift. In theory, changing it to ms-X.wls-subdomain should work, however it did not for me and I need to investigate further. For now, I changed default to weblogic and deployed the sample into a weblogic project.

b. I also had an issue creating the docker file with the chown failing, see the issue I opened here for a workaround.

c. When creating the docker file, the sample implies you can select an admin user but you can’t. Just use the default weblogic admin user.

d. The Oracle docker images must be run as the Oracle user. OpenShift by default disallows images running as specific users, therefore a service account must be created to grant the anyuid scc.

oc create serviceaccount weblogic
oc adm policy add-scc-to-user anyuid -z weblogic

e. The wls-admin-webhook.yml and wls-stateful.yml files need to be updated to use the weblogic service account:

spec:
containers:
...
serviceAccount: weblogic
serviceAccountName: weblogic

f. The sample exposes the services using NodePort which should work in OpenShift, however I ended up creating routes as follows:

oc expose svc wls-admin-server
oc expose svc wls-service

g. If you are not familiar with WebLogic, to access the web console use the wls-admin-server route and add /console to the end of it. The username will be weblogic and the password whatever you selected.

Obviously the Oracle work is just a sample and a number of things would need to happen to operationalize it. The biggest IMHO is not having to hardcode the OpenShift namespaces the image will be running in. I’m hoping to resolve this as I play around with it further.