OpenShift in five minutes

Welcome to OpenShift BT Workshop

OpenShift is Red Hat's platform for running containers, built directly on top of Kubernetes, the open-source engine that decides where containers run and keeps them alive. Kubernetes gives you that engine; OpenShift adds the parts most teams end up building themselves anyway: a way to go from source code to a running container without writing a Dockerfile, a web console, sensible security defaults, and a public URL for every app you deploy. This workshop runs on OKD, the free, community-built version of OpenShift, same concepts, same commands, nothing to license.

See what to prepare

Your trainers

The people running this workshop and answering questions along the way.

Daniel Mandea

Digital Architect

Mihai David

DevOps

Horia Apostol

DevOps

Iulian Sabo

Cloud Architect

How it fits together

Same Kubernetes underneath, but OpenShift wires up the pieces most teams end up building themselves anyway.

From code to a running app

This is the one pipeline you'll run over and over, in every exercise:

Git repo→Build→Container image→Deployment→Route→Browser

Inside the cluster

Once deployed, four things keep your app running and reachable:

Control plane

Watches the cluster's desired state and keeps making it real, scheduling Pods, restarting failures, reconciling everything else on this page.

API ServeretcdScheduler & Controllers

Worker nodes

Your Pods actually run here, spread across as many nodes as the cluster has. This is the thing the Deployment step above creates.

PodPodPod

Router

Turns a Route into a real, public URL the moment you create it. Terminates TLS and forwards each request to the right Pod.

Registry

Every image the Build step produces lands here. Worker nodes pull from it the moment a Pod gets scheduled.

What makes OpenShift special

Kubernetes gives you the scheduler. This is everything OpenShift adds on top of it.

No Dockerfile needed

Source-to-Image builds straight from your git repo. The platform picks the right builder image and produces a container for you.

A public URL, every time

Expose a Route and OpenShift wires up a real hostname and TLS certificate automatically, no separate Ingress config to write.

Secure by default

Pods run as a random non-root UID unless you explicitly opt out, closing a whole class of container escapes vanilla Kubernetes leaves open.

A real web console

Every object you'd otherwise manage with YAML has a page in the console, built for developers and cluster admins alike.

Operators do the busywork

Install a database or a monitoring stack as an Operator and it upgrades and heals itself, instead of you babysitting it.

GitOps built in

Argo CD ships as a first-class citizen: describe your desired state in git, and the cluster keeps converging to match it.

One registry, no extra hosting

Every image you build lands in an integrated registry, no separate Docker Hub or ECR account required.

Projects keep teams apart

Namespaces get OpenShift's Project abstraction: quotas, RBAC and network policy defaults applied consistently per team.