Automate Red Hat OpenShift cluster creation

This tutorial explains how to automate the deployment of a Red Hat® OpenShift® cluster within your IBM Cloud® account by using IBM Cloud Schematics.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is a fully managed OpenShift service that can increase your productivity by autoscaling your cluster. It also provides total control over worker node provisioning and flexibility, so you no longer worry about over- and under-provisioning your apps.

IBM Cloud Schematics is a managed Terraform solution, which delivers Terraform-as-a-Service so that you can use a high-level scripting language to model the resources that you want in your IBM Cloud environment and enable Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Prerequisites

Before starting with IBM Cloud Schematics, note the following prerequisites:

• An IBM Cloud account and sufficient permissions to create an OpenShift cluster within your account.
• The creation of an OpenShift cluster requires public and private virtual LANs.
• A GitHub account.

Estimated time

Completing this tutorial should take you about 8 minutes.

Steps

• Step 1. Codify OpenShift on IBM Cloud
• Step 2. Create a workspace in IBM Cloud Schematics
• Step 3. Create an execution plan
• Step 4. Deploy your OpenShift cluster to IBM Cloud

Step 1. Codify OpenShift on IBM Cloud

In this step, you will use the Terraform HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) format to specify the IBM Cloud resources that you want to provision in your IBM Cloud environment. With the following Terraform configuration, you are able to create an OpenShift cluster with a default worker_pool of size 1 (default_pool_size), in the zone ams03, and in region eu-de.

• Create a provider.tf file in your GitHub repository with the following provider configuration:

  variable "ibmcloud_api_key" {
    description = "Enter your IBM Cloud API, you can get your IBM Cloud API key using: https://cloud.ibm.com/iam#/apikeys"
  }
  
  provider "ibm" {
    ibmcloud_api_key = var.ibm.cloud_api_key
  }
  

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  Note: Learn more about the configuration file in the IBM Cloud Provider documentation.

• Create a file called main.tf in your GitHub repository with the following configuration for your OpenShift cluster:

    resource "ibm_container_cluster" "cluster" {
      name              = "${var.cluster_name}${random_id.name.hex}"
      datacenter        = var.datacenter
      default_pool_size = 3
      machine_type      = var.machine_type
      hardware          = var.hardware
      kube_version      = var.kube_version
      public_vlan_id    = var.public_vlan_id
      private_vlan_id   = var.private_vlan_id
    }
  

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This GitHub repo explains the template configuration which deploys the OpenShift cluster.

Step 2. Create a workspace in IBM Cloud Schematics

Follow the detailed steps for setting up your workspace in the IBM Cloud Schematics product documentation.

• On the workspace Settings page, enter the URL for your GitHub repository.

• Update the variables under the Variable section as follows:

  • datacenter
    The datacenter where you want to provision the worker nodes. The zone that you choose must be supported in the region where you want to create the cluster. To find supported zones, run the ibmcloud ks zones command. Default is wdc04.

  • machine_type
    The machine type for your worker node. The machine type determines the amount of memory, CPU, and disk space that is available to the worker node. Default is b3c.4x16.

  • hardware
    The level of hardware isolation for your worker node. Use dedicated to have available physical resources dedicated to you only, or shared to allow physical resources to be shared with other IBM customers. This option is available for virtual machine worker node flavors only. Default is shared.

  • public_vlan_id
    The ID of the public VLAN that you want to use for your worker nodes. You can retrieve the VLAN ID with the ibmcloud ks vlans --zone <zone> command.

  • private_vlan_id
    The ID of the private VLAN that you want to use for your worker nodes. You can retrieve the VLAN ID with the ibmcloud ks vlans --zone <zone> command.

  • cluster_name
    The name of the cluster. The name must start with a letter and can contain letters, numbers, and hyphens (-). It also must be 35 characters or fewer. Use a name that is unique across regions. The cluster name and the region in which the cluster is deployed form the fully qualified domain name for the Ingress subdomain. To ensure that the Ingress subdomain is unique within a region, the cluster name might be truncated and appended with a random value within the Ingress domain name. Default is iks_openshift.

  • kube_version
    The Kubernetes or OpenShift version that you want to set up in your cluster. For OpenShift clusters, you can specify version 3.11_openshift or 4.3.1_openshift. Default is 4.3_openshift .

Step 3. Create an execution plan

• Review the variables under Settings and click Generate plan to create the execution plan.

• Click on View log to review the execution plan log. The following screen capture shows an example plan.

Step 4. Deploy your OpenShift cluster to IBM Cloud

• After you review the plan, apply it by clicking Apply plan. This will deploy your OpenShift cluster on IBM Cloud.
• After the activity is completed, you can view the logs by clicking View log.

Summary

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you to learn how to automate the deployment of an OpenShift cluster on IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud Schematics is a powerful way for you to automate infrastructure deployment. With it, you can organize your IBM Cloud resources across environments by using workspaces.

You can go to the OperatorHub in your OpenShift 4.3 cluster to discover other services that are available to install in your cluster. You can also find certified software on the Red Hat Marketplace. Or you can go to OperatorHub.io for a larger list of operators that you can install manually.

Next steps

Use the open source code and instructions in the following articles and video to further understand how to deploy infrastructure with IBM Cloud Schematics:

• Article: Discover best-practice VPC configuration for application deployment
• Article: Learn about repeatable and reliable end-to-end app provisioning and configuration
• Video: Why Cloud Paks on IBM Cloud?