Red Hat Marketplace gives you a single place to easily buy and deploy container-based softwares across clouds. To try out software from Red Hat Marketplace, developers need to have a Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

This tutorial shows you how to create a free trial version of an OpenShift cluster that you can register with Red Hat Marketplace for easy install of purchases and trials.

*A free trial version of OpenShift is valid for 2 months. This tutorial demonstrates installing the OpenShift cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This free version of OpenShift supports AWS and Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. Infrastructure costs might incur separately.

Prerequisites

An AWS Account is required to complete this tutorial.

Estimated time

Completing this tutorial should take about 30 minutes.

Step 1: Create an OpenShift IAM user in AWS

In order for the OpenShift installer to access your AWS infrastructure, you need to create an infrastructure and access management (IAM) user called osdCcsAdmin within the AWS account.

The IAM user needs at least programmatic accesss enable. This user must have the AdministratorAccess policy attached to it. In order to enable this, follow these steps:

Navigate to the Identity and Access Management (IAM) page in your AWS console.
Under Access management, click Users.
Create a new user named osdCcsAdmin by selecting the AWS access types as follows:
- Programmatic access
- AWS Management Console access
Create a user group to manage permissions for osdCcsAdmin. Enable AdministratorAccess and create the group.
Select the recently created user group to proceed.
Optionally, you can add Tags.
Review the details and create a user.
After successfully creating osdCcsAdmin IAM User, you need to select Download CSV. Future steps require the Access Key ID and the Secret Access key that's captured in the CSV.
Also make a note of your Account ID because you will need it in upcoming steps.

At this point, you have successfully created:

IAM user osdCcsAdmin with required permissions
AWS access ID, AWS account key ID, and AWS secret access key credentials

Your next step is to sign up for Red Hat OpenShift.

Create a Red Hat account to get started. Start here.
If you already have an OpenShift account, log in to get started.

Note: Red Hat provides the free trial of OpenShift (not AWS), which is why you need to create a Red Hat account.

Step 3: Deploy a free trial of OpenShift on AWS

After signing in to your Red Hat account, navigate to Create OpenShift cluster. Under Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated Trial, click Create trial cluster.
Under Select an Infrastructure Provider, select Run on Amazon Web Services.
View and accept the Terms and Conditions.
Afterc you accept the Terms and Conditions, enter the AWS access ID, AWS account key ID, and AWS secret access key credentials copied in Step 1. Select the Bypass AWS Service Control Policy (SCP) checks.

Note: If SCP check is not bypassed, the installation may fail.
Select Scale, Networking, Monitoring, Cluster updates and Node draining settings as required.
Click on Create cluster. This starts deploying the cluster on AWS.

Note: It may take about 30 to 45 minutes to provision VPC and EC2 instances on AWS and deploy OpenShift on it.
After the cluster is deployed, you will see a message that reads "Cluster installed successfully".

Note: The OpenShift cluster is free for 2 months. However, the worker nodes, instance type, VPC, and other infrastructure costs might incur separately.

Once the OpenShift cluster is deployed, you need to add an Identity provider to allow users to log in to OpenShift Console.

image of an openshift cluster success message

Summary

This tutorial showed you how to get a free OpenShift cluster on AWS infrastructure. Now you can access operators on Red Hat Marketplace

Once you have your Cluster registered with Red Hat Marketplace, you can deploy and try any Operator from Red Hat Marketplace. You can also quick start by referring to technical content to start using certified software on Red Hat OpenShift.

Read examples of using operators from the Red Hat Marketplace.

Create a Red Hat OpenShift trial cluster on Amazon Web Services

Create a Red Hat OpenShift trial cluster on Amazon Web Services