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🔴 Red Hat OpenShift Components (Explained Clearly)

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Since you're already working with AWS infra, think of OpenShift as a managed Kubernetes control system with extra enterprise layers.

🏗️ 1️⃣ Control Plane (Master Nodes)

The brain of the cluster.

Built on top of Kubernetes

Core Kubernetes Components:

Component Purpose
API Server Entry point to cluster
Scheduler Decides where Pods run
Controller Manager Maintains desired state
etcd Cluster database

OpenShift adds:

  • Authentication server
  • Web Console
  • RBAC management
  • Security policies

🖥️ 2️⃣ Worker Nodes

Where your applications run.

Each worker node contains:

  • kubelet
  • kube-proxy
  • Container runtime (CRI-O)
  • Pods (your apps)

Example: Your Medical backend container runs inside a Pod → inside Worker Node.

🌐 3️⃣ Routing Layer (OpenShift Feature)

Instead of Kubernetes Ingress, OpenShift uses:

👉 Routes

  • Exposes services to external world
  • Uses HAProxy router internally
  • Auto generates public URL

Example:

backend-medical.apps.sandbox.openshift.com

📦 4️⃣ Image Management

OpenShift has built-in image handling.

ImageStreams

  • Track container images
  • Auto redeploy when new image pushed

Internal Registry

  • Stores built images inside cluster

This is powerful for CI/CD.

🏗️ 5️⃣ Build System

OpenShift supports:

BuildConfig

Build container images directly from:

  • GitHub repo
  • Dockerfile
  • Source code

No external Docker needed.

🔐 6️⃣ Security Components (Very Important)

OpenShift is stricter than Kubernetes.

  • Security Context Constraints (SCC)
  • RBAC
  • OAuth authentication
  • Project isolation

Containers don’t run as root by default (important interview point).

🔁 7️⃣ CI/CD (Pipelines)

Built using:

Tekton

OpenShift Pipelines allows:

  • Git → Build → Deploy automation
  • Full DevOps workflow inside cluster

🗄️ 8️⃣ Storage Layer

Supports:

  • Persistent Volumes (PV)
  • Persistent Volume Claims (PVC)
  • Dynamic provisioning
  • Cloud storage integration (EBS, Azure Disk, etc.)

🎯 Complete Component Flow

User → Route → Service → Pod → Worker Node Control Plane manages everything.

🔥 Interview Summary (Very Important)

OpenShift Components include:

  1. Control Plane (API server, Scheduler, etcd)
  2. Worker Nodes
  3. Routes
  4. ImageStreams
  5. BuildConfigs
  6. Internal Registry
  7. Security (SCC, RBAC)
  8. Pipelines (Tekton)