Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes
This section provides a brief overview of the foundational concepts behind Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes.
Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes is:
- A collection of runtimes, such as Thorntail and Spring Boot, designed to run on OpenShift.
- A prescriptive approach to cloud-native development on OpenShift.
The goal of Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes is to provide prescriptive architectures, design patterns, tools, and best practices in ready-made example applications that you can execute on OpenShift to enable cloud-native development.
Cloud-native Development
Cloud-native development is an approach to developing, deploying, and running applications that take full advantage of cloud computing.
OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is a container application platform that brings Docker and Kubernetes to the enterprise. OpenShift Online is a public cloud hosted by Red Hat. A Single-node OpenShift Cluster is a local cloud that you can install and execute on your local machine; this functionality is provided for example by Red Hat Container Development Kit or Minishift.
developers.redhat.com/launch
developers.redhat.com/launch is a project generator offered by Red Hat to accelerate your experience with cloud-native development on OpenShift. It provides a hassle-free way of creating example applications, called boosters, as well as an easy way to build and deploy those boosters to OpenShift. To use developers.redhat.com/launch:
- Navigate to developers.redhat.com/launch.
- Choose the details for your example application.
- Deploy application to OpenShift automatically or manually.
You can find more details on using developers.redhat.com/launch in the Chapter 2, Deploying a booster to OpenShift Online section.
The Fabric8 Launcher Tool
The Fabric8 Launcher is the upstream project from which developers.redhat.com/launch is based.
You can also install and execute the Fabric8 Launcher tool on your Single-node OpenShift Cluster to use the same capabilities within your Single-node OpenShift Cluster. For more information, see the Installing the Fabric8 Launcher Tool chapter of the Install and Configure the Fabric8 Launcher Tool guide.
Missions and Boosters
A mission implements a Microservice pattern such as:
- Health Check
- REST or HTTP endpoint
- Externalized Configuration
- Circuit Breaker
Missions use these patterns to show how to create the fundamental building blocks of cloud-native applications and services, such as:
- Creating HTTP APIs.
- Integrating your application with a relational database to provide persistent data storage.
- Implementing the health check and circuit-breaker patterns to ensure that your services can withstand a traffic overload and network issues.
- Externalizing the configuration of your applications to make them more secure and easier to scale.
Each mission is implemented in one or more runtimes. Both the specific implementation and the actual project that contains your code are called a booster. Any booster can be updated or extended for your own use case.
Process for Building and Deploying to OpenShift
When using developers.redhat.com/launch, you can create and deploy a booster to OpenShift using the Build and Deploy to OpenShift build process, which is based on the Source-to-Image (S2I) build process. Build and Deploy to OpenShift configures OpenShift to pull the code of your booster from your GitHub repository, build the code, and deploy it to OpenShift.
The benefit of this process is that it handles all the configuration, building, and deployment steps needed to get your booster running in OpenShift. It also allows you to quickly deploy code updates and see your changes in OpenShift.
OpenShift supports different build strategies including Source-to-Image and Jenkins Pipeline. The Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes boosters use the Source-to-Image strategy for simplicity of use and implementation. Other build strategies, such as the Jenkins Pipeline, are more complex, for example employing multiple servers for building or using webhooks to trigger builds.
Boosters created using the Build and Deploy to OpenShift build process can also be executed locally, as well as built locally and manually deployed to OpenShift. For more information on these options, see the README.adoc file of your booster.
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