Have you ever developed applications on a platform like Red Hat OpenShift? I’m a Java developer with more than 15 years of coding experience, and while I’ve been working with OpenShift for over three years now, I never found it easy to use or compelling as a day to day development platform. Why? There are many reasons to this question, but the key ones are, complexity and speed. Before you call me a troll, allow me to explain.

OpenShift admins choose different architectures for their installations, but many use two discrete clusters to physically divide development and testing workloads from production deployments. We recommend having some Continuous Integration (CI) process in nearly every development scenario, to orchestrate the lifecycle of applications from the initial commit all the way into production. Continuous Integration can imply many different tasks related to application development, testing, and releases. In this article, I won’t directly address whether one should do Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment, as that depends on the maturity and complexity of the organization and the application.

If you’ve heard of minishift, the OpenShift environment for your laptop, or if you’re using the Container Development Kit (CDK) at work, you’re probably building applications on the OpenShift Container Platform. This post is for you. If you’re new to OpenShift and these names aren’t familiar yet, check out the this other minishift blog first to get the most value from the content below. Upgrades: The Wisdom of Impermanence Developers often ask how minishift installations should be upgraded.

For some time I’ve been hearing about Helm and have been asked by people how they could deploy into OpenShift applications defined as Charts, the format Helm uses to package an application. One of the really nice features that minishift >= 1.2.0 introduced was the concept of an addon which is a way to provide additional capabilities to your minishift local environment. As this feature is really interesting, and evolving really nicely, I have developed some addons that allow me to extend my minishift capabilities by issuing a single command.

One of my biggest interests is how to make local development experience with OpenShift as easy as possible. I’m constantly exploring what needs to be enhanced to our current experience as I develop applications for OpenShift very frequently. I work hard to understand developers requirements and eventually provide solutions in the tooling we provide. I use to incubate ideas in a project my team owns, oc-cluster-wrapper. I work very close with our engineering teams to solve these use cases in “oc cluster” or “minishift” depending on the nature of the problem, as even if they both can stand up an OpenShift all-in-one instance for local development, they both have different goals.