OpenShift v3 launched a year and a half ago and during this time we’ve been looking at different ways to run a local OpenShift development environment on the developer’s laptop. In this series of articles I will be introducing the options we have been providing and most importantly, I will describe the evolution in our approach.. But before digging into any particular solution, we need to set the ground rules of what a local development environment is and why it is important.

In this blog, I’m going to describe what are my requirements when looking for a way to develop locally using OpenShift, and I’ll describe a tool I have created to help me with this workflow. First of all, I have to say that I’m not only a developer, so maybe the workflow I’m looking for is too complex, so I’m still experimenting to refine not only the workflow but also the tooling.

In a real world, your applications will be transitioning from environment to environment, from development to testing and into production, as part of their lifecycle. In a container world, applications are assembled into one or many container images, hence what will be promoted are images. In this blog I will demonstrate the concepts we learnt about externalizing configuration in your image promotion scenarios. As Veer has previously showed, OpenShift is a platform where we can easily model the concept of stages/environments per application, and we can promote an application (image) from environment to environment just by tagging it accordingly in the project.

Kubernetes 1.2, released more than a month ago, has brought many interesting additions to the Kubernetes platform, but there’s one, that relates to configuration management, that’s especially relevant for application developers, this is ConfigMap. In this blog entry I will share some experiences and tips on using ConfigMap that goes beyond what one of our engineers and Kubernetes contributor, Paul Morie, recently blogged about it. We will take advantage of this new feature in a real application that we will be promoting through different environments, from development through testing into production.

We launched OpenShift 3.0 back in June 2015 and I have had the pleasure of speaking with users all over Europe and the EMEA region to help them get up and running with deploying applications on the platform. One of the features that developers and administrator often ask questions about are Service Accounts and Security Context Constraints. In this blog post, I will provide a simple introduction into both concepts, how they work and their usage.