Azure Red Hat OpenShift at a glance

Kubernetes ‘done right’ is pretty hard and needs well-talented people within the organization to provide a good set of integrations to make it production-ready. For that purpose, two technology giants, Microsoft and Red Hat, have put their hands together to co-develop, jointly manage and provide an enterprise version of the OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

What is ARO?

ARO, standing for “Azure Red Hat OpenShift”, is an enterprise-grade, open-source platform, which permits to run container-based solutions and includes unified signup, service management and technical support. It offers fully managed clusters, regulatory compliance with multiple standards and provides better integration with Azure services.

Looking at the bigger picture

Let’s go a bit more into detail and check out ARO’s architecture and what it provides to end-users.

An overall overview of ARO

ARO is provisioned with two Application Load Balancers, one for the Console/API called “Master Load Balancer” and a separate one, “Wildcard App Zone Load Balancer”, to expose the applications running as pods on top of the worker nodes.

The whole set of Azure resources and OpenShift nodes of the cluster, including the master, Infra and worker nodes are accessible in Read-Only mode. This was enforced by Microsoft to be able to provide customers with a certain level of SLA. During the writing-process of this article, ARO…