Quick and Simplified Red Hat Openshift Cluster 4.3 Install on AWS

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KUBELANCER PRIVATE LIMITED

6 min readMay 1, 2020

Openshift Kubernetes Engine, its just rename of Openshift Container Platform as of 27 April 2020, Red Hat has decided for better communicate based on the value the product offering delivers.
No change on install or download, we can install Openshift Kubernetes Engine the same way as Openshift Container Platform as both are them same binary distribution.
Openshift Kubernetes Engine has designed to use for enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment and by the way it is easy to install on Cloud, On-Premise or Laptop.
Openshift Kubernetes Engine comes with different installation types for different platforms like AWS, Azure, Bare-metal and Vmware. In this post I have simplified the process of bootstrapping your first Openshift Container Platform 4.3 cluster on AWS Infrastructure from scratch.
Openshift Container Platform 4.3 uses ignition-based deployment, Yes, its a new approach defined on version 4.2 to getting your Kubernetes cluster operational which gives us the fully-automated experience with just 1 command, that deploy a complete Openshift 4 cluster.

This Quick Start Post sets up a AWS cloud Infrastructure and deploys Red Hat Openshift Container Platform 4.3 on AWS cloud.
Am writing this article for someone setting out to install an Openshift Container Platform 4.3 cluster, could assume this documentation will help you.

Let’s start!!!, The deployment process includes these steps:

Step 1: Accounts Sign Up

If you don’t already have an AWS account and Red Hat account, create it first.
Sign up for a Red Hat subscription https://www.redhat.com/wapps/ugc/register.html
Sign Up AWS account https://aws.amazon.com

Step 2: Configuring your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account

Step 2.1: Configuring Route53

To install Openshift Container Platform, we must need a dedicated public hosted zone in your Route53 service, this provides cluster DNS resolution and name lookup for external connections to the cluster.

Step 2.2: AWS account limits

since the Openshift Container Platform cluster uses a number of Amazon Web Services (AWS) components, ensure have enough services limits like VPC, EIP etc.

Step 2.3. Creating an IAM user

Each Amazon Web Services (AWS) account contains a root user account that is based on the email address you used to create the account.
Other than default, Here we created new IAM user name ‘ospuser’ with Programmatic access and attached the AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy. (Download the Access and Secret Key)

IAM added user Access and Secret Access Key

Step 3: Setup Jump server or Local Machine (Linux)

This Jump server mine on AWS EC2 machine with Red hat AMI which act as management server will help to perform AWS CLI and Openshift installer and CLI tasks.

Step 3.1: Install the AWS CLI version 1 on Linux

Link: https://aws.amazon.com/cli/

$ sudo yum install python3 -y
$ sudo python get-pip.py --user
$ sudo cp -rf .local/bin/* /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo pip3 install awscli upgrade --user
$ sudo cp .local/bin/aws /usr/local/bin/ ; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/aws
$ sudo aws --version

aws cli tool

Step 3.2: Generating an SSH private key and adding it to the agent

$ sudo ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -N ‘’ -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
$ sudo eval “$(ssh-agent -s)”
$ sudo ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Step 3.3 AWS Configure

Configure the AWS CLI tool with IAM user name ‘ospuser’ account ID with Access and Secret Key (created and downloaded on Step 2.3).

$ sudo aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAV62DSXXXXXXX
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: AcpxFM2YVJ0XXXXXXXXX
Default region name [None]: us-east-2
Default output format [None]: json

aws configure using IAM user Access and Secret Access Key with AWS Region

Step 4: Download Openshift installer and client CLI binaries and add them to your PATH

Next, Obtaining the installation program https://cloud.redhat.com/openshift/install, download and extract the install program on Jump server or Local machine in the root directory of user.

Select Red Hat Openshift Container Platform

Select Installer-provisioned infrastructure

Step 4.1: Download Openshift installer

$ sudo curl -O https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/ocp/latest/openshift-install-linux.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -xvzf openshift-install-linux.tar.gz
$ sudo cp -rf openshift-install /usr/local/bin/openshift-install ; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/openshift-install

Step 4.2: Pull secret

Download or copy pull secret from https://cloud.redhat.com/openshift/install . The install program will prompt you for your pull secret during installation.

Step 4.3: Download Command-line interface

Download the Openshift command-line tools to manage cluster after installed.

$ sudo curl -O https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/ocp/latest/openshift-client-linux.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -xvzf openshift-client-linux.tar.gz
$ sudo cp -rf oc /usr/local/bin/oc ; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/oc ; cp -rf kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Command-line interface download using curl

Step: 4 Deploy the Openshift cluster 4.3

Great, Now our environment ready for Openshift cluster installation on AWS Cloud Infrastructure.
It will be quick and simplified process, openshift-install CLI initially create a Bootstrap EC2 instance which deploy 3 Master and 3 Worker nodes instances. Once process completed Bootstrap instance will terminate automatically.

Step 4.1: Create a directory to store installation files

$sudo mkdir ./oscdir

Step 4.2: Create Cluster

$ sudo openshift-install create cluster --dir=./oscdir

The Pull Secret is one of the values we need to specify during the installation process. Obtain from installation program page https://cloud.redhat.com/openshift/install

That’s it, only 1 command :), Deployment will complete in approximately 30 to 60 mins.

Step 5: Access your cluster

You are now ready to access your Openshift Cluster 4.3 through the browser (or command-line interface).

For Command-line cluster access, you can log into your cluster as a default system user by exporting the cluster kubeconfig file:

export KUBECONFIG=<installation_directory>/auth/kubeconfig

Access your cluster through browser by using web-console link got after the installation with default username and password on install completion screen.