Overview
The open source revolution and containerization have fundamentally transformed the .NET landscape. No longer confined to the Windows ecosystem, your .NET skills are now the direct path to building powerful applications directly on OpenShift.
OpenShift for .NET Developers is your essential guide to becoming a first-class citizen in the OpenShift world using your existing .NET expertise. In this e-book, Microsoft MVP Don Schenck will show you exactly how to:
- Seamlessly integrate your .NET applications into the OpenShift platform.
- Containerize your .NET code with Podman and Docker for OpenShift deployment.
- Leverage OpenShift's robust features like Routes, Operators, and scaling for your .NET workloads.
- Understand and utilize the tools that make .NET a powerful force within the OpenShift ecosystem.
- Build any application you envision, running efficiently and reliably on Red Hat OpenShift.
Your .NET skills are highly valuable on OpenShift, and this book shows you how to prove it. Don't miss out on the immense opportunities waiting for you to build and deploy high-performance .NET applications in a leading Kubernetes environment.
Excerpt
Why choose OpenShift over plain Kubernetes?
For developers, the first key feature that OpenShift offers is Source-to-Image, or S2I. This software build technology allows you to specify a Git repository (repo) from which to pull source code, and OpenShift takes care of the rest. The source code is inspected to determine the programming language, then a base image is pulled, the source code is compiled and built, and the resulting image is deployed to your OpenShift image registry. Finally, that newly deposited image is pulled (internally) and used to start a container.
This works often, but not all the time. It’s a good start, a good way to immediately get started with OpenShift. But as your development skills progress, to be honest, you won’t use S2I very often.
There can also be some .NET SDK issues when building .NET code with S2I. I’ll show this—and how to get around it—plus much more about S2I, in Chapter 6. Hint: Dockerfile.
Permissions can also be an issue because of another rather huge advantage that OpenShift brings to the table: It does not allow root access to the underlying host. OpenShift also prevents you from using the default namespace. These extra security features alone just might be worth the price of admission.
OpenShift Profiles define the level of access and security a user is granted. Using Profiles greatly simplifies what is rather complicated in Kubernetes. As a developer, you want the level of access you need and nothing more. If I don’t have access to something, I can’t break it.
And we developers, well… we know how to break stuff.
Another valuable OpenShift advantage is the inclusion of CI/CD and DevOps workflows and pipelines. Setting up a pipeline to take code from a GitHub pull request and build it is a pretty powerful move. It expands your thinking as a developer into the realm of operations, and lets you solve challenges such as “How small can I make this image?” Not gonna lie: That’s a cool challenge.
OpenShift has many other advantages over Kubernetes, but a lot of them are related to IT operations. From a developer’s point of view, S2I and pipelines are arguably the two biggest advantages.
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