OpenShift Administration (GL280)

Course Duration

4 Days

Audience

Employees of federal, state and local governments; and businesses working with the government.

Prerequisites

Solid knowledge of Kubernetes concepts including Pods, Deployments, Services, and namespaces. GL275 (Kubernetes Administration) or equivalent hands-on Kubernetes experience strongly recommended. GL120 (Linux Fundamentals) or equivalent Linux command-line proficiency required. Familiarity with container images, registries, and YAML object manifests is expected.

Course Description

Build production-ready OpenShift administration skills across the full cluster operations stack. Students progress from architecture review and cluster installation through authentication, security hardening, application lifecycle management, advanced scheduling, autoscaling, and production observability, gaining the expertise to operate OpenShift Container Platform clusters at scale. Key topics include OpenShift 4.x installation on AWS with IPI and UPI methods, identity providers and OAuth, Role-Based Access Control, Security Context Constraints, advanced scheduling with affinity and taints, Horizontal Pod Autoscalers and ClusterAutoscaler, EFK logging, and Prometheus-based monitoring with Grafana. Like all Guru Labs courses, the material is designed to provide extensive hands-on experience, with 17 labs on live OpenShift clusters reinforcing the day-2 operations skills cluster administrators rely on.

Learning Objectives

• Describe OpenShift and Kubernetes cluster architecture including control plane components, RHCOS nodes, and Operator-managed infrastructure.
• Configure cluster authentication using htpasswd identity providers, OAuth, kubeconfig files, and service accounts.
• Implement Role-Based Access Control with Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, and ClusterRoleBindings.
• Manage Security Context Constraints and admission controllers to enforce pod security policies.
• Deploy and manage applications using Deployments, ReplicaSets, rolling updates, and Pod Disruption Budgets.
• Configure pod health checks using startup, liveness, and readiness probes.
• Control pod scheduling with resource requests, limits, node and pod affinity rules, taints, and tolerations.
• Plan cluster capacity including control plane sizing, network CIDR allocation, and etcd performance tuning.
• Scale clusters using Horizontal Pod Autoscalers, MachineSets, MachineHealthChecks, and ClusterAutoscalers.
• Enforce organizational standards using labels, annotations, and Gatekeeper policy-based admission control.
• Deploy and operate the EFK logging stack with Elasticsearch, Fluentd, Kibana, and ClusterLogForwarder audit log management.
• Monitor cluster health using Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos Querier, ServiceMonitors, and custom application metrics.

Course Outline

• Core Concept Review
• Installation and Authentication
• Security
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Scheduling
• Scaling
• Logging, Monitoring, Alerting

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