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Getting started

Once you get access to your ARI&Snet environment, please head over to console.arisnet.ac.at and log in with your credentials.

Tip

You can, of course, use ARI&Snet using only the graphical console, but for the best results it is worth using the command line interface and permanently storing the YAML manifests outside the ARI&Snet system. We will provide you with a git repository for this purpose. This guide will assume you intend to use the command line tool and that you have at least some experience with Kubernetes. If you would like to use the graphical user interface, please read the OpenShift manual.

Downloading the Command Line Tools

To work with ARI&Snet, you will need a few tools. You can download these tools by heading to the top right corner of the console and clicking the question mark item, then selecting the "Command Line Tools" option.

For this guide, you will need the oc command line tool, which is available for most modern operating systems. This tool is functionally identical to the kubectl tool from vanilla Kubernetes, but contains some OpenShift-specific functionality.

Please download this tool to a location on your computer that is within your path environment variable:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/oc
curl -o - https://downloads-openshift-console.arisnet.ac.at/amd64/linux/oc.tar | sudo tar xvC /opt/oc
sudo ln -s /opt/oc/oc /usr/local/bin/oc

sudo mkdir -p /opt/oc
curl -o - https://downloads-openshift-console.arisnet.ac.at/arm64/linux/oc.tar | sudo tar xvC /opt/oc
sudo ln -s /opt/oc/oc /usr/local/bin/oc

Download the oc binary, unpack it, then open System Properties ➝ Advanced ➝ Environment Variables... and edit the Path environment variable to include the location of the oc binary.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/oc
curl -o /tmp/oc.zip https://downloads-openshift-console.arisnet.ac.at/arm64/mac/oc.zip
cd /opt/oc
sudo unzip /tmp/oc.zip
rm /tmp/oc.zip
sudo ln -s /opt/oc/oc /usr/local/bin/oc

sudo mkdir -p /opt/oc
curl -o /tmp/oc.zip https://downloads-openshift-console.arisnet.ac.at/amd64/mac/oc.zip
cd /opt/oc
sudo unzip /tmp/oc.zip
rm /tmp/oc.zip
sudo ln -s /opt/oc/oc /usr/local/bin/oc

Linking the oc tool to ARI&Snet

Now that you have oc installed, you will need to link it to ARI&Snet.

Note

This process will modify your ~/.kube/config file. If you have other Kubernetes clusters configured, you may need to change contexts using kubectl config use-context after you are done working on ARI&Snet.

Click on your username in the top right corner and select "Copy login command", then click "Display Token". ARI&Snet will display the command you will need to run in order to link your oc command line tool to ARI&Snet.

Differences to vanilla Kubernetes and other noteworthy concerns

If you have deployed your applications on Kubernetes before, there are a few key differences you need to observe when deploying on the ARI&Snet cluster. These are:

  1. In ARI&Snet, you will get access to individual Kubernetes namespaces for your applications. However, we are unable to grant you cluster admin rights as ARI&Snet is a shared infrastructure. Should you need more permissions than granted by default, please contact us through the developer support channel.
  2. You must declare resource requests for your pods. Declaring limits is optional. The ARI&Snet cluster guarantees that the requested resources will always be available for your application. However, keep in mind that most administrative applications do not need CPU all the time, so it may be best to set a low CPU request number.
  3. Your applications cannot run as the root user. Most images on Docker Hub and other registries run as root, so you may not be able to use these images.
  4. By default, the ARI&Snet cluster runs your pods under a random user ID. This can be relaxed to a fixed, non-root user should you need it.
  5. ARI&Snet, by default, only offers Read-Write-Once storage volumes. This means, that you can only access each data volume from one component of your application. We strongly recommend using the included S3-compatible storage, or co-locating components within one pod. If neither of these solutions are viable, we can enable Read-Write-Many storage for your application for low-volume access only. (Read-Write-Many causes is exceptionally expensive to run and can affect cluster stability for read and write volumes, which is why it is disabled by default.)
  6. ARI&Snet has a regular maintenance window every Tuesday morning. Individual cluster nodes may go down during this period for upgrades. Your application should be built in a redundant fashion to avoid outages during cluster maintenance.
  7. Image pulls from Docker Hub and GitHub may be rate limited. To avoid delays in deployment or outages due to failed image pulls, we recommend not using the :latest image tag or the ImagePullPolicy: Always option.

Next

If you are familiar with Kubernetes, please read the manual on deploying your application. For a quick introduction to Kubernetes, please read our Kubernetes primer.