OKD4 - Public Release Is Here

The OKD Working Group is pleased to announce a public release of OKD4, the community version of Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes.

Red Hat reaffirms its commitment to open source and open collaboration with the Kubernetes development communities and other cloud-based initiatives.

The origins of OKD

When Red Hat first launched Origin as an open source upstream version of OpenShift in April 2012, it was hard to imagine how fast and successful the development of cloud-based technologies would be. The following years will be remembered for the rise of containers, the creation of OCI and Fedora CoreOS, and the recent move of the Operator Framework under the CNCF roof. Without these innovative technologies and the communities in which they were created, the emergence of OKD4 would not have been possible.

At the time of release of the third version, OKD acted as a stable foundation for the OpenShift Container Platform, playing the role of an upstream distribution based on community components such as CentOS, Project Atomic and others. With the advent of Universal Base Image, the relationship between OKD and OCP has changed: the upstream-downstream format has been replaced by what we call “sibling distributions”. Images are now based on RHEL7 and can be distributed simultaneously for both OKD and OCP without any rebuilding. As a result, it allows both distributions to receive updates, including RHEL7 security fixes, and also provides a stable base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

OpenShift 4.x focuses on high availability, observability, and seamless upgrade. With the release of OKD 4, the community not only gains automatic access to these features, but also the ability to influence the development of the platform (through the repository improvement process), as well as a space for experimentation, discussion and knowledge sharing. The Operators pattern, widely used in OKD 4, allows users to efficiently maintain clusters throughout their lifecycle.

Release features

OKD4 uses Fedora CoreOS as the base OS for its nodes, providing a cluster with the latest security fixes, new features (like cgroups v2), and updated software. OKD4 uses the same images as the corresponding version of the OpenShift Container Platform. Therefore, the community can fully participate in the development of the system and modify any part of the cluster to achieve certain goals.

At the same time, the cluster retains its familiar OKD3 features: it can be installed in the user environment, configured to your liking and updated.

How OKD differs from OCP

OKD4 has a number of important differences from OCP:

First, as a community distribution, it does not need a pull secret from the site https://openshift.com/try… All OKD4 images are available without additional authentication. Basic OS image for OKD4 is downloaded from the site https://getfedora.org/en/coreos/download/… However, for some optional operators from the site operatorhub.io The pull secret is still required, so by default OKD4 installs the source code only with community operators, see details. FAQ…

Second, OCP is a distinct Kubernetes distribution with a focus on high availability and production workloads. Hence the limitations on cluster configuration – for example, single master configurations are not supported. In turn, OKD4 easily allows you to create such configurations for the same development or test stage environments. Although such clusters cannot then be upgraded to the next version.

New OKD4 nightly releases are created after OCP is tested under our CI system. Every two weeks, we will be moving the nightly release to the stable channel so that users can get updates to the latest and tested code without switching channels.

How to get started with OKD4

OKD4 installs as easily as OCP4, see manual for instructions Getting started…

OKD documentation is available on the website docs.okd.io

You can report bugs on the OKD Github Repo at https://github.com/openshift/okd

Technical support is provided here: # openshift-users channel on Kubernetes Slack

Already using OKD?

In this case, please take five minutes to fill out the questionnaire. OKD Adoptionto help the OKD team plan the future development of the project and better understand the nature of the workloads it applies to!

Get involved in work

On the community site OKD.io you can download the latest release, see the key upstream projects we are working on, get to know our end users and the workloads that OKD is used for, and find links to the latest resources.

OKD Working Group meets twice a week to discuss the current status and next steps of development. Meeting times and locations are tracked in the openshift / community repo.

The agenda and details of upcoming meetings can be found here: https://github.com/openshift/community/projects/1

Russian-speaking community of OpenShift in Telegram:
https://t.me/ru_openshift

Join our ranks

OpenShift Commons community counts over 590 participating organizationswho are collaborating on OpenShift. The community is open to everyone: users, operators, businesses, startups, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, partners and service providers.