Many organizations have recognized the benefits of modern cloud-native technologies and want to gradually move from legacy IT to microservices and container technology. However, public cloud providers are often unable to comply with companies’ data protection regulations, which is why an on-premises/bare-metal installation of container clusters based on Kubernetes or OpenShift in their own data center is an attractive option for them. It can also be decided immediately whether the container platforms are connected to the Internet or are installed completely isolated offline as a result of security requirements.

While enterprise container platforms such as RedHat OpenShift, SUSE CaaSP, Docker EE or Rancher bring a fully automated installer with them, a number of manual steps are required to prepare the installation and subsequent configuration of the container platforms. With the help of modern configuration management tools such as Puppet and Ansible, these steps can be automated according to the “Infrastructure as Code” principle. Automation brings standardization and reproducibility, allowing multiple container platforms to be rolled out with a simple command-line command, or a container cluster to be uninstalled and restarted with a single command.

This presentation focuses on the use case of performing an offline, On-Premises/Baremetal installation of an OpenShift container platform and implementing the necessary automation to provision individual hosts and configure the container cluster.