This post was written in collaboration with Rahul Mehta, Azure Red Hat OpenShift Product Manager, Microsoft

Azure Red Hat OpenShift® (ARO) is an Azure-native, turnkey application platform with built-in and integrated tooling to help you quickly build, deploy and manage your applications at scale. And you might have heard us mention the joint Red Hat and Microsoft management and support that help you shift focus from day-to-day infrastructure maintenance to high-value innovative projects. But did you know that getting started with ARO is simple and takes only a few clicks to get your first cluster in less than 40 minutes? Using an intuitive, wizard-based approach, you can quickly deploy clusters directly through the Azure portal.

But let’s take a step back. Most users are already familiar with using CLI or ARM APIs for deploying Azure Red Hat OpenShift and some users leverage the ARM or Bicep templates. For others, deploying Azure Red Hat OpenShift through the Azure portal will simplify and perhaps even shorten the deployment process. Let’s watch a quick, 4 minute demo of setting up your first cluster in ARO so you can see the experience for yourself.

Interested in following along yourself? Here are a few quick steps to setting up your first Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

Before we begin, you should ensure that you have an Azure subscription with appropriate quota for the deployment to be successful (link to quota management) and that you prepare a service principal. You can bring your own VNET as well but here we will focus on creating a VNET through the deployment.

We will get started by logging into the Azure portal:

 

Preparing a Service Principal:

You will need to prepare a service principal for your deployment. This service principal will be used by the cluster to perform operations in Azure and will need to have contributor access to your subscription.

To create this service principal in the UI:

  • Go to active directory

  • Select App registrations

  • This will bring you to a screen allowing you to name the service principal and give it the appropriate permissions. We will select Single Tenant and we will not need a redirect URI for this SP and click register

  • The resulting screen will show you the value of the service principal. Take note of the Application ID

  • In order to be able to authenticate, we will create a secret. To do so click on the Certificates and secrets on the left hand bar:

  • We will create a new client secret by selecting New Client Secret. Once the secret is generated, make a copy of the value of the secret and store it in a safe place. This value cannot be regenerated and is the value that we will need when specifying the service principal later.

For additional details around how to create a service principal, additional documentation is located here

Start the Deployment Wizard:

Now that we have all the prerequisites prepared, we can now move forward with deploying Azure Red Hat OpenShift.

From the Search bar at the top, type in OpenShift and select Azure Red Hat OpenShift as below:

Select Create from the screen:

The first screen in the wizard allows you to select some important parameters to identify the size of the cluster that will be created. Create a new resource group by selecting “Create New” and enter a name for your cluster as well as the domain prefix you wish to select for this cluster

Select “Next: Authentication”

Authentication is where we will select the credentials which the cluster will leverage to communicate with Azure. Service Principal ID is the value that was previously referred to as the application ID and the Secret is the value that was mentioned earlier

By default, the service will create a new vnet with two subnets, one for  control plane nodes and another for  worker nodes. If you wish to have your cluster private, you can modify the toggle on the public API and ingress visibility. In this case, we are looking to have the cluster be a public cluster and will keep the default values.

The summary page will validate your values. Double check that the values are the ones you are looking to use and click on “Review+Create”.

The cluster will take about 30 minutes to deploy. Once deployed, you will be provided with an ARO API URL and kubeadmin credentials. Copy the API server URL to your browser and this will bring you to your cluster’s login page

Interested in learning more? Check out our webpage for more information.