OpenShift on Azure (ARO): Kubernetes’ Enterprise Version
Kubernetes ‘done right’ is pretty hard and needs well-talented people within the organization to provide a good set of integrations to make it production-ready. For that purpose, two technology giants, Microsoft and Red Hat, have put their hands together to co-develop, jointly manage and provide an enterprise version of the OpenShift Kubernetes platform called OpenShift on Azure (ARO).
ARO, standing for “Azure Red Hat OpenShift”, is an enterprise-grade, open-source platform, which permits to run container-based solutions and includes unified signup, service management, and technical support. It offers fully managed clusters, regulatory compliance with multiple standards and provides better integration with Azure services.
An overall overview of OpenShift on Azure (ARO)
ARO is provisioned with two Application Load Balancers, one for the Console/API called “Master Load Balancer” and a separate one, “Wildcard App Zone Load Balancer”, to expose the applications running as pods on top of the worker nodes. A well-hardened version of a Bastion host is also provisioned, enabling access to resources.
The whole set of nodes of the cluster, including the master, Infra and worker nodes are accessible in read-only mode by the end-user. This was enforced by Microsoft to be able to provide customers with a certain level of SLA. During the writing process of this article, ARO had a guaranteed monthly SLA of 99.9%.
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