Designing applications to run effectively on container orchestration platforms like OpenShift involves adhering to several key principles. By following these design principles, you can develop applications that are well-suited for deployment and management on container orchestration platforms like OpenShift, maximising their scalability, reliability, and maintainability:
Microservices Architecture: Break down your application into smaller, loosely coupled services. This allows for easier management, scaling, and updating of individual components within the application.
Statelessness: Design your application components to be stateless whenever possible. Store session state and other persistent data in external data stores or databases. This ensures that instances of your application can be easily scaled up or down without losing important state information.
Containerization: Package your application components and their dependencies into lightweight, portable containers. This ensures consistency across different environments and simplifies deployment on OpenShift.
Service Discovery and Load Balancing: Use service discovery mechanisms provided by OpenShift, such as Kubernetes Services, to allow components to discover and communicate with each other dynamically. Use built-in load balancers to distribute traffic evenly across multiple instances of your application.
Health Checks and Self-Healing: Implement health checks within your application components to allow OpenShift to monitor their health status. Configure auto-scaling and self-healing features to automatically replace or restart unhealthy instances, ensuring high availability and reliability.
Configuration Management: Externalize configuration settings from your application code and manage them using environment variables or configuration files. This allows you to easily configure your application for different environments and ensures that sensitive information, such as credentials, is not hard-coded.
Logging and Monitoring: Instrument your application with logging and monitoring capabilities to track its performance, detect issues, and troubleshoot problems. Utilize OpenShift’s built-in monitoring tools or integrate with external monitoring solutions for comprehensive visibility into your application’s health and performance.
Secrets Management: Use OpenShift’s secrets management features to securely store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, API keys, and certificates, needed by your application components. Avoid storing secrets directly in code or configuration files to minimize security risks.
Immutable Infrastructure: Treat your infrastructure as immutable and deploy new versions of your application components by creating new container images rather than modifying existing ones. This promotes consistency, repeatability, and easier rollbacks in case of issues.
Compliance and Security: Adhere to security best practices and compliance requirements when designing and deploying your application on OpenShift. Implement network policies, access controls, and encryption to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access.