Our main use case for Red Hat OpenShift is that our application, the CBMS application, is a microsite divided into multiple modules with multiple back-end modules built using Spring Boot and Java and UI modules built using Vue.js and React.js. These individual modules are deployed in Red Hat OpenShift, and whenever we make any changes and push to a feature branch, that particular feature branch gets merged with the development branch, and then a build is triggered. Once a build is triggered and I log into Red Hat OpenShift client platform from IBM Cloud, I can see that a build is happening. If there is any compilation issue, the build fails, and if there is no issue, once the build completes, a deployment happens and the application is deployed.
Apart from that, we check config maps, secrets, and see logs in the pod. For example, we worked on another application named AL Lab where the client asked us to download the profile pictures of all the senior managers working in IBM. From that pod, we wrote an API to zip the profile pictures downloading from Box and then put that inside one container from which that application was running and downloaded it. There are many other use cases, and it is very difficult to remember each one of them, but when I am working and seeing the user interface of that application, they come to mind.
A specific example of when Red Hat OpenShift helped my team solve a problem is when I came into this project that got migrated from the Chinese team. I think they built most of the things, and we have a DevOps person in our team who has most of the controls. Now, coming to help, we can find out the config maps and the secrets from Red Hat OpenShift by going into the console. If we need to run the application locally, we can get the secrets and put them in our STS application YML to run the application. I do not have too much experience because I am not getting many opportunities to work on Red Hat OpenShift. My basic work is mainly writing code in this project, which may be Java code, Spring Boot code, Python code, or React.js and Vue.js code, without being too much into the DevOps side, as there is a different person managing that. Whenever she faces any challenge, we work together to solve the problem.
We are mainly using Red Hat OpenShift as a deployment platform where we are pushing our changes. The image is built into the container registry, and when the build triggers, that particular image gets deployed into the containers and pod in Kubernetes. Once the application starts, it gets the secret config maps from specific locations, and the application starts and serves the client.