A Multitenant Container Platform with OKD, Harbor Registry and ELK

Abstract

This paper summarizes the open container [2] journey of the University of Oslo’s Center of Information technology, (Division for Infrastructure). It describes the background for adopting containers in the first place, the pitfalls of early attempts, the learning that was obtained from stepping into those pitfalls, how they were mended and some thoughts about future direction for container usage. Challenges regarding organizational aspects and increased demand for rapid delivery, combined with the established expectations of security and stability, is also described in relation to container technology. It distills the findings and explains the rationale behind the chosen direction of adapting Openshift community Distribution of Kubernetes (OKD) [1] as our main container platform for long running core services, and how it was adapted to best integrate it with existing automation, monitoring and logging: Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK).