Deploying Keycloak on OpenShift for Scalable Identity and Access Management

Keycloak stands in the center of the cluster, ready to take control. Your applications demand identity. Your infrastructure demands security. On OpenShift, pairing both is not just possible—it’s efficient, fast, and scalable.

Deploying Keycloak on OpenShift gives you a full-featured Identity and Access Management service with built-in high availability. You get single sign-on, LDAP integration, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and fine-grained role-based access control without writing extra code. OpenShift’s container orchestration manages Keycloak like any other workload: rolling updates, persistent storage, horizontal scaling.

Start by creating a new project in OpenShift. Use the official Keycloak container image from Red Hat or quay.io. Apply the deployment configuration with environment variables for admin credentials, database connections, and TLS settings. Bind a persistent volume to store configuration and realm data. Integrate with Red Hat SSO if required. Expose your service with a secure route.

For database persistence, connect Keycloak to PostgreSQL or MariaDB within your OpenShift cluster. Configure readiness and liveness probes to ensure smooth restarts. Use StatefulSets if you want more control over pod identity and storage. Monitor metrics through Prometheus and set resource limits to prevent memory spikes.

Clustering Keycloak on OpenShift is straightforward—add JGROUPS_DISCOVERY_PROTOCOL and configuration for Infinispan caching to ensure every pod shares state. Autoscaling handles changes in load. With OpenShift’s built-in service discovery, each Keycloak instance registers and communicates without manual wiring.

Security hardening is simple. Enforce PodSecurityPolicies. Use secrets to store sensitive variables. Apply network policies to restrict inter-service communication. Update images as soon as Red Hat releases security patches. Audit realm configurations regularly to prevent privilege drift.

Once running, your developers authenticate against Keycloak instead of building yet another login page. Management sees logs, metrics, and health checks in the OpenShift console. Upgrades happen without downtime. Identity flows become part of your platform rather than scattered per application.

Want to see Keycloak on OpenShift live without spending days on setup? Launch it now on hoop.dev and watch your identity service come online in minutes.