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Concepts

Why Self-Host OpenShift

Andrios Robert

• 1 min read

The cluster hummed like a live wire. Every pod was in its place. Every service pointed the right way. This is the power of OpenShift self-hosted deployment—your own infrastructure, your own control, no middleman.

Why Self-Host OpenShift

Running OpenShift on your own servers or cloud VMs lets you decide your architecture, security policies, and upgrade schedules. You choose the worker nodes, the networking layer, and the underlying storage. This means predictable latency, custom configurations, and compliance that matches your company’s rules.

Core Requirements

To deploy OpenShift self-hosted, prepare:

  • Bare metal or virtual nodes running RHEL or CentOS
  • At least one master node, and two or more worker nodes
  • Reliable internal DNS and load balancers
  • Access to the oc CLI and installation binaries
  • Configured firewall rules for API and node communication

Secure SSH access and verify resource capacity before you start.

Installation Flow

  1. Install the prerequisites on all nodes: container runtime, OpenShift dependencies, and network plugins.
  2. Configure the cluster with openshift-install or the advanced Ansible playbooks.
  3. Deploy the control plane, then join the worker nodes with their kubelet configs.
  4. Set up your ingress controller to handle external traffic.
  5. Confirm cluster health with oc get nodes and oc get pods --all-namespaces.

Key Considerations

OpenShift self-hosted deployment benefits from tight monitoring and alerting. Track API server performance, etcd health, and pod scheduling. Secure every endpoint with TLS. Keep backups of etcd—without it, the cluster state is gone. Test disaster recovery before it’s needed.

Scaling and Maintenance

You can scale horizontally by adding more worker nodes or vertically by increasing resources on existing ones. Rolling upgrades in OpenShift allow you to update without downtime if planned carefully. Ensure cluster operators are green before any major change.

Control means responsibility. A self-hosted OpenShift cluster gives you full ownership of performance, costs, and uptime. Done right, it becomes the backbone of your application delivery pipeline.

Take the next step—see this kind of deployment live on hoop.dev in minutes.