How to Deploy NGINX Plus on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in Ten Minutes

Did you know that when Sysdig looked at its customers this year it found more than two million container instances running on-premises and in the public cloud? More exciting (for us, at least) was the data point that NGINX was running in 60% of those containers.

That’s a lot of NGINX.

One of the reasons you see NGINX and, by extension, NGINX Plus deployed so broadly is that it has many roles within modern and traditional architectures. It can act as a web server. It can act as a reverse proxy. It fills the role of an application delivery controller (ADC) and provides critical application services like SSL termination and HTTP routing and can act as an API gateway. In modern application stacks it fills the role of ingress control in the north/south data path as well as providing application routing and load balancing inside a container cluster, a.k.a. the east/west data path. 

The Many Faces of NGINX Plus

This is important when we start talking about the need to bridge the divide between traditional network architectures and modern, cloud-native architectures. One of the more popular platforms for deploying and operating containerized workloads is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP).

So, it’s natural that folks deploying OCP 3.11 might want to take advantage of NGINX Plus as an OCP Router. The Router in an OCP environment provides the very important function of getting requests from clients to the right service inside the container cluster.

Today’s blog brings you a link to a demo conducted by our own intrepid Principal Solutions Engineer Dylen Turnbull. In it, Dylen downloads the NGINX Plus trial from the repo, installs the NGINX Plus router on OCP, and brings up an application. Dylen then accesses the NGINX Plus UI and shows application traffic flowing into the OCP cluster with live activity monitoring on an OCP 3.11 cluster. 

It’s ten minutes, and we encourage comments and feedback on our efforts via YouTube.