OKD4 is now Generally Available

Announcing the General Availability of OKD4

Today, the OKD-WG is pleased to announce the General Availability of OKD4, the community distribution of Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform. With today’s GA release of OKD4, Red Hat continues its commitment to open source and open collaboration with the Kubernetes and other Cloud Native communities.

OKD’s Origins

In April 2012, Red Hat first released Origin as the open source upstream project of OpenShift. We had little inkling of the phenomenal trajectory of cloud-native technology that was to come. From the rise of containers, the birth of OCI and Fedora CoreOS, and now the CNCF’s incubation of Operator Framework, it has been an amazing ride. OKD4 wouldn’t be possible without all these incredible innovative technologies and their communities.

During the 3.x release timeframe, OKD has been a stable basis for OpenShift Container Platform, acting as an upstream distribution based on community-driven components - CentOS and Project Atomic to name a few. With the advent of the Universal Base Image, relations between OKD and OCP has changed - from "upstream-downstream" to what we call "sibling distributions." Images are built using RHEL7 base and can be distributed simultaneously for OKD and OCP, with no rebuild necessary. This enables both distributions to get updated code earlier, including security fixes from RHEL7, and provides a stable base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

OpenShift 4.x heavily focuses on high availability, observability and seamless upgrades. With the OKD 4 release, the community is not only getting easy access to these features, but also the ability to affect the direction of the platform (via enhancements process) and a community space for experimentation, discussion and knowledge sharing. The Operators pattern used throughout the design of OKD 4 is allowing users to maintain clusters efficiently over their lifetime.

Release Highlights

OKD4 uses Fedora CoreOS as a base OS for the nodes. It enables the cluster with recent security fixes, new features (like cgroups v2 support) and updated software. OKD4 is using the same images as the corresponding OpenShift Container Platform release. As a result, the community can participate in the development and can modify any part of the cluster in order to achieve specific goals.

The cluster still has the same features as in OKD3 - it can be installed in the user environment, configured to user liking and updated.

How it differs from OCP

Unlike OCP there are several distinctive features in OKD4:

As a community distribution it does not require a pull secret from https://openshift.com/try. All OKD4 images are available without additional authentication. The base OS image for OKD4 is available at https://getfedora.org/en/coreos/download/. However some optional operators from operatorhub.io require a pull secret, so by default OKD4 installs a source with community operators only. See FAQ for more information.

OCP is an opinionated Kubernetes distribution with a heavy focus on high availability and production workloads. This puts restrictions on cluster configuration - for instance, single master installations are not supported. OKD4, however, allows users to install single master clusters - for development or stage environments. These clusters cannot be upgraded to later versions, though.

OKD4 creates a new nightly release after OCP tests are completed by our CI system. Every two weeks we'll promote a nightly to a stable release stream, so users can get updates to latest and tested code without switching channels.

Getting Started

Installing OKD4 is as easy as OCP4 - see Getting Started for instructions.

OKD-specific documentation is available at docs.okd.io

To report issues, use the OKD Github Repo: https://github.com/openshift/okd

For technical support check out the #openshift-users channel on Kubernetes Slack

Already using OKD?

If you are already using OKD, take this short 5 minute survey on OKD Adoption and help the OKD-WG drive our road map and better understand the workloads you are deploying on OKD!

Get Involved

Please take a moment to visit the OKD.io community site to download the latest release, check out the key upstream projects that we are collaborating with, find out more about our end users and their workloads and find the latest resource links.

The OKD Working Group meets bi-weekly to discuss the development and next steps. The meeting schedule and location are tracked in the openshift/community repo.

The Agenda and Details for upcoming meetings lives here: https://github.com/openshift/community/projects/1

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