Platform Engineer Activity: Setup an Ephemeral Dev Environment on OpenShift

When developers are assigned a JIRA task or feature to enhance an application, they start by creating a feature branch on Git. They continue working on this branch until their changes are ready to be merged into the main branch. Providing an ephemeral development environment for these developers enables a continuous inner loop, enhancing productivity and accelerating development.

The Platform Engineer creates a new Software Template to set up an ephemeral development environment for Developers working on the parasol-store application. This template performs several tasks:

  • Creates a dedicated namespace within OpenShift for the developer

  • Connects the ephemeral development environment to the dev DB instance running on OpenShift

  • Sets up development pipelines to build and deploy the developer’s changes in the environment

  • Generates GitOps/Argo manifests to manage CI/CD for the developer’s environment

With this approach, the Platform Engineers enable developers to just focus on coding. The templates simplify the set up of these ephemeral dev environments in a self-service manner. This allows the developers to create them repeatedly and easily, thereby rapidly increasing developer productivity.

Please ensure you are logged in as a Platform Engineer
Click here to view instructions to login as the Platform Engineer.

Login as Platform Engineer

You will perform this activity as a Platform Engineer. Please follow the below steps to logout from Red Hat Developer Hub and GitLab, and login back as a Platform Engineer (pe1/{common_password})

  • Logout from Red Hat Developer Hub

    • Navigate to the Settings side menu of Red Hat Developer Hub and click on the kebab menu in the Profile card

      Settings of Red Hat Developer Hub

    • Sign out of Red Hat Developer Hub from the Settings section as shown in the screenshot below.

      Signing out of Red Hat Developer Hub

  • Logout from GitLab

    • Click on the Profile icon, and Sign out from the dropdown as shown in the screenshot below.

      Signing out of Red Hat Developer Hub

  • Login back as a Platform Engineer to Red Hat Developer Hub and GitLab using the credentials pe1/{common_password}

Create parasol-store Dev Template

  1. Access your Red Hat Developer Hub instance. If prompted login using pe1/{common_password}

  2. Click on the Create menu on the left-hand navigation, and choose Register Existing Component.

  3. Create a Software Template by pasting this template URL into the URL textbox

    https://gitlab-gitlab.{openshift_cluster_ingress_domain}/rhdh/parasol-store-dev-template/-/blob/main/template.yaml

  4. Click on the Analyze button followed by clicking the Import button to import the template.

  5. The Template will start appearing in the Create side menu.

    parasol store dev template create