Red Hat OpenShift Cloud Platform Administration Training Course

Course overview

OpenShift administrators are expected to provide a stable, secure application platform while development teams release containerised workloads at speed. That requires more than creating projects and checking pod status: administrators must manage identity, quotas, networking, storage, upgrades, operators, cluster capacity and incident response without disrupting production services. This five-day course equips experienced infrastructure and platform professionals to operate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with the controls, repeatable procedures and diagnostic discipline required in enterprise environments.

Participants work through the administration model behind OpenShift clusters, including control plane and worker node roles, projects, RBAC, SecurityContextConstraints, resource governance, routes, ingress, persistent storage and Operators. They use the oc CLI to inspect cluster state, troubleshoot unhealthy workloads, manage users and service accounts, configure quotas and limit ranges, apply network policies, and plan controlled cluster updates. The course also addresses GitOps-based configuration management and multi-cluster governance using Red Hat OpenShift GitOps and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

Delivery combines instructor-led technical walkthroughs with guided labs on live OpenShift environments and operational case studies based on realistic platform incidents. Participants build and administer a governed application namespace, diagnose workload, network and storage faults, and create an operational runbook containing command sequences, validation checks, escalation criteria and an upgrade readiness checklist. They leave with practical administration patterns that can be adapted to their organisation's cluster operating model, together with a certificate of completion.

The course is best suited to professionals responsible for operating, supporting or governing OpenShift platforms used by internal development teams, customer-facing products or regulated workloads.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Administer OpenShift projects, users, groups, service accounts and RBAC roles using the oc CLI
• Configure resource quotas, limit ranges and namespace governance controls for multi-team clusters
• Diagnose pod scheduling, image pull, readiness, route and persistent-volume failures from cluster events and logs
• Implement SecurityContextConstraints, secrets and service-account permissions for controlled workload execution
• Configure OpenShift routes, ingress behaviour and NetworkPolicy rules for secure application exposure
• Provision and manage persistent volumes, claims, storage classes and stateful workload storage requirements
• Plan and validate a controlled OpenShift cluster upgrade using operator health and update-channel checks
• Produce an OpenShift operations runbook with monitoring checks, incident triage steps and upgrade readiness criteria

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• OpenShift Administrators — who operate clusters and need repeatable controls for security, availability and upgrades
• Platform Engineers — who provide self-service Kubernetes capabilities to development teams
• Cloud Infrastructure Engineers — who support hybrid cloud clusters, networking, storage and capacity
• DevOps Engineers — who need to troubleshoot application delivery pipelines and runtime workloads on OpenShift
• Site Reliability Engineers — who require practical methods for detecting, triaging and reducing platform incidents
• Technical Operations Managers — who govern OpenShift service standards, support procedures and operational risk

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable administering Linux systems from the command line, including files, processes, permissions, networking basics and SSH access. They need working knowledge of containers, images and registries, plus a basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts such as pods, deployments, services, namespaces, nodes and persistent volumes. Prior exposure to YAML manifests and Git is useful. Experience with Red Hat OpenShift is beneficial but not essential; the course establishes the OpenShift-specific administration model before advanced labs begin. No prior OpenShift certification, programming experience, cloud-provider certification or cluster-installation experience is required.

Training methodology

The course alternates focused instructor demonstrations with hands-on administration tasks in a live Red Hat OpenShift environment. Participants use the oc CLI and web console to inspect cluster resources, configure access and quotas, deploy governed workloads, expose services, attach storage and investigate deliberately injected faults. Small-group case discussions examine decisions around tenant isolation, upgrade windows and incident escalation. Each day closes with a practical output, culminating in an individual OpenShift operations runbook and a workplace application plan for a selected cluster or platform service.

Course outline

Day 1: OpenShift architecture and platform access

• OpenShift control plane, worker nodes and cluster operator architecture
• Kubernetes resources as implemented in OpenShift Container Platform
• Web console navigation and oc CLI authentication workflows
• Projects, namespaces and multi-tenant platform design
• Users, groups, service accounts and OAuth identity integration concepts
• RBAC roles, role bindings and least-privilege access assignment
• Cluster health inspection with ClusterOperators, nodes and events

Workshop: Participants create a governed project, assign role-based access to user groups and produce a cluster health baseline using oc commands.

Day 2: Workload governance and security

• Deployments, deployment configs and pod lifecycle management
• Resource requests, limits, quotas and limit ranges
• Pod scheduling, node selectors, taints, tolerations and affinity rules
• SecurityContextConstraints and workload permission boundaries
• Secrets, ConfigMaps and service-account token management
• Image streams, image pull secrets and registry access controls
• Operator Lifecycle Manager and installed operator administration

Workshop: Participants configure a team namespace with quotas, limit ranges, RBAC and SecurityContextConstraints, then validate a workload deployment against those controls.

Day 3: Networking, routes and persistent storage

• OpenShift service networking and internal DNS resolution
• Routes, ingress controllers and TLS termination options
• NetworkPolicy design for namespace and pod traffic isolation
• Troubleshooting route admission, endpoint and DNS failures
• Storage classes, dynamic provisioning and persistent volume claims
• StatefulSets, volume attachment and reclaim policy considerations
• Backup and recovery considerations for application data and cluster resources

Workshop: Participants expose a stateful application through a secured route, apply network isolation rules and resolve injected route and persistent-volume faults.

Day 4: Observability, troubleshooting and GitOps operations

• Cluster monitoring architecture, alerts and Prometheus metrics
• Using events, logs and pod conditions for incident triage
• oc describe, oc logs, oc adm inspect and debug container workflows
• Diagnosing ImagePullBackOff, CrashLoopBackOff and pending pod conditions
• Capacity signals, node pressure and resource-consumption analysis
• Red Hat OpenShift GitOps application synchronization and drift detection
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management policies and multi-cluster visibility

Workshop: Participants investigate a simulated production incident involving failed pods, policy drift and node resource pressure, then document the remediation sequence.

Day 5: Lifecycle management and operational readiness

• OpenShift update channels, release images and cluster version status
• Pre-upgrade validation of cluster operators, nodes and workload health
• Upgrade sequencing, maintenance windows and stakeholder communication
• Post-upgrade verification and application smoke-test criteria
• Certificate expiry, machine configuration and operator degradation checks
• Operational runbook structure, escalation paths and change records
• Platform service levels, governance metrics and continuous improvement actions

Workshop: Participants complete an upgrade-readiness assessment and produce an OpenShift operations runbook covering health checks, incident triage and controlled change procedures.

Tools & standards covered

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, oc CLI, Red Hat OpenShift GitOps, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions