Goodbye All-In-One VM, Hello Minishift

After almost 100,000 downloads, the time has come to retire the OpenShift All-In-One VM. The intent of the VM was to give developers a simple and easy way to bring up OpenShift on their local machine for development purposes. Our team used it for everything from teaching workshops to doing our own development work. We also heard a lot of praise from the community about how easy it made life for them.

Why We Are Ending Production

Then came the bad part. We chose VirtualBox because it is the only FOSS virtualization technology that runs across Linux, Mac, and Windows. We chose Vagrant because it seemed like a great way to package up and ship the VMs so they could easily be setup and run on all those platforms. Unfortunately, in our experience, there was consistent problems getting Vagrant to work properly on all three platforms. In the end it became no longer feasible to support this setup.

The Heros Arrive in the Nick Of Time

In the meantime, there was movement within the Kubernetes community to create MiniKube - a means to run a Kubernetes "cluster" on your local machine. Jimmi Dyson saw this work and started MiniShift which built off MiniKube except for OpenShift.

There is now a whole team working on Minishift, with 30 contributors (and more are always welcome). And after meeting with the team, the Evangelist team has decided to direct users to Minishift rather than the All-In-One. It is still in beta, but it already works better than All-In-One and has been updated to OpenShift Origin 1.4.1. It fulfills all the original use cases we had for the All-In-One with the added bonus of actually having an engineering team maintaining it!

Please remember, Minishift is an upstream community project that is intended for OpenShift Origin. If you need a supported version based on RHEL and OpenShift Container Platform, please wait for the next release of the CDK, which will benefit from all this work.

Commons Briefing

If you want to go more in depth on Minishift, there will be an OpenShift Commons briefing on Minishift on Feb. 22nd. Hardy and team will give a much more thorough introduction to Minishift. Add the briefing to your calendar and tune in!

Wrap Up

The OpenShift.Org VM page has been updated with instructions on how to use Minishift. Over time this page will go away and redirect to a page for MiniShift. We have done limited testing and we know there is more documentation coming to the MiniShift site. Until then, as we do more testing we will be putting in pull requests to Minishift and updating our instructions.

We hope you enjoy the Minishift as much as we do and look forward to your feedback. What are you waiting for, Get Started NOW!