As organizations adopt Red Hat OpenShift to streamline application deployment and lifecycle management, it's crucial to provide developers with secure and flexible access to the platform. This article walks you through configuring an identity provider for your OpenShift cluster and enabling self-service project creation — allowing developers to deploy unprivileged applications independently.
🚀 Why Identity Provider & Self-Service Access Matter
Secure authentication with external identity providers (IdPs) lets organizations manage user access without duplicating accounts.
Developer self-service boosts agility by letting users create projects and deploy apps without cluster admin involvement.
Resource isolation ensures developers can innovate securely, with appropriate permissions.
🔧 Step 1: Configure an Identity Provider
OpenShift supports several identity providers including GitHub, GitLab, LDAP, and OAuth. The most commonly used in enterprise setups is LDAP or OAuth-based providers.
You can configure an identity provider via the web console or Cluster OAuth configuration.
Example (OAuth provider setup via Console):
Log in to the OpenShift Web Console as a cluster admin.
Navigate to Administration > Cluster Settings > Configuration > OAuth.
Click Add Identity Provider.
Choose your provider (e.g., GitHub).
Fill in details such as:
Client ID and Secret
Redirect URI
Mapping method
Save the configuration.
Once added, users can authenticate using their GitHub/GitLab or enterprise credentials.
🧑💻 Step 2: Assign Roles for Developer Access
By default, only cluster admins can create new projects. To allow developers to create their own:
Use the ClusterRoleBinding to assign self-provisioner role:
oc adm policy add-cluster-role-to-group self-provisioner system:authenticated
You can further customize which groups or users get this capability using RBAC policies.
📦 Step 3: Developers Create Projects & Deploy Applications
Once configured:
Developers can log in with their identity provider credentials.
Use oc new-project or the OpenShift Web Console to create their own projects.
Deploy unprivileged containers without needing elevated permissions.
✅ Best Practices
Restrict self-provisioning to a specific group if not all users should have this access.
Monitor resource quotas to avoid misuse or over-consumption.
Use Pod Security Admission (PSA) to restrict the types of containers developers can deploy.
📈 Benefits Recap
Simplified access management via external IdP
Reduced admin overhead with project self-provisioning
Faster app delivery cycle for development teams
Empowering developers through secure access and self-service project creation is a major step toward DevOps maturity in OpenShift environments. Get started today to build a smoother, more scalable development workflow!
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