As government agencies increasingly look to adopt of DevOps, cloud computing, and Linux containers, building the underlying infrastructure on a trusted and secure foundation is critical. Today Red Hat, in collaboration with Microsoft, released a partner Azure Blueprint for deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Microsoft Azure Government. The Azure Blueprint for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a template for customers looking to more quickly and easily deploy Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Microsoft Azure Government.

Using the FedRAMP-provided System Security Plan template for Moderate impact systems, this partner Azure Blueprint release documents Azure Government and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform components. Joint Azure and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform customers can use this documentation as the basis of their certification paperwork, which can help to reduce the security accreditation effort required to deploy Platform-as-a-Service capabilities. The Azure Blueprint for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is designed to identify which controls are inherited (from Azure’s FedRAMP P-ATO), which are satisfied through native Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform capabilities, and which security controls are the responsibility of the system operator (procedural controls).

This initiative has been open sourced through the OpenControl project and released on GitHub. By releasing in the OpenControl format, customers can edit the underlying security documentation as code, and generate end-products as Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, or even their own system security plan templates. These Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Azure templates are available on GitHub.

Complementing the release of this FedRAMP documentation, Red Hat and Microsoft recently published a technical reference architecture for Deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Microsoft Azure. The reference architecture describes using Azure-specific properties to enable a successful OpenShift installation and deployment. Also, steps and links to a code base are provided to allow for the installation of the exact reference architecture environment using an Azure account.

Ongoing initiatives include creation of Ansible Playbooks which can automate the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Azure . If you are interested in this project, please join us on the GitHub project page!

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