I’m setting up a new k8s cluster, and I find the concept of BuildConfig and ImageStream quite interesting. But I do not have the incentive to buy Openshift support since the project context does not allow that.
so I was wondering if it is safe to use an OKD cluster in a production environment, and if there is an example of an entity that is already using it in production grade?
I was (still are) in the same situation with projects that could not afford to run AWS or GCE clouds, so we have deployed a 3 node single master, and later a 9 node HA cluster in our own data centre. The HA architecture was based on the reference implementation at http://uncontained.io/.
So yes it is certainly possible and thoroughly worth the effort. Our cluster is running Kafka, Spark, Neo4J, MongoDB, Jenkins and Cassandra and about 100 business application pods. The DevOps in Openshift (OKD) the biggest benefit.
The learning curve is steep though. I have invested enormous amounts of time in reading up on persistent storage (GlusterFS in our case), networking, cluster architecture, etc. It is very important to script the provisioning process in a rigorously repeatable manner. You are going to stand up and tear down the initial cluster close to 100 times before it plays through reliably.