Projects and quota

OpenShift projects and CSC computing projects

Note

Projects in OpenShift are separate from CSC computing projects. A single CSC computing project can have access to multiple projects in OpenShift. Each CSC computing project with access to Rahti gets a group in OpenShift.

Note

Rahti can be used free of charge for open research and education in Finnish universities and polytechnics.

All projects in OpenShift must be mapped to a CSC computing project. This mapping is used to determine which CSC computing project a given resource belongs to for billing and other purposes. If you only have one CSC computing project with access to Rahti, this mapping will be done for you automatically. If you have more than one CSC computing project, you need to specify which of them to use. You can do so by entering csc_project: followed by the name or number of your CSC computing project in the Description field when creating a new project in OpenShift. You can also enter other text in the description field as well if you want to have a human readable description for the project you are creating.

For example, if you have Rahti access via project_1000123, you would enter this in the Description field:

csc_project: project_1000123

You could also enter a human readable description for the project, in which case the field could look like this:

This project is used for hosting the Pied Piper web application.

csc_project: project_1000123

This would make it so that any usage within that OpenShift project is billed from the billing unit quota of project_1000123. Note that project_1000123 must have Rahti access and you must be a member of that computing project or the OpenShift project creation will fail.

If you would like to know which CSC computing projects you are a member of, you can view a list in the My Projects tool of the Scientist's User Interface. You can also set a default billing project with the same tool. Select the project that you would like to have as your default billing project and click "Set As Billing Project". After doing this, the default billing project will be selected as the billing project for OpenShift projects that don't explicitly specify one.

If you would like to know which CSC computing project an OpenShift project is associated with, you can do so using the oc command line tool. You can find instructions for setting up oc in the command line tool usage instructions. For example, if your OpenShift project was called my-openshift-project, you would run this:

oc get project my-openshift-project -o yaml

This should produce output like this:

apiVersion: project.openshift.io/v1
kind: Project
metadata:
  annotations:
    ...
  creationTimestamp: 2018-11-22T12:27:05Z
  labels:
    csc_project: "1000123"
  name: my-openshift-project
  resourceVersion: "72557736"
  selfLink: /apis/project.openshift.io/v1/projects/my-openshift-project
  uid: df4970e2-abd7-4417-adbf-531293c68cd6
spec:
  finalizers:
  - openshift.io/origin
  - kubernetes
status:
  phase: Active

In the output above, you can find the associated CSC computing project under metadata.labels.csc_project. In this case the project is 1000123. Unfortunately this information is not available via a web user interface yet.

Note

It is not possible for normal users to change the csc_project label after a project has been created. If you would like to change the label for an existing project, please contact support. You can also create a completely new project if you want to use a different label.

Creating a project

Click the blue "Create Project" button to create a project and you will be presented with this view:

OpenShift new project dialog

Here you'll need to pick a unique name that is not in use by any other project in the system. You can also enter a human readable display name and a description for the project. You may also enter a CSC computing project here in the Description field as described above. Once you've filled in the fields, click "Create" and you will see the application catalog where you can pick from various application templates or import your own.

For more information about using the web user interface, you can refer to the official OpenShift documentation. You can find out which version of the documentation to look at in the web interface by clicking the question mark symbol in the top bar and selecting "About".

Project quotas

Two kinds of quota are applied in OpenShift:

  • Total number of projects per user
  • Resources created inside a project

By default, users can create up to five projects. Each of these then has its own quota for the following resources:

Resource Default
Pods 20
Virtual cores per pod 2
Virtual cores per container 2
RAM per pod 8 GiB
RAM per container 8 GiB

You can find the resource usage and quota for a project from the project view in the web interface under Resources -> Quota. Alternatively, you can use the oc command line tool:

oc get quota -o yaml
oc get limitranges -o yaml

If you need to create more projects or you need more resources in a project for your application, you can apply for more quota by contacting Rahti support. See the Contact page for instructions. Quota requests are handled on a case-by-case basis depending on the currently available resources in Rahti and the use case.

Sharing projects with other users

OpenShift has a flexible role based access control system that allows you to give access to projects you've created to other users and groups in the system. You can give e.g. full admin, basic user, edit or read only access to other users and groups in the system for collaboration.

You can edit project membership in the web interface via Resources -> Membership. You can either give access rights to individuals users or groups by selecting either the Users or the Groups tab and clicking Edit Membership in the top right corner.

Note that it is important to use the correct usernames when sharing projects with others. OpenShift allows you to freely enter any username and won't tell you if you've entered a non-existent username. The usernames are also case sensitive. You can find out what your username in OpenShift is from either the web interface or via the command line:

  1. In the web interface, click the question mark symbol in the top bar and select "Command Line Tools". You can find your username above the text box that has the login command.
  2. If you have an active command line session, you can use the oc whoami command.

If you would like to share a project you've created with members of the same CSC computing project, you can do so by selecting the Groups tab, clicking Edit Membership and entering the name of the computing project and a role in the dropdown menu on the right for the members of that computing project.