Chapter 4. Red Hat OpenShift components and architecture 63
A project is a group of Kubernetes resources with common user access rights. A project can 
also be assigned a quota, which limits the number of defined pods, volumes, services, and 
other cluster resources.
OpenShift client provides a new-app command that creates resources inside a project; then, 
OpenShift uses the app label to group these related resources into a new application that is 
inside that specific project.
4.2  OpenShift container platform networking
While installing all the prerequisites that are needed to deploy the OpenShift Container 
Platform configuration, all of the nodes must include internet access to register each node 
and install every dependency that is left.
During the installation process, an internal network is configured. To make this process 
possible, a virtual switch is installed and configured automatically. This switch ensures that 
the internal network is forwarded from the public network. 
OpenShift Container Platform features a built-in DNS to resolve the hosts that are created 
internally. This DNS manages the port forwarding for the public IP into the internal network, 
such as for resolving the internal services IP addresses.
When a service is created, a new IP address can be assigned to it. If this service is deleted 
and re-created, a new IP address can be assigned by default or the cloud administrator can 
configure a specific IP address and host name on it.
This section provides an overview of the main OpenShift software-defined networking (SDN) 
solutions and describes the traffic flow among pods that are inside the cluster. Also discussed 
is how these pods communicate to destinations that are outside of the cluster.
4.2.1  OpenShift networking overview
OpenShift Networking features two main components: the OpenShift Software Defined 
Network plug-in to handle the communication within the cluster and the OpenShift Router 
plug-in to handle the inbound and outbound traffic that is destined to services in the cluster.
The default OpenShift SDN solution is built on Open vSwitch (OVS). With OpenShift, the 
cluster administrator can choose to deploy with one of the OpenShift native SDN plug-ins or 
deploy the cluster by using a third-party SDN from the supported system. 
If a different SDN is wanted, OpenShift supports Kubernetes CNI-compliant SDN solutions.
4.2.2  OpenShift internal cluster communication
OpenShift container Platform uses a software-defined networking approach to provide a 
unified cluster network that assigns an internal IP address to each pod in the cluster to ensure 
that all containers within the pod behave as though they were on the same host. In terms of 
port allocation, networking, naming, load balancing, and application configuration are the 
same as though they were physical hosts or virtual machines. 
This pod network is established and maintained by the OpenShift SDN, which configures an 
overlay network by using Open vSwitch (OVS).