What you will learn

The application

Parasol Insurance is a Quarkus-based web application that agents use to process claims, manage policies, and complete other daily functions. Additionally, the application processes and automatically categorizes incoming customer emails using simple keyword-based routing. Emails arrive via Apache Kafka, are classified and routed, and the results are displayed in an inbox-style UI. Claims and other data is persisted in Parasol’s PostgreSQL database.

Parasol completed an application modernization to Quarkus using Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit for Applications. The application is already deployed and running in your OpenShift environment, in both development and production configurations. Over the course of this lab you will explore, modify, and enhance it, experiencing OpenShift’s Application Platform capabilities along the way. Additionally, you’ll enhance the Parasol Insurance application with AI capabilities.

What you will learn

  • How OpenShift provides a complete application platform, and goes beyond container orchestration

  • How to use Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces as a zero-install cloud development environment

  • How AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Continue, Roo, etc.) with approved models can be made available to developers using Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces

  • How OpenShift natively supports container-based CI/CD pipelines using OpenShift Pipelines (Tekton)

  • How to enforce quality gates including SonarQube analysis as part of CI/CD based on OpenShift Pipelines

  • How GitOps with OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD) drives consistent, auditable deployments, and prevents configuration drift

  • How HashiCorp Vault can deliver secrets to your application without manual configuration, nor exposing the secrets to developers

  • How to integrate LLM-powered classification into an existing application using Quarkus and Langchain4j

  • How to promote code to production using a GitOps workflow

Technologies used

Red Hat OpenShift provides a complete application platform, however it does not mandate use of specific dependencies or components. For example, our self-hosted GitLab can be replaced by your preferred SCM tool. Additionally, tools like OpenShift Pipelines can be replaced with Jenkins. This lab is opinionated, but not prescriptive.
Technology Purpose

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Application platform

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces

Cloud development environments

Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines

Tekton-based CI/CD pipelines

Red Hat OpenShift GitOps

Argo CD for GitOps delivery

Red Hat build of Quarkus

Cloud native Java runtime

SonarQube

Static analysis and code quality

GitLab

Source code management

Apache Kafka (provided by Red Hat AMQ Streams)

Event streaming

PostgreSQL

Database

HashiCorp Vault + ExternalSecrets

Secrets management

Quay

Container image registry

Estimated duration

This lab takes approximately 90 minutes to complete all three modules.