Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

As an IT service provider, we work on enterprise technologies for our customers.

We have multiple customers with multiple domains, but the majority of our experience is in the banking and telecom sectors. In banking, they're using the OpenShift platform for their microservices-based requirements, and similarly on the telecom side, they are using it for the microservices-led solutions.

We started with the on-prem deployment of OpenShift Container Platform, version 3.2. But currently, we are also helping our customers to migrate to 4.x and to cloud solutions. The plan is to move to a cloud version, strictly on AWS. We are exploring the OpenShift Container Platform cluster, and ROSA (Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS) the latest one with the managed services. By mid-2022, we'll probably be on cloud with this.

OpenShift eliminates distractions so that we can focus on innovation and other things. It completely removes overhead for the developers in terms of managing the orchestration of Kubernetes container clusters. It provides all the built-in features for managing these requirements. As a result, our team is more focused on development and on innovations in the underlying services. With microservices or applications that are deployed on OpenShift, they are able to focus more with the business requirements and innovate by further optimizing efficiently, utilizing the resources at a Kubernetes level.

Some of the primary features we leverage in the platform have to do with how we manage the cluster configurations, the properties, and the auto-scalability. These are the features that definitely provide value in terms of reducing overhead for the developers.

Also the Kubernetes cluster management or orchestration is provisioned through the UI and the CLI.

We are using the Red Hat OpenStack OpenShift Platform. It is much faster in terms of deploying the cluster. As of now, our experience rolling it out is more on the on-prem, but I think with the 4.0 version there is a little bit of a change regarding the way it is deployed, either using the installer base or user-driven installations. It takes a couple of days just to roll out the entire cluster and configure it so that it is ready for the applications or the services to be deployed on the cluster.

The robustness, the availability in terms of resilience, and the service availability with the multiple cluster nodes configured automatically, is pretty good. Even if load balancing is required across multiple clusters with the SDN network, it's pretty good. We haven't had many issues when it comes to robustness. We are happy with the performance provided.

From our experience on the on-prem, we know that there are 10 layers of security provisioned by the OpenShift platform, starting from the kernel level, and including the clusters and the container level. That definitely helped us to achieve a lot of enterprise security requirements in terms of accessibility and managing the infra part or the cluster part.

For running business-critical applications, the solution's security is pretty good. We are able to achieve consistent efficiency and availability for all our critical service requirements, when spanned across multiple DCs with the load balancer and DR solutions. We don't have to spend much on it, once we orchestrate the cluster with the proper configurations. At that point, everything is taken care of automatically.

At the service level, I don't see a very granular level of security as compared with the container-based clusters. It is at the Kubernetes level, not at the service level.

Also, when I compare it with the other container or Kubernetes technologies, we have pretty good documentation from OpenShift, but with the recent trend of cloud-native, fully managed serverless services, I don't see much documentation about how a customer should move from on-prem to the cloud, or what is the best way to do a lift-and-shift. Even if you are on AWS OCP, which is self-managed infra services, and you want to use the ROSA managed services, what is the best way to achieve that migration? I don't see documentation for these kinds of use cases from Red Hat. There is some room for improvement there.

We have been using OpenShift Container Platform, as an organization, for the last three or four years.

The stability is pretty good. The industry has been using these enterprise solutions over the long term and we haven't heard of or seen any issues with stability. Of course, it depends on the way you configure it or manage it. But given best practices, the stability is pretty good.

The solution gives us the flexibility to start with a small number of nodes and to scale it to the maximum number of nodes. As of now, we haven't gone beyond whatever the limitations are, in terms of the number of clusters or nodes, within OpenShift. We are well within the limits and are able to achieve our requirements. That aspect makes it more flexible.

Scalability is definitely one of the positives with OpenShift, where you can have a distributed cluster across multiple DCs or multiple Availability Zones with AWS. The only thing we don't see is much documentation. If we want to maintain Active-Active disaster recovery or hot and warm availability requirements, even in on-prem, how do our clusters scale across different regions or different availabilities? And how do I manage the internal cluster storage being replicated across multiple clusters? How does that work, and how do we prove it? That's another use case where, when it comes to documentation, there is a little gap.

But overall, scalability is pretty consistent and achievable with OpenShift.

I'm not involved much in post-production support. Usually, it is the customer team that gets into those kinds of requirements. But what I heard from our customers is pretty good, in terms of the support provided by the Red Hat. We know that they have a very good enterprise support team and provide support fairly quickly for technical issues.

On AWS, we have seen they have OCP-dedicated infra, which is completely managed by Red Hat. Now with ROSA, where AWS and Red Hat are both managing it, we are expecting a similar kind of support from Red Hat.

Whether Red Hat acts as a partner with our customers depends on the customer. Most of our customers use Red Hat enterprise support for technical issues with OpenShift Cluster Platform. But they don't get deeply integrated with Red Hat in terms of exchanging ideas or innovating new solutions. But Red Hat is always providing its innovations and doing research into new products. That has definitely helped our customers.

We embarked on OpenShift as our first enterprise container technology.

There are open-source-based Kubernetes services provided by AWS and there are a number of cluster-based solutions available. But what Red Hat and OpenShift did was that they packaged all of their solutions within their platform so that it provides added features. For our finance or banking customers, adopting an open-source solution is challenging, but the enterprise-grade support from Red Hat makes it much easier for them to adopt the OpenShift cluster.

As for building our own container platform, initially we tried with Dockers, but when we compared other Kubernetes cluster technologies to OpenShift we found that OpenShift is a much better solution in terms of the features.

With the on-prem solution, with OCP, where you have control of your infra, I feel the setup is straightforward, because you know OpenShift 4.0, or other versions, and how to install it. You have the resources and the skill sets and it is easy to just start with that part.

But ROSA is a very new approach, with the fully-managed and serverless cluster. I feel there are some gaps there because you don't have control of infra provisioning. AWS and Red Hat directly provision things once you provide the configurations. But if a customer wants to use a fully managed service with some level of customization, we don't see how we can easily achieve that.

On average, if it's a single-cluster deployment for five nodes, it may take three days to get the infra up and running. And then, to do all the configurations and get the applications deployed, it probably takes another one or two days, including the testing and readiness of the infra. So a total of about five days is the optimum timeline to get a single cluster up and running with the services deployed in it.

As we are exploring the cloud migration side of things, we definitely have a deployment plan where we use the templates, including Terraform templates, when it comes to infra and core provisioning. We then have a clusterized deployment as a basic migration approach or a phased approach. We leverage tools like the Migration Toolkit from Red Hat itself and some AWS tools which are relevant if there are challenges with agent installation and the like.

We have seen return on investment from using OpenShift. The TCO is much better, comparatively, over the course of three to five years. We have seen a reduction in infra and cluster management operational costs. These are some of the aspects where we have definitely seen a return on investment.

OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS.

Initially, we had this interim state where we wanted to move as a lift-and-shift, meaning we wanted to move OpenShift to OpenShift. We had three choices: OpenShift Container Platform, the OpenShift dedicated platform from Red Hat itself, and ROSA with the fully managed services. For lift-and-shift, we wanted to maintain an as-is state and made a decision to go with AWS OCP, which helps us to control our infrastructure and deployment requirements, while maintaining the as-is state. Price-wise, this option is less than ROSA. In ROSA, we would need to pay the cost for the underlying AWS resources we would be using, plus a nominal cost to Red Hat for managing every cluster and every worker node.

There is no doubt about things, feature-wise. In terms of scalability, availability, stability, robustness, OpenShift stands out. It's the cost and support factors which make the decision a little difficult.

If a customer is looking for a fully controlled or fully managed container technology, OpenShift is definitely a choice for them. But there are other services available, like AWS EKS, which come with similar kinds of services. It depends on if you need a deep-dive solution: Do you want to maintain your own infra or do you want fully managed services? And do you want to leverage other OpenShift cluster services? But OpenShift is the choice.

We don't use the full-fledged automated services for OpenShift clusters as of now, although we do use a few of the automated services. What we are using currently is sufficient and it helps us to meet a lot of audit and telemetric requirements.

In terms of using it for cloud native stacks and meeting regulatory constraints, we are still exploring that. We are currently looking at the AWS OCP and ROSA platforms. ROSA provides flexibility in terms of installations and managing the entire infra. ROSA is completely managed by automated serverless services, where you just provide the initial configurations for the kind of a cluster you need and it automatically provisions the infrastructure for you. Whereas with OCP you have control over the infrastructure and you can play with your cluster orchestrations, configurations, et cetera. In these ways, with the cloud services, we do have flexibility, but the cost factor may be a differentiator in terms of the on-prem and the cloud versions.

We definitely plan to use the CodeReady Workspaces, but we are not there yet. The idea is to move on to the AWS Workspaces.

Overall, I would rate the solution at nine out of 10. It has everything. For me, it is not a 10 because the support and the pricing costs stand out.

Our primary use case for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is to enhance our Kubernetes management by leveraging the additional features and tools it provides. We use it to deploy applications, set up pipelines with Tekton, integrate secure networking, and facilitate AI and machine learning projects through MLOps.

Red Hat OpenShift has made the development processes more manageable and secure, particularly by providing its own DNS system, a pipeline solution called Tekton, and features like source-to-image. These enhancements simplify the complex tasks seen in plain Kubernetes, making it user-friendly and improving DevOps efficiency.

The most valuable features of OpenShift include its advanced security, integrated DNS system, built-in pipeline management with Tekton, enhanced networking routes, and dedicated platforms for DataOps and MLOps. These features make it a robust choice for handling enterprise-level tasks securely and efficiently.

Setting up OpenShift locally can be challenging, particularly because it requires RHL Linux and has specific restrictions. Additionally, the documentation for local setups is lacking. Improving these aspects would make OpenShift more accessible to the community for trial and development purposes.

I have been using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for two years.

OpenShift is highly stable. Its performance is comparable to Kubernetes, with enhancements where Kubernetes lacks certain features.

Scalability is customizable and straightforward. We can deploy it on any cloud service or our server center and scale it easily. Red Hat and AWS provide excellent support, making it easier to scale quickly.

The technical support from Red Hat and AWS is reliable and friendly, aiding problem resolution effectively.

Neutral

I have experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and Sravan for container management. However, OpenShift stands out for its security and feature enhancements.

The initial setup for OpenShift on the cloud platform is straightforward and quick, taking five to ten minutes to initiate and up to one day to deploy all resources, depending on the complexity. For local setups, the process is more complicated and error-prone.

Typically, three to four people are needed for deployment. This may include configuring nodes and setting up multi-cluster or hybrid environments to ensure scalability and ease of management.

If your concerns are primarily security and feature enhancement, OpenShift offers substantial value. It is suitable for larger teams concerned about security and usability. Smaller teams with less stringent requirements might consider other solutions. Careful cost estimation is crucial to avoid unnecessary financial burdens.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I am the platform engineer, and the platform serves a function for end users by allowing them to deploy their apps based on their application use cases.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability on demand, which allows for potentially lower costs, and Built-in resiliency. Those are the three most important ones that spring to mind.

In my experience, the issues are not always simply technical. They do stem from technical challenges, but they struggle with the topic of adoption. When you encounter all of the customer pull, there are normally several tiers of your client pop that can adopt either the fundamental features or a little more advanced ones.

The majority of the time, the challenge is determining how to drive adoption, how to sell the product to the customer, and how much time they can spend to really utilize those advanced features. If we get into much more detail, but this is from my perspective as the platform engineer and not the end customer, the ability of the end user to be able to debug potential issues with their application That is arguably the most important, let's say, work throughput in my area.

I have been working with the OpenShift Container Platform for two months.

We use version 4.9, and our legacy version is 3.9.

OpenShift Container Platform is quite stable.

OpenShift Container Platform is highly scalable.

I have more data regarding the number of net spaces and the number of apps that are tied to it, rather than how many individuals are on the receiving end of such applications which would be considerably more difficult. I would say more than three persons for each application, which is definitely driving the number near 500. This would be an approximate number.

I would rate the technical support a 10 or 11 because, in my personal experience, they are always going above and beyond to deliver the solution.

They are very caring about their customers.

Because the platform I'm working with was inherited, I wouldn't know how that procedure works here. I have, however, performed a few deployments in a considerably smaller context. 

You have at least three distinct techniques to perform that deployment using OpenShift, as well as a few of IPIs and UPIs. 

When I approached that scenario, I was thinking in terms of UPI, which stands for user-provided infrastructure in a non-homogenous, domestic cloud environment, a tiny simulated cloud environment. 

It wasn't simple, and it took a few tries to get a functional cluster structure with various control planes and many worker nodes. 

It's a difficult response to a hard subject, in my opinion, but, it is not an extremely simple or out-of-the-box solution.

The deployment took about two hours if we count the successful attempt once I had my preexisting issue sorted out. 

The upgrade would depend on the scale of the cluster. It can take a couple of minutes per node, so it would depend on the number of nodes.

In terms of the cluster that has workloads that are on production, you need to make sure that the workloads are not experiencing any issues.

I have a vague understanding of it but keep in mind that enterprise pricing differs from, I don't know, people or smaller businesses approaching them.

It largely depends on how much money they earn from the application being deployed; you don't normally deploy an app just for the purpose of having it. 

You must constantly look into your revenue and how much you spend every container, minute, or hour of how much it is working.

I wouldn't have access to that information within my company, therefore I'd assume it's in plus.

As far as I understand the situation, while this solution was inherited, the outstanding technical support is one of the main reasons it was chosen over other solutions.

I would definitely recommend having the vanilla experience because, contrary to popular belief, OpenShift is not Kubernetes; it's actually written on top of Kubernetes and adds an extra value of authentication, auditing, and logging on top of that, but it does require a familiarity with Kubernetes to properly utilize its capabilities. 

After being acquainted with Kubernetes, I believe it is worthwhile to dip their fingers and brains into the distinctions that OpenShift provides in contrast to other basic Kubernetes implementations.

I would rate OpenShift Container Platform a seven out of ten.

It is really expensive. That is not something you would employ unless you had a strong business case for your application. That is, not in terms of the enterprise version.

You may use our OKD, which is a community version we provide, which is less expensive. However, it is not a supported version of OpenShift; it is only supported within the community. However, because the OKD community is small, there is a low likelihood that someone would respond to your inquiry if you run into problems and need to locate answers elsewhere.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I work in a bank and we develop new microservices based on mainframe legacy systems. They want to start developing new microservices to reduce the calls to the mainframe. DevOps in Bank Hapoalim uses OpenShift as a platform and all the services are deployed automatically to avoid the problem of services being unavailable. So the main use case is to modernize the existing legacy systems. All the big projects of the bank are going through this modernization, with a new architecture and deploying stuff through microservices.

It makes our work much easier. Everything works automatically: the pods, memory, and CPU grow automatically. We had so many systems on the old technologies and it's very hard to modernize them. But this tool, OpenShift Container Platform, helps a lot. If we want to keep up with the market and be a strong organization, we have to support modernization. We can't see all the banks making changes and still go with the old systems.

Also, the department that's in charge of it, DevOps, has given us more dashboards so that we can see more details, exactly what's going on in terms of timing and everything. They give us all the details we need to see about the microservices.

It's an easy platform to use.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with OCP, but it takes time to deploy. I'm not sure because we have pipelines and Jenkins jobs that deploy the microservice so it takes time. It can take 10 to 15 minutes to deploy a microservice. The CI/CD process takes a long time, and if it's because of OCP, that is something that can be changed.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for about two years.

Overall it's stable. Sometimes I see problems with the stability, but I'm not sure that the problem is with OCP. There are things that we need to explore more deeply, but I would say it's stable.

It scales microservices automatically.

We have about 1,000 internal users of OCP and about a quarter of them use it daily.

We did not use any other container management software.

There were several other departments involved in the setup. 

It was done in-house.

It's a very cool product. You can trust it. We have plenty of complicated microservices systems deployed through this platform, and it does the job. We see the results. I only have good feedback about it.

It's nice to see technology getting better and better, doing things automatically. The platform can fit every organization, with the right configuration. It can do whatever you need it to do. It's very impressive to see how the technology of this platform does it.

On-premises

We are using OpenShift Container Platform to build microserivces which are financial business logics, such as payments, transfers, KYC etc. These serve as the defacto logic consumed by any channel. We are also leveraging the networking and securing capabilities of OCP which serves to secure and control on granular level.

First and foremost we have benefited vastly in cost reduction.

The abstraction provided by OpenShift of the underlying infrastructure gives us the ability to extend the application across data centers (on-prem or cloud) that gurantees the uptime by 50%.

The ability to push new changes without hampering the current version given us almost 100% business continuity and zero downtime deployments.

OCP gives the ability to use the resource effectively which has helped in maximizing the use of underlying infra and it further has the intel to scale up the  the running app in case it is running out of resources thus auto-scalablility is inherent when apps are ran on OCP.

It would be unjust to not mention the automation capability introduced by OCP makes the whole development and deployment seamless and almost eradicates the operational overhead of running this platform.

The auto scalability feature, which is based on smart agendas, determined from pre-prepared rules is the most valuable feature. You can also create different routes for deployment. Deployment types can be provided with an identifier, such as AB deployment. This really helped in rolling out releases without disrupting services for the end-users.

Secondly, there is the ability to control at a granular level. For example, they can release two versions of the same service and control the traffic towards it to a specific percentage.  Other organizations don't seem to use this feature in the same way we did. Additional rules can be specified to determine individual versions of a service, and rules for governing users access to such services.

Marketing can also make use of OpenShift by analyzing logs to provide useable data. This is one of the features that I really like about OpenShift. It is also a secure environment, with user access configurable at a very granular level. Depending on the API and the ecosystem, it is possible to completely plug and integrate. You control how the deployment works and the testing process.

With OCP 4.x the capability of configuring and controlling your ingress controller has also introduced an immense ability to provide an experience which is pertinent to a particular app. With this we can introduce app specific compliance and security without enforcing similar requirements on all services, which was the case with earlier versions.

From a networking perspective, the routing capability can be matured further. OpenShift doesn't handle restrictions on what kind of IPs are allowed, who can access them, and who cannot access them. So it is a simple matter of just using it with adequate network access, at the network level.

It should be possible to whitelist IPs so that you can allow and restrict access to the API. That would be a fantastic feature. OpenShift would then encapsulate the entire security and access. This is one improvement that I would seriously want our client to have, and for that reason, I have joined the OpenShift community, and it is a project I could probably work on myself. 

The second thing is that deployment is more of a strategy rather than a feature in OpenShift. Although you can create different routes, and it works fine, it is not an innate feature of OpenShift that it understands that you want to run specific versions of the same service as needed. Though you can define routes to serve different versions.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for almost four years.

It is very stable when it's running. So far, I haven't found any issues. We went through operating system upgrades. We did need to perform some patching, so there was some vulnerability and there were many tasks we had to undertake to assist with stability. In fact, we use two clusters. One of them is used for non-production purposes. It is a developer's structure and is a very stable solution.

Further by the design OCP will keep running the cluster is left with only one node, which makes it very robust and reliable platform.

The auto-scalability feature, which is based on smart agendas, can be determined from pre-prepared rules. You can also create different routes for deployment. Deployment types can be provided with an identifier.

This is very flexible and saves resources when you don't need them, and scales up when you do. This is a very powerful feature.

We used the Redhat TAM service. They assign a technical application manager to you, and we have used that. The support is very, very responsive. They respond very quickly. What I like about them is that they have a very precise, clear and rationale way of working they will ask guide you to take a decision towards one single solution you require. That's it. They will come back to you and provide pinpoint in-depth guidance into the problem that you have.
Unlike most support companies, you usually obtain a workable solution in a good time frame.

Positive

We were using 3.x and now we have swtiched to managed OCP 4.x on cloud. This has given us helped in reducing cost and given the ability to expand and configure OCP without involving infra team, what was a months process has reduced down to minutes.

3.x was a complex setup but with 4.x this has been addressed drastically and now it comes with a setup engine which handles 90% of the setup itself. Though it still does gives you the ability to do it 3.x way but it still less complex than 3.x.

This was an in-house implementation.

Costs reduced by 70%, this includes infra and operation costs.

It is a costly solution but then again, it's intended for enterprise-level business, and the license has to reflect that. It is appreciated what the GPU's processing power requirements will be higher. The licensing is very flexible. The license is related to the processing power you need, and the infrastructure of any clusters which go with that. If your current application, internally, has more then 5 workflows that have significant resources requirement I will suggest to consider using OCP. Anything below would be more costly on OCP in terms of license and infra setup.

We had a comparison between OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Services and Elastic Kubernetes Services (AWS) but OpenShift is more mature, it has understands the corporate more especially from security and compliance perspective. We also have the leverage to be multi-tenant with OCP over IaaS that lets us leverage the best of all infra flavours out there.

A common mistake is to assume that the solution can change the architecture type. e.g. some people think by using this solution they can change their application architecture into a microservices architecture. OpenShift is an orchestration platform. These types of solutions are not intended to be run as a microservices architecture. Very often, the two become synonymous which leads to decisions which incur huge costs. Especially the conventional thought process kicks in and OCP looks more like an application server rather than a platform.

As the cost of this product is expensive it should only be considered for large enterprises. There will also be a need to hire technical people, and this may also involve a training cost.

There has to be a cost-benefit. It can be done as a single solution, but the solution itself has to be huge. 

You also need to make the best use of the solution. If you are processing millions of transactions, that would describe an adequate use. You need to calculate the solution costs against the work it is designed to do, otherwise, it becomes a cost overhead. Certainly, for a single application, it would be a waste of money.

I would rate OpenShift Container Platform a nine out of ten.

Last but not the least, considering running multiple application on OCP to maximize the cost of licenses and it the budgeting of OCP should not reside with an application team where it will hard for them to budget and run the platform and would innately require other application teams to have a separate cluster which dissolves the whole purpose of OCP.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Our client deployed OpenShift on a bare-metal server, and they use it to offer their customers a platform-as-a-service solution with metered billing. It's pay-as-you-go. We are currently developing our own platform. For the most part, we have enough developers, but we'll go to Red Hat when we need support.

OpenShift is an improvement over legacy monolithic applications. With OpenShift, our clients can see the new features quickly, and developers can get any software they need from the Red Hat Marketplace. It has improved our product development and the existing workload on business material applications running on OpenShift. It has improved the performance of our company's IT department. 

OpenShift complies with the security center, where the CS image is hardened by default. OpenShift is very secure. When there are updates, OpenShift will update all the patches necessary throughout the entire cluster platform. It takes care of that easily, reducing many administrative tasks. Using this product improves our compliance code significantly.

The pipelines in OpenShift are handy for developers to build and automate things quickly. It's easy to bring things online. Options are helpful for the customized solutions we can do with this product. Overall, the automations are well aligned with OpenShift. That's what I see.

OpenShift's code-ready workspaces reduce project onboarding time by about 70-plus days while reducing time-to-market by around 50 percent. 

The operating system has a live update and is more secure than any other. It's made for Atomic OS, a lightweight OS new to the market. I also like the source-to-image capabilities. The customer can directly deploy their applications from the repository. It's a highly flexible and easy way to deploy into production. 

It's a simplified network for exposing their application to the outside world. Red Hat has good built-in oversight, where it monitors the cluster performance and records everything built inside the cluster besides OpenShift. Of course, Red Hat is a pioneer in this kind of auditing. 

Telecom clients can use OpenStack as their private cloud to access secure resources on demand. When they deploy to OpenShift, it's easier for them to have a cloud-like field on their own data center. OpenShift and OpenStack are integrated. It's an ideal combination. The infrastructure created in OpenStack is a robust private cloud solution. If the developer wants to consume resources within their organization per the utilization, OpenStack is the right platform for building their private cloud.

In terms of innovation, features, and functionality, a public cloud has much more than OpenStack by itself. I prefer OpenShift on AWS or Azure Cloud. That has made it easier for the customers to benefit because they don't need to worry about their managed solutions anymore. It's the customer's choice to manage services through OpenShift or on-prem. OpenShift can be run on all platforms, including VMware, public, private, etc. It's a great solution from a consumer choice perspective. 

The codes are customized and fixed only for their own environment, so it's more secure, but we cannot assure the client's security. However, the code is validated, and Red Hat support will address any vulnerabilities or security issues that arise.

The support costs are too high. 

I've used OpenShift for the last two years.

OpenShift is a highly stable product if you're using it as a managed service. 

OpenShift is scalable. 

I rate Red Hat support nine out of 10. 

Positive

Setting up OpenShift is fairly straightforward. It takes about a week to plan and another to deploy, so two weeks max. 

They can reduce prices because Kubernetes is open-source and freely available to customers. The license cost is for deploying on-prem, so it's costly to go to a client's location to deploy things compared to open source. If they reduce the cost, more customers will choose OpenShift.

I rate OpenShift Container Platform 10 out of 10. This is a great product. Red Hat has been in the field for more than 25 years. Each product they release is more innovative and cutting-edge. 

On-premises

We are moving as many applications as possible to a containerized environment. In terms of our environment, we have multiple data centers. One, of course, is for redundancy. Most of them are hot-warm. They're not hot-hot or hot-cold, depending on how you look at it, but pretty much everything that's important is fully redundant. That would be between our own private data centers and within Amazon across regions.

We have an on-premises and private cloud deployment. Amazon is the cloud provider. We've got some Azure out there too, but Amazon has been the primary focus.

Centralized control of container resources is most valuable.

There should be a simplification of the overall cluster environment. It should require fewer resources. Just to run a simple Hello World app, it requires about seven servers, and that's just crazy. I understand that it is fully redundant, but it's prohibitively expensive to get something simple going.

We've had a very difficult time going from version 3 to 4. We need to go to version 4 because of multiple network segments that may be running in a container and how we organize our applications. It's very difficult to have applications from different domains in the same container cluster. We've had a lot of problems with that. I find it to be an overcomplicated environment, and some of the other simpler containers may very well rise above this. 

It has probably been in use in the organization for about a year and a half.

It is fine. I've not heard anything negative about either the performance or the reliability.

Scalability is one of the primary reasons for going with a containerized environment like this. I have not heard that we've had any restrictions there, and I would be shocked and remarkably disappointed if we did. We have not hit any scalability issues yet.

I personally do not have any experience with them. I'm quite sure our low-level implementers do. 

They were just different JBoss containers. It really wasn't a containerized environment. We're looking at some of the AWS solutions.

I didn't do the initial setup. Some other people did that. We're all pretty uber geeks. So, I'm quite sure that we'd be able to figure it out naturally. Because it's a fully-featured and complex environment, you'd have to bone up on OpenShift to figure out how to install it properly, but I wouldn't expect it to be onerous.

Our implementation strategy was to start moving applications to be containerized and then implement them in the OpenShift. We were moving to OpenShift running on our own ECS on Amazon, but we have a lot of on-prem as well.

We're still working out the kinks. A part of that is our own dysfunction in terms of how we organize our apps, and then there is the problem with running apps from different domains in the same container. Some of those are our own self-imposed problems, but some of it is due to the OpenShift complexity.

We definitely hired different experts, but for the most part, we went out and hired people with the expertise, and now, they're employees. So, I'm quite sure there were consultants in there, but I don't know that offhand. 

We have not yet seen an ROI.

It depends on who you're talking to. For a large corporation, it is acceptable, other than the significant infrastructure requirements. For a small organization, it is in no way suitable, and we'd go for Amazon's container solution.

Additional costs are difficult for me to articulate because ours is a highly-complex environment even outside of it.

Ensure that you need all of the features that it has because otherwise, it's not worth the investment. Be careful what version you're getting into because that can be problematic to change after you've already invested in both the training and the infrastructure.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Considering some of the problems we've had, even though some of them are self-imposed, I would hope that a containerized environment would be flexible to be able to give us some options there. 

Red Hat is acquired by IBM, there is still a separate entity, but we are more on the partner side.

I work with IBM, and most of our solutions are on the OpenShift platform. I work with our business partners to enable and help them with the technical pre-sales and setup role. So, I'm not involved in production engineering systems but rather in demos, first application implementations, and POCs.

The user experience and security are some of the key features. There are two key differentiators that you have certainly worked on from the customer's perspective.

It is actually very well laid out for a computer product. But maybe, since it has security built into it, it is sometimes very difficult for people to grasp.

It is much easier to work with Kubernetes than OpenShift. On the inside, all the security and other aspects are very much required by the container.

It has a difficult learning curve. Those are the areas where, from a customer perspective, OpenShift is a little challenging compared to other Kubernetes solutions.

I have been using it for five years. 

I would rate the stability of this solution a ten out of ten.  It is very stable.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It is a scalable solution. Our customers are mostly enterprise businesses for Red Hat OpenShift. 

The technical support is good. One challenge is that sometimes it may be difficult to find the answers to your questions if you are not a Red Hat customer. Many of the answers require you to log in to the Red Hat portal. Unless you are a customer, you cannot ask for a solution. On those lines, it is a little difficult. Otherwise, technical support is good.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy and one being difficult. 

The initial setup is a little difficult because installing and configuring it is very involved. I don't see it as easy yet.

It's deployed on both the cloud or on-premises. On the cloud, it's much easier where it is managed OpenShift. If we go to managed offerings like Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, Azure OpenShift, or IBM Cloud, it is much easier to provision. But if it is self-managed, where you have to do everything yourself, it is difficult.

Red Hat OpenShift is self-managed, not from a cloud provider. If you are doing it on the cloud, then it is just a couple of hours. But if it is self-managed, then it will depend on the infrastructure, networking, and all that. It is still a team, but not yet a resource to have all that correctly set up.

It has been a good solution to deploy all containerized applications, like our AI and ML applications. We're not missing out on that capability.

The ROI is definitely much better because once it is set up and done, it is very easy to manage and have applications deployed. The user experience is very good. So once you have it in place, it's easy to do the day-to-day operations, and eventually, scalability and all those things become clear.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is a very good solution overall.

I would definitely recommend it to others.