Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

Our use case is primarily to do with DataPower. We wanted to configure DataPower and move away from appliances to a software-based solution, which is CP4I. DataPower is an IBM product, and we were using their firmware machine. We wanted to move from hardware or firmware to software, and CP4I is a software-based solution for DataPower, and that works primarily for any Kubernetes, but IBM had both. So we moved to Kubernetes, and on top of that, we had CP4I.

We did the implementation for one organization. It was widely used, and there was a huge customer base. It was primarily in the telecom domain. Those APIs were used, and we were getting a lot of incoming traffic and outgoing traffic through DataPower.

This solution is deployed on our private cloud.

The architecture is the best. The solution is scalable if you are on a container-based solution. I can easily spin a new container or create another image, so that was the benefit. It was scalable, and I could easily ramp up and ramp down the services based on the need.

OpenShift is not very old. They have built an entire layer on top of Kubernetes. Getting the solution quickly and troubleshooting quickly are both areas where I think it needs some work. 

It wasn't very problematic for us because we were getting the solution. They also needed to do some experiments in their own lab, because our use case was a little different, and we were one of the few who were implementing it for the first time with Cloud Pak.

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.

It wasn't stable while we were testing it, but now it's really stable.

I would rate technical support 4 out of 5. 

The deployment was very easy, which is another benefit. The orchestration and management were also very user-friendly and easy.

We used our own technical team for deployment. The team, including support and everything, was around five to six people. They were working on services also, like creating and deploying the APIs. We had the infrastructure team who were managing the clusters.

It also depends on the size and how many master nodes there are, how many worker nodes you have, and the mechanism you're using for logging. I was using Prometheus and Grafana. It all depends on how huge your architecture, how huge your infrastructure is.

We definitely did the ROI on this new implementation, and we found that in the long run, it was going to save a lot.

We paid for Cloud Pak for integration. It all depends on how many VMs or how many CPUs you are using. They do the licensing based on that.

It was not very cheap, but it was affordable for the organization. They had the enterprise ELA, which means they had the enterprise licensing agreement with IBM. So it worked for them, and it wasn't very expensive.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform as a container of network functions for customer's telecom industry. 

One practical example of how OpenShift Container Platform helps us is in deploying security updates quickly, which is superior compared to other solutions like Coverness, Canonical, Kubernetes, Rancher, etc. However, there are areas for improvement in networking, architecture, and cloud aspects of the solution.

I find the security features and use of operators in OpenShift Container Platform highly valuable. The container update capabilities and OpenShift data foundation for storage are also important features.

I believe OpenShift Container Platform can improve in networking, architecture, and cloud areas by reducing deployment time, lowering costs, and streamlining engineer resources. Additionally, I would like to see more Azure I/O functions in the next release.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for four years.

The platform is stable and capable, covering various customer needs.

The scalability of OpenShift Container Platform is excellent. It allows for quick scale-outs with new workers, making it very efficient and is used by eighteen engineers for telecom purposes, impacting business significantly.

Technical support from OpenShift is decent but could be improved in some locations.

I find the initial setup of OpenShift Container Platform to be moderately complex. The deployment involves steps like installation, configuration, and deploying common services on-premises. Deployment typically takes around four hours and involves a team of two to four people. I'm not involved in maintenance. 

I'm not familiar with pricing or financial aspects. In terms of effort versus benefit, it's worth it.

My advice for new users is to explore the platform thoroughly as it's complex yet reliable. I would rate their customer service a seven out of ten. Overall, I rate OpenShift Container Platform a nine as it's a good product with room for improvement.

We use the OpenShift Container Platform to deploy applications. It helps to deploy them from a monolithic to a microservices approach. 

The tool's most valuable features include high availability, scalability, and security. Other features like advanced cluster management, advanced cluster security, and Red Hat Quay make it powerful for businesses. It also comes with features like OpenShift Virtualization. 

OpenShift Container Platform needs to work on integrations. 

I have been using the solution for two years. 

I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. We encountered certain bugs and issues, which were resolved once we raised them with Red Hat. 

I rate OpenShift Container Platform's scalability a ten out of ten. The autoscale feature is particularly beneficial for managing varying traffic loads on the platform. It automatically deploys additional VMs in response to high traffic and scales down when the traffic returns to normal levels. This feature is more powerful when deploying the OpenShift Container Platform on cloud platforms like AWS or Azure, where it adapts to the fluctuating traffic demands. My company has 15 customers who are mostly enterprise businesses. 

Red Hat offers good technical support. 

Positive

I rate the product's deployment an eight out of ten. It was a little complex. There are two to three types of initial configuration, including UBI. UBI is complex. Deployment takes around two hours to complete. 

The deployment process involves some complexity. We create configuration files and distribute these files to the platforms we work on, such as VMware or Nutanix. Subsequently, we initiate the initial deployment and configuration of OpenShift.

The solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten. There is a subscription called OpenShift Plus, which offers additional features and products the vendor provides to complement the OpenShift Container Platform. These include ACM, Red Hat Quay, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation.

I recommend studying the documentation thoroughly and preparing the infrastructure according to the guidelines. Following the documentation is crucial, and most issues reported were related to network problems. Therefore, I suggest becoming proficient in troubleshooting network issues to identify and resolve problems. I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The principal use case of the platform is the transition and migration to the cloud. The second one is the modernization of our integration platforms.

The usability and the developer experience. The platform has a centralized consultant that is easy to use for our development, operations and security teams.

The price needs to be improved in OpenShift Container Platform.

When I choose this, the product is the first factor that we have to make a long analysis to compare the real cost for the other services. However, price is high.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for five years. We started with OpenShift Container Platform and now we have OpenShift Container Platform tools. 

I would rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The solution is difficult to set up because of the limitations of the premises. 

Overall, I would rate the product a nine out of ten.

I usually help companies design their environments, find workloads efficiencies, suggest best practices, and provide an overview of the environment, which involves consultation and a focused-oriented approach. I also deploy and develop solutions for companies. I do end-to-end deployment for companies.

OpenShift Container Platform is used by companies moving from their old monolithic environment to a microservices-oriented architecture. If a company wants to do a BAU sort of stuff, they already have OpenShift Container Platform, but they need someone to drive it or work on its day-to-day automation while looking at its integration with Ansible or Puppet.

People choose OpenShift Container Platform because it's an open-source and Red Hat Kubernetes product. Red Hat has made Kubernetes command-line oriented, obscure, and hard to learn. OpenShift is easier to learn for a newbie, especially for someone who has not used CLI. The support structure of OpenShift is pretty good and absolutely terrific. The bug fixes and patching capabilities, along with the whole ecosystem of OpenShift Container Platform, are very mature from a technical standpoint or from an enterprise standpoint. If you are a big company and invest a lot of money in certain solutions, you need and expect top-notch support and features of very high quality. OpenShift Container Platform is a very good way to get in started in this whole containerization journey for some companies because the underlying product is from Red Hat, which has its own benefits. The aforementioned factors play a role in the decision-making process of most companies.

I have only been working for two years on OpenShift Container Platform, and I have only seen good stuff so far. Hopefully, in the next two years, I will have a bit more hands-on experience to find out some pain points in the product.

There are no perfect tools. Many things can be done better in a product, but I don't know how to make it possible. Once I have done enough with the tool, I should be able to give you a bit more insight into the product's pain points.

The interface could be a bit more useful or better. The product's interface is a bit buggy.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for a couple of years. I am a consultant who specializes in Red Hat products. I am a Red Hat-certified engineer.

The tool is scalable enough because it is available across the clouds, like AWS or Azure. You can have the tool deployed on-premises too. I think it's a pretty scalable tool.

The solution's technical support has been pretty good. Red Hat offers the best support to its users.

I am a person who is a bit more infrastructure-focused. JBoss is a middleware software, and I don't really work in that space. I am more into the underlying infrastructure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Containers and Kubernetes, and that sort of stuff, including OpenShift and OpenStack. I am not really into the application layer.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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. 

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.

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.