Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

We can deploy microservices on the fly. The time to market has improved for our organization. If any issues are found or any incident is reported, fixes or hotfixes can be done within a fraction of a second. These KPIs are the improvements.

In terms of security, it supports user management. An authentication and authorization solution is embedded in that. There is also certificate management in terms of how it rotates the certificates and the kind of TLS mechanism it uses for the end-users as well as for the communication within a cluster. It also allows our images to be scanned before deployment.

OpenShift comes with a lot of marketplace operator-based solutions. It also allows any open-source operator-based solution. It could also be a Helm Chart-based solution for deploying any cloud-native application or workload.

OpenShift is much better than others as an upstream project for Kubernetes. It also has certain features that are not there in any other flavor of Kubernetes. For example, Source-to-Image (S2I) is a wonderful feature in OpenShift where your code can be in the source repository. It can be built and deployed with a click of a button. That helps the developers' community to deploy their code and see the results on the fly.

In OpenShift, there are a lot of things that are good as compared to any other Kubernetes flavor. The console or the GUI of OpenShift is awesome. You can do a lot of things from there. You can perform administration tasks as well as development tasks. 

The RBAC user management that comes packaged with OpenShift is not there in other Kubernetes. That's a very nice feature. 

The upgrade mechanism is also very good. The upgrades are pushed by Red Hat, and with just the click of a button, your OpenShift cluster gets upgraded. That is another very nice feature. These are a couple of things that I like.

A lot of improvements are required in OpenShift when it's deployed on a public cloud such as AWS, GCP, or AKS. 

OpenShift has certain restrictions in terms of managing the cluster when it's running on a public cloud. For example, identity and access management integration with the IM of AWS is quite difficult. It requires some open-source tools to integrate. This is one area where I always see room for improvement. 

In addition, the RBAC access is only controlled by the OpenShift internal mechanism, whereas the authorization part can be handled by any public cloud. We are already managing and maintaining users in the cloud environment. So, a repetitive or duplicate RBAC mechanism is not required. 

I have been working with this solution since 2018. It has been more than four years.

It's a stable solution. However, most organizations are lagging in upgrading the versions because of various reasons, such as business downtime and the risk involved behind that. If you don't upgrade it on time, then there will definitely be bugs. It normally doesn't create many issues, but we have had instances where when we go to the Red Hat product support team, they always mention going for the next upgrade or the next possible upgrade so that a bug is completely removed. However, it's not always possible to do that. So, stability-wise, it's quite stable, but no product can be perfect. In the version that we are running, there are a couple of bugs, and we have to live with them, unless and until we upgrade to the next version.

Because it's on a public cloud, it's very easy to scale up.

In terms of its users, we have close to 100 users. There are a couple of DevOps engineers in that, and then there are administrators who manage and maintain the cluster. The rest of them are developers. These are the primary users.

It's being used quite extensively, at least in two of our markets. I have no idea about plans to increase the usage of this product, but I also don't see any reduction in its usage in the near future.

Their support is very good. We have a premium subscription for our organization, and we get support whenever we need it. It's quite good. It's the backbone of this product. I would rate them a nine out of ten. Sometimes, the support professionals work from different geographical regions, and when there is a shift change, we lose some time. It happens rarely, but it has been a cause of concern a couple of times.

As a partner for helping us create the platform that we need, I would rate Red Hat an eight out of ten. In terms of support, they provide all the required commands, code pieces, or files required to troubleshoot the issue. They also provide support during any new installation or upgrade.

Positive

When I started working on this project, OpenShift was already there. I don't know if and what it was migrated from. In the accounts that I'm handling, we had OpenShift, and applications were containerized and migrated to OpenShift.

We use other Red Hat products. We use Red Hat OpenStack, and we also use GlusterFS storage from Red Hat, which comes as a part of OpenStack. Apart from that, most of the virtual machines are already using RHEL. OpenStack, for us, is on a private cloud. It's not as friendly as AWS public cloud. Integration-wise, it's seamless, but if we want auto-scaling at the OpenStack level, it's not possible for us. 

An advantage of using multiple Red Hat products together is in terms of the support we get from them. That's very good. If we consider any Kubernetes flavor running on any public cloud, getting support on the components we have deployed is difficult, but Red Hat supports that. Whatever we have deployed, they can provide support on that. The support provided by Red Hat is really great, and that's why they're asking for a premium cost for that.

It was already done before I came, but I know that it was done using Ansible stack and Ansible code. Its deployment is quite straightforward. The 4x versions of OpenShift are very easy to deploy. The older 3x versions were quite difficult to deploy, but in the latest versions, especially on a public cloud, it manages everything. It spins up your cloud virtual machines, installs OpenShift on them, and provides you the endpoint to access it.

If the Ansible code or scripts are available and ready, on a production system, it takes about one hour to one and a half hours. It also depends on how many virtual machines you require to install OpenShift.

Its price is a bit high because it's a premium product, but as long as the business is ready to pay for that, it's okay. 

I would recommend evaluating the product thoroughly for your requirements. That's because OpenShift comes with a lot of bells and whistles, and most organizations don't need that. It also comes with auto-managed components. If you are looking for less-managed components on a Kubernetes cluster, then Red Hat OpenShift is the only answer.

We didn't consider building our own container platform. There are different flavors available for Kubernetes. We use OpenShift, EKS, AKS, and GKE. Even OKE is coming up. It depends on what different markets of our organization prefer and what is cost-effective for them.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten because we are quite happy with it. There are a couple of restrictions in terms of managing clusters on a public cloud, but other than that, it has a lot of inbuilt components, which are helpful for managing the cluster better.

We have a monolithic application, and our primary use case is to implement microservices. We needed Kubernetes, but instead of going with plain Kubernetes, we chose OpenShift because it has a well-designed UI, more advanced features, and better security.

The product provides great visibility in the form of metrics over our systems. The infrastructure team monitors the platform with their personal tools and dashboards and can see how it deals with loads, security threats, if bugs are present, etc. Then they can send reports to the rest of us in the organization.

The solution's CodeReady Workspaces reduce project onboarding time in the region of 10-15%.  

The CodeReady Workspaces also reduce the time to market; a rival vendor released an offering we had to counter, so we used the platform to implement and deploy our counter in three to four days.   

One of the best features is monitoring; we can see metrics via visual aids when the load increases, for example.

The software is user-friendly and straightforward to use, which is favorable to a developer.

The system also takes care of itself regarding scaling; the platform can up and downscale automatically depending on demand.  

With OpenShift, there is no need to learn new technology, as the skills required for Kubernetes carry over; the commands are interchangeable. Therefore, OpenShift is a developer-friendly tool.

We use the solution on the vendor's OpenStack Platform, and in terms of the ease and speed with which it enables us to create infrastructure, it's very straightforward. We can set up an environment within a day or two, and it's a very convenient way to develop.  

The infrastructure created by the solution on the OpenStack Platform is very robust; we created communication metrics: a shield where all VMs, master, and worker nodes communicate from subnet to subnet. We designed these and gave them to Red Hat, where they developed the ISO clients for deployment from day one. After gaining hands-on experience, we could create our own and implement a cluster.   

OpenShift is highly effective at creating infrastructure that can be flexibly sized to meet specific needs on the OpenStack Platform. The minimum basic configuration is three masters, three infra, and two worker nodes. When a load starts passing through this setup, and we reach a certain threshold, say the worker machines are running at 60%, we can add another node, another VM. We have added eight to ten VMs in this way before. After experimenting with different configurations, we get a feel of which one to implement for a specific use case within the production environment. If we want to scale up, we add worker nodes; nothing else is required.  

OpenShift provides solid security throughout the stack and the software supply chain; the solution has an inbuilt image registry and doesn't allow outside images, making the system more secure. The platform also features a Compliance Operator, which assesses the compliance of API resources and the nodes running the cluster.  

I want to see more incorporation of native automation features; then, we could write a code, deploy it directly to OpenShift, and allow it to take care of the automated process. Using this method, we could write one application and have elements copied or pasted to other applications in the development process.

There are some gaps in the solution's security, so there is room for improvement in the security and compliance features. Protection against ransomware attacks would be welcome, much like in Google Apigee.

We've been using the solution for two years.

OpenShift's current stability as of 4.10 is excellent; I don't see any issues. From 4.0 to 4.6, the product wasn't stable, and in many cases, nodes went down, taking down other nodes, and we had to follow up on clusters a lot. After 4.8, the stability issues were fixed, and we haven't had a problem in a year.

The platform is highly scalable; we simply need to add VMs to accommodate the amount of traffic we have, which is a straightforward task. Eight to ten VMs is sufficient for millions of users, and we can easily implement them in a cloud-based or on-prem environment. There are around 50 total users across our Dev Teams, and the solution was able to support one million users of our applications per second without an issue. 

Overall, the customer support is good. There's a ticket process with a priority level from one to three, indicating the highest and lowest priority, respectively, with two in the middle. Level one means production is impacted, and support responds rapidly to help with a client team. There are some delays with the lower-priority tickets, but they are there when we need them most. They could have better internal communication so they are all on the same page, as we are sometimes asked the same questions by different people and have to re-explain the issue.

Neutral

We previously used Kubernetes and switched because it's more complex from the developer, management, and maintenance perspectives. It doesn't have a proper UI, so knowledge of Linux is required to operate the CLI. However, with OpenShift, a newcomer can log in and run the solution using the UI, which is an excellent capability for a development company. OpenShift isn't restrictive; anyone can use it, making it a good choice.

In addition to the UI, OpenShift has more advanced features, such as the Internal Image Registry, which can restrict malware images. The product is also straightforward to deploy and has good integrations with other tools like Jenkins.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took two days. At most, two staff members are required to deploy and maintain the solution.

The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We recently experienced a Log4j vulnerability issue, and the OpenShift team released a patch to which we upgraded, but they could have done a better job.

Regarding the platform helping us meet regulatory constraints, I have yet to deal with this area.

In terms of automation, most people I know use Github, Jenkins, or some other third-party platform and integrate with OpenShift.

We didn't consider building our own container platform because Kubernetes is an excellent platform, and OpenShift is built on top of it. We're satisfied with what we have and see no need to start from the beginning.  

Red Hat is an excellent partner; we never shared code, but we used to have review meetings where we shared room for improvement with the product and gave some suggestions. For example, we would like a backup process or system implemented, and we have communicated this to Red Hat.  

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.