Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

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. 

OpenShift Connect Platform is on a private cloud setup. There, we deploy all of our applications.

They have built on top of Kubernetes. Most of the Kubernetes latest technology is already supported by the solution. The only thing is, we need to change our view of the routes. 

The stability needs improvement. 

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for one year. 

Stability wise, I think there were few issues, but I'm not sure whether it was on an organization level or it was from OpenShift. The stability is a seven out of ten. 

The initial setup is not very complex but it is not as easy as Kubernetes. 

We have to pay for the license. 

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

It's a good tool and a very comprehensive tool. There are a lot of things to explore. I'm still exploring, I'm not done with it yet.

The UI is good.

It’s user-friendly.

The product offers good customization.

There will be things that can improve, however, at this stage I cannot give a point or two. Maybe after a few months, I can give more details.

One improvement I can suggest is for the people who are not very competent with technology, for the product to give some tips on the screen, to make it easier for them. Things are there and the documentation is there, however, there still needs to be quick guides available. Then it will be easier for people to adapt and learn. Rather than going to big documentation, if there is some quick help or quick guide available and then it would help people to quickly adapt and learn.

It still has to improve compatibility with a couple of more platforms. It works with many however we are still trying to improvise more on a couple of other platforms. Integration seems to take a little bit of time. It would be nice if it was expanded and simplified a bit.

I’ve been using the solution for the last five or six months.

The solution is stable. It works for me. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn’t crash or freeze.

It is a scalable product. So far, we are not using it in production, so we currently have below 50 users. When it will be in production then there will be more.

If the testing goes well we do plan to increase usage.

I’m getting good support so far. I am happy with them.

We did previously use a different solution. Both are good products. They each have their own benefits.

I don’t have a license. I don’t deal with licensing directly.

I’d rate the solution seven out of ten. We haven’t used it too long. It’s still in production. After six months, we’ll likely have a better idea of how it is going.

The product is used to deploy applications. We provide the base image that has the fundamentals for the BPM product. Then, it's in our docker farm and another image is created that extends the base image. The second image adds application-specific requirements on it. Basically, it's layering the application on top of the base image and a new image is created and that is deployed onto OpenShift.

The OpenShift platform is built on the Docker Ecosystem. The image we create is easily portable. OpenShift is built on top of the Docker Ecosystem which is one advantage.

It has run time. It has all the binders required. Once built and once tested that it is working, it'll work wherever it's deployed. 

On OpenShift, it's easy to scale applications. We can easily scale up or scale down.

It's a container platform. It uses resources efficiently - specifically on the CPU RAM limit. We can create as many containers as needed. The underlying resources are utilized well.

It's intuitive and user-friendly. They have a very good UI, through which we can add all the artifacts required for OpenShift. Also, they are providing API through which also we can work on the projects. Apart from that, they also provide the CLI, a command-line interface. In my view, I think it's very good. I don't see anything more that is needed.

Everything is good. I don't see any need or any improvement that can be done. They cover CI/CD and I have not seen something which is missed in this product.

The initial setup can be hard.

It takes some time to learn everything. There's a learning curve. 

I've used the solution for four or five years. 

It's very stable. We've never had any failures. It was always up and running. It's very reliable. 

Our company is quite large. I'm not sure how many people are actually using the solution. We have a small team, and, of us, about four are using it. However, that's not indicative of the company as a whole. 

So far, the scalability is good. 

We're using it regularly, on a daily basis. 

I haven't reached out to support. For this product, we are focused more on the application side. We use the platform, however, our focus is on the application side. Whatever happens, the team that maintains and does the upgrade of the platform, interacts with the vendor. We never interacted with the vendor for OpenShift.

I tried AWS. It's also a cloud product, however, not exactly the same as OpenShift. They offer a different set of services. It's not a past product platform, it is a service product. I have used AWS, which offers cloud services. We cannot really compare both of them.

At the outset, the initial setup was not easy. The learning curve is always there. The lack of materials at that point in time also made learning a little bit hard. However, after some point, we had very good documentation and we could easily handle the product. We could easily start working on it. It's gotten better over time. For the first three or four months, it was hard, however, after that, it was easy.

The first deployment took around four to five months as we had to develop an agent data rate. It took some time. However, the changes, usually, could be done in a week or so. It was not a long time. Every week we can easily make the changes.

There's no maintenance. We don't do it. We use the platform and some other team will automatically do the upgrade. We don't have to do it ourselves. It's done by a separate team.

I'd rate the solution four out of ten in terms of ease of setup.

We handled the implementation ourselves. The solution does not offer any consultants or integrators. We managed everything through the UI.

I cannot speak about the pricing. We never interact with the vendor for that. There is a separate team who takes care of the platform and they work with the vendor for pricing.

While my company has some sort of partnership with eh solution, I am just an end-user.

It's my understanding I'm using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I would recommend this product. It's easy to develop applications and it gives you the option to manage your cloud on a private platform. We don't have to rely on public infrastructure. In the private infrastructure, we can have our server and use this product and make the application secure.

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

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.

The platform's most valuable features are its regulatory compliance and enterprise support. It does not offer significantly unique features compared to Kubernetes or Docker. The primary advantage is its extensive support and integration with Red Hat's solutions.

The product's setup process could be easier. 

We have been using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for approximately one year.

The product is quite stable and reliable, offering robust performance compared to other solutions.

We are currently working with a multi-cluster environment, and the product scalability and response time are impressive, with nodes performing optimally.

Compared to IBM support, Red Hat's support team is more responsive.

The setup process is considerably more complex than that of Docker or Kubernetes. Its multi-node cluster setup involves a more intricate and time-consuming method.

OpenShift's core-based licensing model provides significant benefits regarding enterprise support and scalability. Despite its high cost, it offers valuable features and support that justify the investment.

The product is expensive. 

I rate the platform an eight. 

We use OpenShift Container Platform for load balancing, scaling, self-healing, and distributed key database features. It helps us monitor cluster configuration.

The product has a CentOS operating system providing a stable and compatible foundation for hosting Red Hat OpenShift clusters. It helps in creating an architecture framework automatically. It makes it possible to control the CentOS API server and Kubernetes console.

We encounter difficulties while accessing the environment and managing the cluster. This particular area needs improvement.

We have been using OpenShift Container Platform as a partner for seven to eight months.

The product's stability is manageable.

The product is scalable. It is suitable for medium and enterprise businesses.

The technical technical support services need updating with changing times.

Positive

We have used SAP before. We switched to OpenShift Container Platform for better support facilities. We are their gold partner. However, the support services have needed improvement in the last six to seven months.

The initial setup process is easy. We have a dedicated team for data installation. It takes around three months to complete. The product is easy to maintain as well. We have a team of 35 to 40 executives to work on it.

I advise others to learn about the tool, including certification, warning alerts, security, and monitoring features. It isn't easy to manage the cluster using it.

I rate OpenShift Container PlatformOpen an eight out of ten.