Red Hat OpenShift Reviews

Our company uses it as a platform as a service. We have business units with developers who deploy their containerized applications in OpenShift. We have a team that supports the infrastructure of clusters all over the world. We run thousands of applications on it.

It's deployed on-prem and in the cloud.

One benefit is that it provides you with the flexibility and efficiency of cloud-native stacks while enabling you to meet regulatory constraints. They have a catalog of the ratings of the base images that we use to build our containers. We reference that to show our security team that an application we're building has passed the security with vulnerabilities that are acceptable. We won't deploy it if something is not unacceptable.

In terms of our organization, the business units are able to deploy changes to the code rapidly. They can test it on the test cluster and, once it's tested, they can deploy an image in seconds. It has saved us time. Our guys are continuing to move to the OpenShift platform from whatever they were on, whether it was a mainframe or a standalone machine. And they're doing that for the cost savings.

In addition, a perfect example of the solution's automated processes and their effect on development time is the source-to-image feature. The developer can use that tool to improve his code's quality and it saves him some time. He doesn't have to understand the specifics of building a container.

There is also an advantage due to the solution's CodeReady Workspaces. That definitely helps reduce project onboarding time. There are prebuilt packages that they use. We have a lot of Java and some .NET and Python and the CodeReady packages help. Conservatively, that feature has reduced onboarding time by 50 percent. It also helps reduce the time to market by about the same amount.

Overall, Red Hat is a handy tool to have, like an electric screwdriver instead of a manual one. We don't have to write things manually. We can use what they've already written to make us more productive.

The developers seem to like the source-to-image feature. That makes it easy for them to deploy an application from code into containers, so they don't have to think about things. They take it straight from their code into a containerized application. If you don't have OpenShift, you have to build the container and then deploy the container to, say, EKS or something like that. It's a little different.

In terms of the solution’s security throughout the stack and the software supply chain, it meets our needs. It's excellent as far as we're concerned. It goes right along with the Kubernetes role-based assets control. OpenShift's security features for running business-critical applications are excellent. A lot of our external-facing applications have been protected. We do use Apigee for a lot of it, but we also do security scans so we don't expose something to a known vulnerability.

The software-defined networking part of it caused us quite a bit of heartburn. We ran into a lot of problems with the difference between on-prem and cloud, where we had to make quite a number of modifications. That heartburn meant millions of dollars for us. That was a year ago and the product has matured since then. They've since resolved it, so it's not really an issue anymore.

The storage part of it was also problematic. There were quite a few things that really hampered us. But it's much better now.

I've been using OpenShift for five years.

It's extremely stable. We haven't had any outages that were caused by the software. There have been issues due to human error on our side, such as not buying enough memory for the host. 

It's also extremely scalable. On our dev cluster, we auto-scale from 50 nodes up to 130 on a weekend, when there is a need. It also scales itself down to save money over the weekend. When people start hitting it on Monday, it scales back up, seamlessly.

In terms of users, we have about 20,000 developers, all over the world. It's used 24 hours a day. We have centralized development clusters that are being used all the time because we have deployments on every continent except Antarctica.

We're moving off mainframes and monolithic apps into the containerized world. Increasing our usage is a stated management decision in our organization. OpenShift has been growing in our company in the last couple of years.

We use the tech support daily and they're pretty good. There are always going to be a few rough spots, but most of the time they're responsive.

You may get one support guy who doesn't understand the solution or the problem and they give a wrong solution, and we all know that it's the wrong solution. The problem is that we have people who have different first languages, so they don't always phrase the question well. I can see where a tech support guy might get a little confused because of the wording of an issue.

Red Hat, as a partner for helping to create the platform we need, has shared code, information, and ideas. They've been very helpful and open. We have a couple of technical account managers who meet with us once a month. One is in the UK and the other is in the US. They're very responsive when it comes to any problems we run into.

Previously, all we used were standalone Unix machines. We didn't use a different container orchestration, like Mesos. We never considered building our own. We took a look at OpenShift a long time ago and it was really the best at the time.

Version 3 is very complex but it's 1,000 times better than five years ago, and it's even much better than it was a year ago. The deployment was a pain point for our company, but it's irrelevant for someone buying it now. They have fixed a lot of stuff.

We have huge deployments, hundreds of nodes in a cluster. The deployment time is relative to the size of the cluster, but the deployment time has gone from a week to a day for a 100-node cluster. Red Hat has improved the process considerably.

It provides us with good value.

There weren't a whole lot of options. There was Mesos or home-grown or Kubernetes using Rancher. There wasn't anything that really compared to OpenShift at the time. OpenShift was a complete package. There were a lot of things you had to do manually with the other products. The Kubernetes world has changed a lot since then.

The fact that Red Hat was open source was a factor and the security was what we really liked about it. They use CRI-O, which is a secure runtime container, as opposed to using Docker, which is super-insecure running as root. Red Hat is definitely the leader in the container security world.

You have to understand what you're getting into and you have to be committed to upgrading it. There are some people in the world who say they'll never want to upgrade it again. With Kubernetes, if you're going to get into OpenShift, you have to "sign the bottom line," so to speak, that says, "I'm going to update it," because the Kubernetes world moves at a fast pace.

In terms of container orchestration, we are totally OpenShift, but we use other Red Hat products like Linux and Tower. We do have standalone Linux machines that we manage, but we'll be migrating some of the applications from those standalone machines into the OpenShift container world. That's where the cost savings are.

I'm currently engaged in developing containerized microservices applications, managing thirteen modules within an OpenShift environment. These modules collectively handle automated payment processes for various services. My role involves closely monitoring these modules on OpenShift, ensuring optimal resource allocation such as storage and CPU usage. Additionally, I'm tasked with implementing solutions for scenarios of resource overutilization, including autoscaling capabilities to accommodate high traffic periods efficiently. I also focus on scaling down resources during low-traffic periods to optimize cost and performance.

OpenShift has significantly enhanced and streamlined our organization's application development and deployment processes. It offers more than just Kubernetes clusters, providing additional features like the Dashboard, which greatly simplifies tasks for developers. Moreover, OpenShift adds an extra layer of security, ensuring that applications run securely with features like hashing upgrades.

It offers a vast repository of images and tools tailored for deployment and application development. This rich ecosystem makes deployment and performance optimization much easier compared to our previous methods. Additionally, by opting for OpenShift, we gain access to comprehensive support from their expert team.

It streamlines our development and deployment processes through automation. From development to deployment, all processes are automated, providing efficiency and productivity gains. Developers can submit their changes for approval, and once approved, the deployment to production can proceed without requiring manual intervention. This streamlined workflow not only makes the process easier but also enhances productivity across the team.

The integration capabilities of OpenShift with other platforms and services have greatly enhanced our workflow. When you opt for OpenShift, whether through a subscription or by installing it on your servers, you gain access to a comprehensive support system provided by Red Hat. OpenShift features a marketplace with a wide array of operators, facilitating seamless integration and deployment of various services. For instance, popular services like Elasticsearch can be easily integrated into the cluster directly from the user interface and dashboard, making the installation process much simpler and more user-friendly.

The broad support for multiple languages and frameworks in OpenShift has positively impacted the productivity of our development teams. We've observed significant improvements in our tools and team collaboration since adopting this platform. As we continue to enhance our processes, it's evident that most of our development team members are actively engaged and contributing, particularly our dedicated engineers and architects.

When comparing the efficiency of OpenShift Container Orchestration to other solutions we've considered, such as Kubernetes, we find that OpenShift aligns well with our existing architecture and team structure. Our approach resembles the architecture of OpenShift, with a team leader overseeing multiple workers.

One of the most valuable features of OpenShift for our operations is its auto-scaling capability. This feature is crucial for handling high loads or traffic spikes in our applications. With OpenShift, we have the flexibility to scale our applications up or down as needed, providing a significant benefit to our operations.

OpenShift offers robust tools for monitoring application traffic, allowing us to analyze client requests and other business-related metrics. This enables us to effectively manage our applications and make informed decisions to optimize performance.

An enhancement to consider for the future might involve incorporating a comprehensive solution for CI/CD tailored specifically for OpenShift.

I have been working with it for three years.

I would rate its stability abilities eight out of ten.

I would rate its scalability capabilities seven out of ten. More than three thousand users use it daily.

We are experiencing dissatisfaction with the technical support as we often receive delayed responses when raising questions. I would rate it five out of ten.

Neutral

We previously worked with Kubernetes cluster, but we switched to using OpenShift, as advised by our architect. This change is aimed at achieving greater scalability and stability for our product, as we've encountered challenges with our setup at the time.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward.

We manually installed the deployment three months ago, utilizing grid protection systems. I have been handling both development and production environments. In the development phase, I build deployments from scratch, while for production, I collaborate with another vendor. I manage all steps of installation and ensure smooth migration to the production environment.

The cost is quite high. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

I have not used it on IBM Cloud. It is basically used on AWS and Azure. I am using a standard OpenShift.

OpenShift is a container orchestration tool. We have been using it for hosting products on container-based applications.

Actually, what happens is that the solution gives or provides that kind of stability and much more. It gives a good production environment that is much more stable and error-free. That's how the solution contributes to the productivity of my whole organization.

If we compare OpenShift and Kubernetes Harbor, OpenShift is derived from Kubernetes. However, some of the most prominent features of OpenShift are its security services and some of the policies, especially security policies that are some of the add-ons and the best things I like in OpenShift.

Some things need to be improved in the solution. Some of the storage services and integrations with third-party tools should be made possible.

I think some more things will come in, like the projects of CNCFs. I think that verified CNCF projects will be integrated into OpenShift.

I have been using OpenShift for eighteen months.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I think the support is fine. It depends upon some of the SLAs and how things or how the SLAs have been maintained. Overall, it is fine, so I will rate the support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Initially, the setup seemed to be complex, but the recommendations from Red Hat, and especially on the CoreOS systems, for quality, stability, and security purposes, it seems to be complex. However, once we get hands-on experience, it is very, very useful and easily maintainable as well.

I have seen a return on investment, and it depends upon the types and the nature of some of the most critical applications that have been hosted on the OpenShift infrastructure. Considering in terms of stability, performance-wise, and security-wise, if everything goes fine, I think its return on investment is justified.

The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range. I don't think the price is very much of an issue for any organization against the services being delivered over the cloud and the services of OpenSuite.

If any organization is just working on open-source technologies and wants to have enterprise support and enterprise-grade solutions, then we must go with OpenShift.

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

We use the solution to split monolithic into microservices. I mostly use OpenShift as a Kubernetes distribution. 

I am impressed with the product's security features. 

The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes. 

I am working with the solution for four years. 

The tool is stable. 

The cloud version is scalable. The solution's on-prem scalability can be improved. 

The tool's support should be improved. 

Positive

The tool's deployment takes a matter of hours to complete. You need a team of three to four to maintain the solution. 

The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The tool requires knowledgeable people to manage it. 

The solution's CodeReady Workspaces reduce project onboarding time by around 10%. 

OpenShift's CodeReady Workspaces also help reduce time to market by about 10%.  

Overall, the solution's security throughout the stack and software supply chain is excellent.

OpenShift offers great security thanks to role-based access control and segregation between projects. The security is very good, even for mission-critical projects.   

The product provides us with the flexibility and efficiency of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints. Furthermore, it doesn't require us to learn a whole new vocabulary, there is no vast stepping stone regarding configuration and management, and we aren't cloud-locked. If we want to move our OpenShift solution to another cloud provider, or even our private data center, that's doable. The tool is better in terms of application management than anything found in the cloud, and one of the main selling points of OpenShift is the abstraction of infrastructure. 

There is room for improvement regarding the secret management and the integrated vault. I want easier node management and more user-friendly scripts for installing master and worker nodes.

In addition, the configuration for addons onto OpenShift could be more straightforward; for example, if I want to integrate with a general monitoring solution. 

We've been using the solution for almost eight years. 

The solution is stable. 

OpenShift is a scalable tool; we have 100-200 users, primarily developers and DevOps staff.

I rate the support a six out of ten, the knowledge base is difficult to navigate, and the documentation is complex.

Neutral

We previously used an on-premise server and implemented a massive change by moving from on-prem to AWS cloud provider to OpenShift.

The initial setup was complex; it was pretty complicated to set up the master, replication, turn ingress and egress, router, and configure the worker nodes, particularly the automatic scaling part of the worker nodes.

It isn't easy to quantify precisely, but we've seen a very good return on our investment.

The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We did not use the solution's automation for development; everything before building and deploying an image on an OpenShift project is done on another program or system, with no interaction. We do the verification and security aspects of the build artifact in OpenShift, but we don't use it to build and run the package, etc.

Red Hat could have been a better partner for helping us create the platform we need, as they weren't particularly helpful or reactive with concern to our specific requirements. They didn't step up as a partner but as more of a vendor; they provided the product in a commercial sense but not with a partnership mindset.

We use another Red Hat product, the Ansible Automation Platform. 

We didn't integrate Ansible and OpenShift, but we once had to connect them, which wasn't straightforward. 

Those considering implementing the solution should go to learn.openshift.com, where they can play around and see if they like the product. The hosted version of OpenShift is better than the dedicated one, as you don't have to manage your own node, deployment, or infrastructure. So, for those who can afford it, I recommend the instance hosted on the Red Hat system.

Our use cases for OpenShift are for payments and internal bank transactions.

What I like best about OpenShift is that it can reduce some of the costs of having multiple applications because you can just move them into small container applications. For example, applications don't need to run for twenty days, only to be used up by Monday. Through OpenShift, you can move some of the small applications into any cloud.

I also find the design of OpenShift good.

My team has found some bugs in OpenShift due to continuous integration, and this is an area for improvement in the platform. RedHat should fix the bugs.

Another area for improvement in OpenShift is that upgrading clusters can be challenging, resulting in downtime.

Application support also needs improvement in OpenShift because the platform doesn't support all applications in the cloud.

I'd like upgraded storage in the next release of OpenShift, especially when I need to do a DR exercise. It would also be good if the platform allows mirroring with another cluster, or more portability in terms of moving applications to another cluster.

We're using OpenShift for the last two years.

OpenShift is a good solution, stability-wise.

The performance of OpenShift is good, but sometimes, it can be bad, depending on the network, but that's okay. That's normal. You won't have a very bad experience with OpenShift, performance-wise. You'll experience some issues from it, but it's still a good platform.

As OpenShift is on-premise, there's not much scalability from it. My team is still coming up with new clusters, and some clusters have been deployed as well, but my company isn't ready to scale OpenShift at the moment.

My team contacts OpenShift support whenever there's an issue, and it was a very bad experience. The response time needs improvement, and support didn't give straightforward answers.

On a scale of one to five, my rating for OpenShift support is a two.

The setup for OpenShift was complex, and it can only be done by a consultant. My team can do an on-premise setup and automation, but a consultant has to certify the cluster, otherwise, you can't get support from RedHat.

Deployment for OpenShift can be completed within six to seven hours depending on the infrastructure. Otherwise, it could take more than one day.

My rating for the initial setup of OpenShift is three out of five. RedHat will check the setup or configuration, and if the customer is ready to take over the process, then it's good, but what's usually happening is that the vendor isn't providing detailed guidelines, so my rating is more on the neutral side.

We used a RedHat consultant for the deployment of OpenShift.

The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees.

We're currently evaluating a product from IBM.

My company uses OpenShift currently, but it's still under RFP.

OpenShift is deployed on-premises on a disconnected cluster for a financial institution.

Some maintenance is required for OpenShift. Whenever there's a bug, my team does the maintenance, but there's still a need to check with RedHat support on how to fix the bug. My team can't do the maintenance without support from RedHat developers.

Less than ten people use OpenShift within the company.

I would recommend OpenShift to others because it's a good tool for the financial sector versus public clouds such as AWS and Azure. I'd also advice others that if it's a public cloud, it's easy to manage, but if it's on-premise, then it can't be managed.

My rating for OpenShift is seven out of ten.

My company is a customer of OpenShift.

These are for some of our applications where we wanted high resiliency. In the traditional VM environment, what used to happen is that everything was dependent on the infrastructure. We wanted to move away from that particular concept. Once an application becomes stateless, it should not be dependent upon platform-related things. We wanted it to be more robust and perform at a much better efficiency. We also wanted higher availability.

We are getting everything from OpenShift at this point in time. What we're doing here is pretty much basic. Any of Kubernetes could have done it because all we're looking for is being able to manage the complete cluster.

Its interface is good. The other part is the seamless integration with the stack that I have. Because my stack is mostly of Red Hat, which is running on top of VMware virtualization, I have had no issues with integrating both of these and trying to install them. We had a seamless integration with the other non-Red Hat products as well.

One of the features that I've observed in Tanzu Mission Control is that I can manage multiple Kubernetes environments. For instance, one of my lines of business is using OpenShift OKD; another one wants to use Google Anthos, and somebody else wants to use VMware Tanzu. If I have to manage all these, Tanzu Mission Control is giving me the opportunity to completely manage all of my Kubernetes clusters, whereas, with OpenShift, I can only manage a particular area. I can't manage other Kubernetes clusters. I would like to have the option to manage all Kubernetes clusters with OpenShift.

I would like to have self-service capability. A lot of developers want to become independent today, and they don't want to depend on the Infra teams for managing, provisioning, etc. If we can give a self-service capability, in terms of building a particular Kubernetes cluster end-to-end, to developers, that would be a plus. That's the ask of the hour.

I have been using this solution for the past one and a half years.

It is a perfectly stable product. If an application is ready to be containerized, it is seamless. You will not have any hiccups.

Scaling up and down is happening, but my concern is that if we hit any kind of bugs, the open-source community won't be that active in terms of doing the bug fixes. If I get any bug, there might be a delay in getting the bug release or the patch coming up. When I'm hosting an enterprise data application on an open-source product, I will have a little higher risk of non-availability, and that might lead to revenue impact as well. Keeping that in mind, I would like to go for the enterprise edition, at least for my high revenue-generating applications.

In terms of the number of people working with this solution, I have about eight administrators. I have eight people in my team who manage the complete Kubernetes cluster for me, which is a combination of OKD and Tanzu. It is being used on a daily basis.

We are using the open-source version, and their community support is good. I don't expect a rapid response from the community, but if I post today, I usually get a response in a few hours. 

We have an enterprise agreement with Red Hat for the other products that we are using. Their response is very prompt.

We also use Tanzu, which has more limitations. If I have to use an F5 load balancer or other third-party products, Tanzu shrinks a little bit. It is not as mature as Red Hat OpenShift, which is more open to other products. I have an F5 load balancer, and I struggle a bit to integrate the F5 load balancer with Tanzu, whereas with OpenShift, it happens directly. For Tanzu, I have to have another layer on my load balancer, which is Avi. I have to use their services. Adding one more product into the environment brings some complexity, whereas OpenShift is very agile in nature. It adapts to all kinds of products that are not part of the same stack. So, I had no issues with that. I would rate OpenShift higher than Tanzu because OpenShift is a much more mature product.

It was straightforward. I had a perfect team with prior experience in OpenShift. They were able to do it without any hiccups. The community of OpenShift is very good. There are a lot of exchanges happening in the community space, which helped us in doing it in a seamless way. I would rate it a 5 out of 5 in terms of the ease of the setup.

We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future.

It is an excellent product. There are a lot of items that will be good to have in there, but based on the comparison with others and based on the kind of use cases I have seen, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Our service order management platform was cloud-native. We deployed its microservices on Red Hat OpenShift. When we did that, we were able to increase the capacity of order processing from 100,000 a day to at least 400,000 orders daily. That is the incremental capacity that OpenShift gave us.

The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good.

We deployed some microservices to handle Airtime Advance and Data Advance. This product from the consumer commercial team needed a throughput of around 2,500. They were able to get that from Red Hat OpenShift.

The self-healing of pods is a valuable feature. This feature goes a long way in helping us ensure our uptime for services, improving the performance of the system.

The solution provides us with the flexibility of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints. Since most of our services were deployed on-premises, this allowed us not to get into data privacy issues for services with personally identifiable information belonging to customers. It is microservice-ready from a cloud-native perspective, which is a benefit.

With the automation that OpenShift gives you, you can automate as much as possible. This goes a long way in reducing time to market and errors due to human intervention. So, if an organization can do a lot of automation, e.g., automating deployments, that can go a very long way in reducing the time to market and the time required to fix issues that arise out of deployment.

The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management.

I was using this solution at my previous company. I left that company in October of last year.

We implemented the project mid-2019. We went live just before the pandemic in 2020.

It is very stable.

From some issues in production where some nodes went down, we just needed to improve in monitoring the Red Hat cluster. Then, we could know when there was degraded performance and repair it before it could cause an impact to the customer.

It is able to scale based on load.

The support is amazing. They stick to the SLA, and even go out of their way to research and assist customers to resolve issues. I would rate the support as nine out of 10.

Red Hat is amazing. With the proper leadership in place and proper partnership, you can do a lot more with Red Hat. There is a very active community where they share codes, information, and ideas.

Positive

Initially, we used to run Vanilla Kubernetes, which is open source. Then, we realized we were short on skill sets. Another organization had done a PoC of Red Hat OpenShift, and it passed. So, our organization was gracious enough to allow us to spend money on Red Hat OpenShift licenses. That was in 2019.

With Vanilla Kubernetes, we were not able to successfully implement service mesh. That comes already preconfigured for you with Red Hat OpenShift. 

In terms of traffic routing and firewall management, it was a nightmare managing that in Vanilla Kubernetes. However, with Red Hat OpenShift, you only add specific IPs in firewalls, as opposed to the nightmare that we used to see with Vanilla Kubernetes.

Red Hat's commitment to open source is one of the reasons that we went with it. We knew that we would get continuous updates. Also, the option of keeping our OpenShift cluster up-to-date with new services was a headache that we passed onto Red Hat. 

Initially, the deployment process was complex. However, with repeated use, it made more sense. Deploying TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition and optimizing it on Red Hat OpenShift is complex.

We teamed up with Red Hat's OEM to do the Red Hat OpenShift implementation. So, it was a small team. We just did a waterfall implementation, not agile.

We did see ROI.

The solution's CodeReady Workspaces reduced project onboarding time by over 50% and time to market by 70%.

The organization really wanted to go open source for a very long time to reduce its CapEx and OpEx costs.

We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO.

The pricing and licensing for OpenShift is okay.

At the time of our evaluation, our options were only OpenShift and Vanilla Kubernetes. Now, there is also VMware Tanzu, which wasn't as mature a product when we did the PoC in 2019.

I am currently implementing VMware Tanzu in my new role at another company. I have not seen any significant differences between Tanzu and OpenShift.

Go for this solution.

Red Hat does a good job of ensuring that their solutions are operable and you can take advantage of the features within a solution.

We also had Red Hat Ansible for automating server provisioning and some operational tasks.

We didn't get any security breaches from Red Hat OpenShift.

I would rate OpenShift as eight out of 10.