Red Hat OpenShift Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Compared to OpenStack, OpenShift is the best product in the market. There are plenty of cloud service providers who use OpenStack or other open-source products, but OpenShift is the best. Even AWS is just an okay product, but they have different proprietary software, which is not the same as OpenShift.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the product's GUI, and other such areas of the product have been set up. Compared to AWS, OpenShift is better.

Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required.

OpenShift's scalability has scope for improvement.

OpenShift's technical support team needs to improve the support they provide to my company since the support we currently receive depends on the support package we have from the ones that OpenShift offers, like platinum, gold, or silver. OpenShift's technical support team is good, but it takes time for them to find the root cause of a particular issue. One of the clients of my company doesn't face many issues with the product, so we don't use much of the technical support. I can say that OpenShift's technical support team is okay in general.

I have experience with the product, but I don't possess a large amount of technical knowledge to comment on what functionalities need to be added to the product.

I have been using OpenShift for two years. My company is a user of Red Hat products.

It is a scalable or expandable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Eight members of my company's team use OpenShift.

For one of my company's clients, we have to deal with the technical support team of OpenShift. With Red Hat, my company has platinum support. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

AWS and DigitalOcean are products with which I have some experience.

Kubernetes on AWS is a bit complex to set up, whereas OpenShift is easier for me to set up. However, they use the same things during the setup process. OpenShift is just a better product for a new user compared to AWS since the former is easier to understand.

The product's initial setup is very easy, especially compared to AWS.

The solution is deployed on a public cloud since half of the deployment is in the data center and half of it is in the cloud.

My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift.

During the evaluation phase, I looked at Google Cloud.

I carried out OpenShift's integration process for two or three firms as a part of the team, so it was not done by myself alone. I did carry out the integration process for AWS. Comparing OpenShift with AWS, I found the former to be much easier.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

Usually, we use it as a test environment and to quickly develop the proof of concept for various projects. So, it's mainly for quick deployment and testing.

It's deployed on the cloud and on-premises.

The biggest benefit is the speed. When developing a new PoC, if we don't have a container-based environment, we would have to set up virtual machines. We would have to install different software to make sure that there are secure ways to do that, which would most likely need a couple of days, whereas, with a container-based platform, such as Kubernetes or OpenShift, we can do that in a matter of minutes or hours.

The security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is very good. It's a step-by-step procedure to obtain new software. It's very secure. We cannot have access without a safe, provisioned way. For troubleshooting a fault, I like the new oc debug feature where you spin up a new pod for debugging. You can spin up a new test pod for a complete copy of the problematic one. We are very happy with it security-wise. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of security features for running business-critical applications. That's only because I never give a ten.

It provides us with the flexibility and efficiency of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints. We can automate these checks. For example, in the hybrid cloud model, we can check for different things, such as the accessibility of many different classes not only in the cloud but also on-premises. We can use the hybrid view to check many things very quickly. If someone comes into the company from a regulatory body whose job is to run a couple of scripts and check if certain rules apply to all servers, without having this kind of interface, we would have to give him a week to be able to connect to everything and check everything one by one, and of course, we would have to pay him for that. With OpenShift, from one panel, we can automatically run a script across several different servers or even connect manually to each of them, which is a big benefit. It saves a lot of time and money.

It can speed up the development time. There's only Jenkins, but I'm not so sure about that. Because the development and testing phases are sped up, the time to market can also be very good. However, it also depends on other factors, such as any back-and-forth changes, because we can have a lot of feedback. Overall, there is about a 10% improvement in the time to market.

The CodeReady Workspaces reduce project onboarding time. There is about a 20% reduction.

Its security is most valuable. It's by default secure, which is very important.

It's very easy to manage deployment across different environments. It doesn't matter if it's a private or a hybrid cloud. It's very well-suited for the type of work that we do, which is the deployment for our PoCs. It's very easy to start with small ideas and then gradually scale up. 

It's very easy to integrate with different systems and products, which is another plus point. 

It also has a very nice user interface. It's very self-explanatory, and that saves a lot of time from training new users. You can cut a lot of time to quickly familiarize yourself with the base.

OperatorHub is another big plus. It's very easy to use and very useful.

One thing that can be improved but is surely difficult to improve is the cost. We have a lot of customers who would prefer a Vanilla Kubernetes solution or another solution that combines Kubernetes with some cloud provider, especially if they are already using a specific cloud provider. When we try to work with them, some customers complain about it.

Another thing is that the installation and setup process is a little bit complex, but I must admit that it has improved a lot as compared to the older version. 

Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications.

I've been using this solution for about one and a half years.

It's a very stable solution. Usually, problems occur when there's an application error or someone does something wrong and there is a human factor. For example, once there was an application creating a lot of automatic snapshots. There were volumes of snapshots, which couldn't be deleted easily. So, occasionally, there may be some bugs, but generally, it's very stable.

Scalability is a big plus. There is scalability from nodes to machines and so on. However, I would prefer more options on scalability based on statistics. That would be very interesting and very nice to see in the future.

Currently, we have less than 100 users who use this solution. They are mostly developers. There are also some end-users, assessors, architects, administrators, and project managers. The end-user experience is quite self-explanatory, and it's very important.

Once I'm able to talk to a technician, the support is very good. They are very knowledgeable and polite. I'm very impressed, and I've only good things to say about their technical support even though there's a lot of bureaucracy until you reach the right department, which can take some time, but I understand that. All big organizations have a bit of a challenge. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

As a partner for helping us create the platform that we need, I would rate Red Hat a nine out of ten. They're helpful. Whenever I'm in contact with the technical team, they're knowledgeable and helpful.

Positive

I'm not sure because I wasn't involved in the installation. 

We never considered building our own container platform. I've only seen customers using Vanilla Kubernetes because OpenShift is a little bit expensive, and some specific organizations have chosen to invest in a strong team because they would need a strong team to build Vanilla Kubernetes. They are succeeding in maintaining that way of working. I have seen this a couple of times.

I wasn't involved in its initial setup, but I talked to a lot of the people who were involved. Compared to a simple or Vanilla Kubernetes, it requires lots more work and has a lot of default processes constantly running, but, in my opinion, it's something where OpenShift is getting better and better. It's getting quicker. It's going in the right direction.

The deployment took a few days.

I believe there is an ROI for organizations where security is very important, and because of privacy requirements, the public cloud cannot be an option. Especially in the banking sector, there's almost no competition. There is about 15% ROI.

It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective. In addition, people who are already working with a specific cloud provider tend to find cheaper solutions by combining Kubernetes on the specific cloud and choosing that over OpenShift.

It's important to build a team around this. So, invest in getting the correct training. There are a lot of options that Red Hat provides. Start small, scale up gradually, and involve people from different areas. In addition to the infrastructure team, also involve someone from development and the architecture team to be able to see its value from different perspectives.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. I'm very happy with the interface, security, and support.