Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

Our primary use case for Red Hat OpenShift is to deploy applications. We utilize the platform to manage multiple pods and ensure seamless scaling of our nodes and servers to meet the demands of our high-availability applications.

The platform has significantly improved our organization by enhancing productivity and reducing the time required to deploy applications. It allows for faster deployment and continuous delivery, which has streamlined our development processes.

The most valuable features of Red Hat OpenShift include its integration with Kubernetes and the user interface, which enhances the end-user experience and accelerates the deployment process. These features contribute to increased productivity and efficiency for our developers.

The product could benefit from additional operators and tools integrated with OpenShift. Furthermore, enhancements to the user interface and including more features would be beneficial.

I rate the platform's stability a seven out of ten.

The platform is scalable. 

I have opened some tickets but did not receive the required technical support.

Neutral

The initial setup was complex. I rate the process a two out of ten.

The implementation was done in-house.

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

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. 

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

Our customers value the monitoring and logging functionalities which are also our most valuable features. 

Our customers like the service mesh, so we integrated these to improve customer satisfaction.

It is difficult to deploy the OpenShift cluster in a bare-metal environment. For example, when there are errors during the cluster deployment, it is hard to find the error on any documentation. So, from the cluster deployment perspective, there could be improvements.

Also, the machine config and machine config tools need improvement. The machine config tool implements changes related to files over the worker and master nodes in OpenShift. However, sometimes it starts without warning, and it is unclear how the error can be fixed.

In terms of additional features, it will be good to have the support of the CNI or OVN for the Multus CNI. Currently, in OpenShift, the additional networks added by the Multus and the pods do not support the OVN CNI plugin. OVN is supported in OpenShift, but only for the non-Multus interface, which is the primary interface of pods.

We have used OpenShift Container Platform for the past four years. We are using version 4.10, and it is deployed on-premises.

It is a stable solution. We have not had any issues or found any big bugs. However, even though it is stable, we observed that the latest versions of this solution are usually less stable than the previous versions.

Therefore, if I were to rate the stability, I would give it a six out of ten because there are a few minor issues in the latest version.

OpenShift Container Platform is great from a scalability perspective. To my knowledge, there is no limitation when adding many compute nodes in OpenShift. It just requires a lot of hardware since we use on-premises at my company. You will need to increase the capability of master nodes if you want to add worker nodes.

I will rate the scalability a six out of ten.

Technical support from Red Hat is very good. They are proactive and always reply accordingly, depending on the tickets' priority. We never have any issues with the support. I will rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was very complicated. It took us about a week to deploy a basic three-master and a two-worker node cluster. I was also not aware of the OpenShift documentation at the time.

From an administrative perspective, it is difficult for new people to understand. A few coworkers from different backgrounds who moved to use OpenShift found it challenging. However, it was not as difficult for me because I am familiar with OpenShift.

I rate the implementation experience a five out of ten.

I don't know the exact licensing costs as I never purchase licenses for my organization.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Regarding advice, it depends on the use case and what kind of platform a company wants. For example, if they want something on Kubernetes with at least basic amenities, like logging and monitoring and similar things out of the box, then OpenShift is good for them. But, if they want to modify the Kubernetes how they want, it is not a good solution because it is not flexible. OpenShift Container Platform gives you a lot of features out of the box, but you cannot modify it. So, if they want to use Kubernetes how they want, then the open-source Vanilla Kubernetes is better for them than OpenShift.

On-premises

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. 

For the majority of use cases, we're actually building APIs for both the enterprise API and also OpenAPI. It's mainly for integrations for the backend. We implement the system for the customer.

It's deployed on a private cloud and on-prem. We are using version 5.8.

The banking transactions, inquiries, and account opening have been the most valuable.

The monitoring and logging could be improved. I think it would help developers in terms of provisioning the database and the whole development lifecycle.

I have been using this solution for two years.

Technical support is standard.

Initial setup was fine. If it's set up on-premise, it takes longer, maybe about four or five days. We actually deployed it on the cloud once using IBM. That takes a shorter amount of time because it's a managed service.

We used a consultant. 

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

If you care about your performance and the support, I would recommend it for enterprise mission critical applications.

Hybrid Cloud

It's a Kubernetes container orchestration solution. Ideally, we will deploy it in the cloud, but it is on-premises for now. We also use Red Hat Linux servers. Some of our operating systems are also Red Hat Linux. All the Red Hat products work well together, and people at my company are familiar with the platform. 

The main goal of adopting OpenShift is to overcome the current challenges of integrating with App Connect. One of the objectives is to make our containers more scalable. The other goals involve the benefits we can get from packaging and more.

I don't have a lot of use cases right now, but when we start using it in production, OpenShift will make things like machine workflows easier. It will enable us to control or orchestrate containers better and provide a tool to demo other aspects of development, deployment, and monitoring on the same platform.

We expect OpenShift to help us with regulatory compliance. Entities like banks require approval of decisions through these kinds of ledgers. Sometimes, it's virtually impossible to do this. OpenShift makes meeting these standards easier.

We still do not see the benefits in terms of development time and quality of the final product because we're still in the evaluation phase, but we'll soon have a better understanding of what we can achieve with the tool. At the same time, we've seen examples of other players that already use OpenShift and recognize the benefits they get from using it. 

OpenShift provides tools that tell me everything I have on a container, and I can make it on-premise or on a cloud infrastructure.

We have been evaluating OpenShift for a couple of months. After we finish the evaluation, we will start testing it. We started looking at OpenShift as a possibility last year. 

OpenShift is a stable product overall.

OpenShift is scalable. Once we fully deploy it, many people will use it. 

I rate Red Hat support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

We used vanilla kubernetes containers.

Setting up OpenShift isn't easy. I rate it three out of ten for ease of setup. We're deploying it in three phases. They're in the second phase now. The total deployment time will be five months. We expect to complete the deployment this March. There are 13 people on three teams working on this deployment.

We are using a third-party consultant. They work to ensure we understand the process.

I rate OpenShift a nine out of ten. I think it's the way to go. Lots of companies are adopting it.

On-premises

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.