Red Hat OpenShift Reviews

OpenShift is a containerization platform.

OpenShift provides faster container orchestration without the need to know the guts of an already complex system. Kubernetes is complicated for an organization to do correctly on its own, so OpenShift streamlines that process and makes it easier to get up and running.

It allows flexible and efficient cloud-native stacks. You've got a lot of capabilities, such as build packs to automatically access development solutions or different languages like Spring Boot or .NET. Everything is in one place and addresses the developers and administrators.

Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes. OpenShift's security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is pretty robust. Including advanced cluster security, OpenShift covers almost everything out of the box.

We are also using Linux Rail and Ansible, and all these Red Hat products have some awareness. However, it's hard to say because some of them previously existed as non-Red Hat products.

One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. 

These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic. They shouldn't be linked together so that when you upgrade one, you must also upgrade the other. It doesn't make sense if they aren't related as operators.

I have been using OpenShift for three or four years.

OpenShift is mostly stable. It's designed so that you seldom notice if it's unstable. I have no complaints.

OpenShift is scalable. It automatically scales.

I rate OpenShift support seven out of 10. There is room for improvement. We sometimes find the answer before the vendor. You get bounced around to various people and must repeat the issue even though it's all documented.

Neutral

Setting up OpenShift is pretty straightforward, and you can do it in under 30 minutes if you know what to do. We have four admins who maintain it. It requires a lot of maintenance because the underlying platform moves quickly. Kubernetes moves quickly, so new versions are constantly coming out. Keeping current requires lots of maintenance. We do upgrades monthly.

Vendor support is one reason to go with OpenShift. It's an open-source product, but you can pay for support. 

We looked at all the options, including Upstream Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, and Rancher.

I rate OpenShift eight out of 10. Red Hart is a good partner for the most part. Like anything, it depends on who you work with. Some people will regurgitate the documentation, while others will bring their experiences from other locations.

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.

Positive

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 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 it for container management. It's our container management platform for our financial systems.

It provides flexibility and efficiency. It helps us to design and deliver applications efficiently. We can modify our application in a smaller scope. We don't need to change the whole application.

It makes development fast because we can separate applications into different parts. We can deliver applications in different phases. 

It has helped to improve the quality of our end products. It has reduced the project onboarding time by 20% to 25%.

I like OCP, and the management UI is better than the open-source ones.

The integration with 3scale is very good. We use that too.

The monitoring part could be better to monitor the performance. The automation part could also be better because we had a hard time integrating our application with OCP.

I've been using this solution for about two years.

It's stable.

It's scalable for one cluster. When it comes to multiple clusters, it could be better. 

We have about 100 users who use this solution.

Their enterprise support is okay, but sometimes, their response is slow. Their response is also not accurate sometimes. It's not right.

Neutral

I didn't use it, but my company used the PKS solution.

It's straightforward. The setup took two to three days.

Red Hat is quite okay as a partner for helping us create the platform that we need. They do help you. They also provide training.

We use Red Hat AMQ streams and 3scale, and its integration with other Red Hat solutions is okay. The advantage of using multiple products from the same vendor is that you can get help from one company. You don't have to go to multiple companies.

It gives me the security that I need, but I didn't evaluate the security much. There is another department that's responsible for that.

I would recommend this solution to others, and overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for deploying Springboot applications and Engine X among other things. 

In the company, if transactions rise, we can scale up the solution easily. It's flexible and we're able to ensure it meets our needs based on its ability to autoscale. 

The deployment is easy.

The security is good. I'd rate it 4.5 or five out of five. I'm satisfied with the security on offer. 

The product can scale well automatically. 

OpenShift can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud. It helps us comply with regulatory issues that would require at least a portion to be covered by on-prem usage. 

The automated processes are really great. It helps with development time and the end product quality. It helps by being so flexible, which translates into easier development. It helps take some stuff off our plate. 

The solution's code ready workspaces have reduced project onboarding time. It's really simple to deploy on OpenShift. The reduction levels have been around 35%. It also reduces time to market due ot the faster development times. The reduction has been around almost 20% based on some administration we ned to handle in order to maintain compliance.

The flexibility is nice, yet comes with great sacrifice. It's much more complicated in general. We'd like the flexibility on offer to be simplified a bit so that we don't have to do so many workarounds. 

The interface could be simplified a bit more. 

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

The stability of the product is good. There may be a few bugs, however, in general, it works quite well. 

The product is scalable. 

We have 100 or hundred users on the solution right now in our organization. Most are developers. Some are end-users. There might be a handful of admins as well. 

Technical support isn't used really. I've never called them personally. 

We previously used a different solution. We switched to this product since it was more flexible.

We have considered building our own container platform as well since we needed something on-prem. However, OpenShift already provided what we needed, and so it wasn't necessary. 

I'm not sure if we also use any other Red Hat products. 

The initial setup was not done by me. I only work with the solution. 

I don't directly deal with pricing or handle the negotiation on licensing. I can't speak to the exact price. 

We're a customer and end-user. 

I do not use the solution on the vendor's open stack platform.

It's a good idea to explore the solution first before really jumping in. Also, companies need to understand the costing and the SSL before jumping into a deployment. 

I'd rate OpenShift at a nine out of ten. 

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.

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. 

Our organization is the product and we have applications that are based on microservices. Our microservices are deployed on OpenShift.

The security features and the support from Red Hat are strong and they have helped our organization.

Integrating the gen case and the CSC pipeline has allowed us to automate processes in OpenShift, reducing the time taken significantly. The system runs smoothly without any issues.

The most valuable feature is the auto scalers for all microservices. The feature allows us to place request limits and it is much cheaper than AWS.

The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement. There are vast metrics and if OpenShift can provide the geometric thread that would be helpful.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable with no downtime.

The solution is very scalable.

Generally, our tickets are resolved within 15 days.

Neutral

Based on feedback from my colleagues, the initial setup is complex with a lot of dependencies to set up the environment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support. The support fee is expensive.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We currently have 100 people using the solution made up of architects, developers, DevOps teams, and testing engineers.

Maintenance is required every two months to restart the ports that get hung up. The solution requires between two and five people for maintenance.

We have built our own container platform. We have lots of products deployed on OpenShift. And there are lots of namespaces all deployed on the same OpenShift control platform. Everything is running fine.

OpenShift is a very stable solution with a lot of support features. I recommend the solution.