Red Hat OpenShift Reviews

We're going to deploy the entire core banking of the bank on the platform.

It helps us through consolidation, ease of use, portability, and because I can use microservices. It's like a one-stop shop for most of my containerized applications that are going to be deployed.

The most valuable features are that 

• it's cloud agnostic
• the containerization and security features are outstanding.

The cloud-agnostic aspect means I can move to AWS, Google, or Azure. That means it is not a limitation. It gives me flexibility.

For running business-critical applications, on a scale of one to five, where five is the best, OpenShift is 4.8.

Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses.

They should partner with Jenkins. It goes without saying that I need Jenkins for my CICD. If Jenkins comes with support, that's good. But if there is a licensed product, I need to secure that license and then I will get support. 

Although the bundling with OCP is better than that offered by others, they can work more on it.

We implemented OpenShift in January 2023, so about six months ago, but we have not fully used it. It's the first time that we've installed it, and we're yet to implement.

It's pretty scalable because of the architecture. I don't see any issues in terms of scaling up or across. During our design phase, we had to scale across and as far as the design was concerned, it was pretty easy.

We can also scale it back. We can reduce or expand as per our needs.

In the future, it will be used by our entire bank, with between 8,000 and 10,000 users. 

We intend to expand the usage but we have to wash our hands of the core banking system first, which itself is a huge system. Once we're done with that, we'll think about other applications.

The forums and services are perfect. Excellent.

Positive

We did not have a previous container platform solution. We did try to build our own but it failed, badly. Building a container platform is not an easy task.

The initial setup is in between straightforward and complex. It's not so easy but not that tough. But we do require a lot of training.

Our deployment took one month.

Red Hat did most of it. We just provided them with the bare metal and away they went. It was a very time-bound project, and the Red Hat team was there. Our teams also worked with them. It was a collaborative exercise. On our side, there were 10 to 15 people involved, but there were five key people.

The CodeReady Workspaces should help reduce time to market if I use the CICD pipelines. That's what we aim for, and that's what the container platform is built for. That's something that goes without saying.

We're using Red Hat Linux across the bank for servers. We will use quite a number of Red Hat products during our core banking deployment, including AMQ, Process Automation Manager, and a couple of other products that are bundled with OCP.

The integration is something that is out of the stack. It's more of a middleware conversation and the middleware for us is an IPaaS. It's less about the stack and more about the application. I don't think there are any issues communicating via APIs. And the access management is pretty adequate. I can plug in any IM or document archival solutions. It's pretty easy to integrate.

Red Hat, as a vendor, has shared ample information with us to help us make decisions. That is where a partner comes into play and we're pretty happy with Red Hat.

We have a PaaS solution built on OpenShift with more templates and shared services for a containerized application environment.

So, the solution built will be using PaaS that is built on Openshift and hosted in a hybrid PaaS (dedicated & AWS) for building, deploying, and managing microservices-based applications.

We will be using many features of OpenShift for scalability, availability, and security (TLS/OAuth, IdAM integration).

This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch. As the organization for which I am building solutions is embarking on a digital transformation journey, OpenShift is providing one of the key platform capabilities for the digitization of the application landscape.

The features that I find most valuable are:

• DevOps
• Container orchestration
• Scalability
• Multi-cloud options
• Flexibility in choosing routers, load balancers, and monitoring tools
• Configuration options for creating an automated DevOps pipeline using tools like Maven, Ansible, and Jenkins
• Easy configuration for scalability

Most of the configurations are command based. If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great.

You need to have in-depth technical knowledge of the platform to do any kind of application setup due to the complexity of configurations related to infrastructure, security, etc.

Maybe in the future, we can get multi-cloud options such as GCP, Azure, etc.

I have not used any other container orchestration platform, except Kubernetes, which is the base platform for OpenShift.

My role was not one of evaluation, so I did not participate in choosing the product.

OpenShift works as a data pipeline management tool.

There are challenges related to additional security layers, connectivity compliance for endpoints, and integration. Additionally, it needs a little training to understand the process.

It is a highly stable product. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

We have deployed OpenShift on the cloud. It is a one-time setup and can take longer to deploy. Once implemented, the rest of the deployment becomes easier. I rate the process a six out of ten.

The product has reasonable pricing. It is an affordable solution but needs a learning effort to understand industrial-grade security.

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins. We receive new versions of the plugin in timely intervals. If we do not upgrade the plugins, it introduces some security vulnerabilities at a corporate level.

I advise others to go for the product as it offers high security and reliability. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to support our clients and specifically for package delivery and the ordering of individual items. 

We are evaluating a few others products that are complementary to OpenShift including Advanced Cluster Management, Advanced Cluster Security, and Depth spaces. 

This solution helps us to account for peak seasons involving higher demand than usual. It also gives us confidence in the security of our overall systems. 

OpenShift allows us to take advantage of the cloud in terms of sizing, especially during times when the prediction of volumes is difficult. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability and maturity. It is also easy to start to use and offers good customer support. The Red Hat team assists us whenever we have questions. 

The latest 4.0 version of OpenShift disabled a few of the features we previously made use of, although this wasn't a huge deal. 

We have been using this solution since 2017. 

This solution offers excellent stability and we have not experienced any issues.

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten for support. Their customer support is outstanding and we always get the answers we need very quickly. Their technological know-how is good and we are able to get assistance from one architect without getting passed on. 

Positive

Setting up OpenShift 4.0 is simple. It takes between 45 minutes and one hour. 

We have seen a return on our investment. We received payback for our projects in one and a half years which has been advantageous for us.

The model of pricing and buying licenses is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on-demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole. 

We evaluated other solutions including Rancher. OpenShift is built with the developer in mind which is advantageous versus most other products on the market. We also chose OpenShift due to the peace of mind of knowing it is a solution supported by Red Hat. It is also an easy-to-use solution for our developers and has a great administrative interface.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

Great GUI and CLI tools allowing developers to deploy, test and delete projects on demand, freeing up time for the operations team to work on production readiness.

Thanks to Docker images and Kubernetes templates, deployments are reproducible. Docker images allow us to package our applications with their configuration files and libraries in a portable format.

Images are built once by the CI/CD pipeline and archived in a repository. CI/CD integration is made easier with built-in Jenkins servers and S2i functionalities.
We can then run these images everywhere, from developer workstations to development, QA and production environments.

OpenShift (in fact Kubernetes) templates are JSON files that list all components of a project: docker image name and version, runtime configuration of the images, services, routes and storage options.

As long as you have proper versioning of all images and the associated template, you can deploy the same project everywhere.

The following issues need some attention:

• Documentation: this is a very complex product and several areas are lacking proper documentation.
• Templates: it takes a lot of effort to write satisfying templates for projects. More real-world examples and specialized editors would be valuable.
• Day 2 tasks: how do I make sure my cluster works in the long term? This includes all tasks that go beyond the installation, i.e. what you’re facing the day after the installation.

I would personally give a list of topics to the OpenShift administrator for reference after the initial installation has been performed, such as:

• What should you monitor?
• What to backup and how often?
• What should you look for when a node seems slow?
• How to clean up Docker caches on various components?

I would even go further and give a maintenance schedule, as with a car (this is just an example) such as:

• Every week: watch for errors in the logs, check disk space on nodes.
• Every month: check for critical updates on nodes, delete unused projects.
• Every second month: update OpenShift version.

We have been using the solution since January 2016.

We had stability issues, especially with earlier versions where the underlying Kubernetes wasn't stable at all.

Today we still have issues with Docker, which has known bugs not being backported to Red Hat supported versions.

We had an issue with the default nodes configuration. Once we gave enough resources to it, it's been fine.

Red Hat technical support is top notch: quick to answer and really caring about issues being solved

However, some fixes may take a long time when they require modifications in Kubernetes for example, as we have to wait for fixes to be released in Kubernetes, then imported into OpenShift.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup was very complex, but that's because we were deploying v3.1 which was only the second release.

Now the Ansible installer is much more robust and offers more options to customize the deployments.

Installation documentation has also improved a lot.

I suggest they take licenses for physical nodes with two sockets and as many cores and as much RAM as possible.

Then use a virtualization solution to create as many Kubernetes virtual nodes, knowing that it doesn't make sense to allocate too much RAM to each node since one should not run more than approximately 80 pods per node.

RHEL licenses are included.

We took a look at: OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Mesosphere and Swarm.

Take it for a spin with Minishift: https://www.openshift.org/mini...

Use the free version of OpenShift called Origin for the development environment to save on licensing: https://www.openshift.org/

Use the paid OCP version for QA and production environments to get technical support: https://www.openshift.com/cont...

Do not implement your own CI/CD flow, instead rely on OpenShift integrated CI/CD or use something like https://fabric8.io/

In short, OpenShift is about running and developing applications in a very efficient manner without the need to mess with virtual machines and other environments.

Longer version: OpenShift is a system for developing and running container-based applications. It uses Kubernetes for the orchestration and deployment, but it is much more than that. With excellent self-provisioning capabilities, it helps power users (developers and administrators) to do their jobs in the shortest time possible. If applications are built with the best practices for cloud or on-premise deployment, they will run well. Such setup saves time and hardware resources by being optimized from the start. Security is also an important part of this solution. By default, things are running with limited privileges and securely confined to their own resources. This way, different users and projects can all use the same infrastructure.

Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment.

• Excellent GUI support, so one does not need to use the command line client for almost any tasks.
• Great support for building images directly from Git repositories with hooks.
• Great integration with Jenkins for constant integration and development.
• Supports all the major languages and environments - PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, etc.

The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications. I believe OpenShift/Kubernetes will play an even more important role in the future, where it will eliminate a lot of the need for virtualization solutions. Such solutions are the proper building blocks for DevOps needs.

I rate this product a 10 out of 10, as this is one of the best options for developing and running modern applications. Easy to use, easy to scale. Offers great command line and Web client. Excellent also for automation.

Used for multiple environments and clients. Providing details is not possible due to NDA constraints. This main purpose of this kind of Platform is a Production grade Environment where Data Protection and Release Management is managed by the Service Provider.

We are able to operate client’s platform without downtime during security patch management each month and provide a good SLA (as scalability for applications is processed during heavy client website load, automatically).

All security features. Our company is focused on sensible information management and security is the most important part.

The other feature we don't find elsewhere is the ImageStream feature which helps to manage Environments or Release promotion.

We submitted over 25 requests for enhancement to Red Hat from the beginning of the OpenShift version 3.1, and they were implemented in the last version of the product 3.11.

The main drawback was the upgrade from Openshift Enterprise 3.11 to Openshift Enterprise 4 up to now.

But the new release Openshift Enterprise 4.2 add a way to migrate from old cluster to the new one easily based on Appranix solution. Namespaces with all data-protection mechanism is taken into account.

This product is Production Ready. The Common Red Hat ERRATAs (security, enhancement, bug fixing) + Platform ImagesStreams provide a way to be updated with Security Constraints without backward compatibility issue.

Platform agility provides the Blue Green deployment workflow which makes available a new Business Unit version easily. ITOps Engineer defined resource capping, this help to gain stability.

ITOps Engineer manage scalability easily aligned with Client's resources and its SLA's thanks to native features found in this product.

Based on Kubernetes vanilla, or Rancher or other PaaS, security is quite heavy to integrate with RBAC, network policies or namespaces isolation.

With Openshift Origin or Enterprise we avoid security management which is managed automatically at namespace level.

Rancher was in the loop and kubernetes vanilla in ~2015.

Developers maturity is a key point.

The software defined network is the best feature in my opinion. While not as flashy as the container scheduling and health monitoring, the usage of a software defined network means administrators existing expertise can be leveraged.

The SDN's usage of existing protocols means it's easier to modify and customize OpenShift.

I've assisted our clients in streamlining with development and deployment processes, achieving orders of magnitude reductions in time to market.

Possibly, the most complicated part is the configuration for an application. Other solutions do have easier ways to configure an application deployment, but they also come with greater restrictions.

Three years. I've been involved since some of the initial installations with Red Hat pilot customers.

No, I have not had any stability issues with OpenShift.

No, OpenShift is imminently scalable. Easy to deploy more containers. Easy to deploy additional nodes. Automating dynamic scaling capabilities was trivial.

OpenShift is supported by Red Hat, with their usual industry leading SLAs.

As a consultant, I have no installed OpenShift for my own solutions. But I have worked with Openshift and Cloud Foundry. Both are excellent products. But some of the limitations inherent in Cloud Foundry made it unfeasible for several of my clients.

The initial installation is trivial. Red Hat has automated the installation using Ansible.

OpenShift is available in Red Hat's usual open source support subscriptions.

Not really applicable to my situation. I support several products and recommend, then implement the best solution for my clients' needs.

While a PaaS is not for everyone, OpenShift mixes the best combination of new technology with the reuse of existing technology. This reuse of familiar options gives OpenShift simpler integration, and greatly reduces the learning curve for new users.

If you need a PaaS with the ability to customize it to handle more complex deployments using protocols other than HTTP, or you need a solution that will scale from a developer's workstation to a multi-site global installation only, OpenShift gives you that flexibility.