I use the solution for deployments with Java applications in the environment.
lead architect at Sys Manager
Has good stability and integrates with multiple applications
Pros and Cons
- "The solution is easy to scale."
- "Its virtual upgrades are time-consuming."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has helped us in faster deployments of the applications.
What is most valuable?
The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with multiple applications, including inference tutor and container platforms. It helps us enhance the deployment process and make it faster.
What needs improvement?
The solution encounters lengthier downtime issues for virtual upgrades. In this case, we have to opt for alternative upgrade strategies. This area needs improvement. Also, they should release its serverless version.
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat OpenShift
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat OpenShift. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution since 2018.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is easy to scale. Our organization plans to increase its usage for the next five years.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is excellent.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is easy to configure and run.
What was our ROI?
The solution generates a return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is expensive but cost-effective.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is an excellent platform with a fast return on investment. I rate it a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Open-source solution that gets better with each update
Pros and Cons
- "The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform."
- "OpenShift's storage management could be better."
What needs improvement?
OpenShift's storage management could be better. In the next release, OpenShift should include a console for running scripts.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with OpenShift for a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
OpenShift is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
OpenShift is easy to scale.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform.
What other advice do I have?
OpenShift 4 is more convenient than 3 because it has better features, which is characteristic of OpenShift's update history. I would rate OpenShift as eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
IBM
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat OpenShift
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat OpenShift. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Cloud Native Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Managing infrastructure is easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling, but technical support is not up to the mark
Pros and Cons
- "The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application."
- "Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—the support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support... When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift."
What is our primary use case?
I have used OpenShift in two companies. My earlier company was using a CI/CD pipeline. I customized the CI/CD pipeline in Java and then in Jenkins. We used it to deploy applications in different stages in the CI/CD. In my current company we are using CloudBees Core. They have a CI/CD pipeline and using that we deploy with the OpenShift platform.
If any application team wants to deploy an application on a container platform, we offer a platform for that. If they want to deploy a microservice application and they want to use a microservices architecture, we provide a space for that. OpenShift is running on the AWS platform, which means that deployment is highly scalable and highly retainable. People who want to deploy an application with a zero-downtime infrastructure prefer using the to OpenShift platform.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application.
What is most valuable?
One of the valuable features is that it's very easy to package an application and deploy it within a short period of time. Since it will be in the CI/CD pipeline, deployment is very easy. And the automation process is very easy and it's highly scalable. It can be scaled up or down at any time. We don't need a person managing the infrastructure all the time because there is automatic self-healing of the application in case something goes wrong.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with OpenShift for the past two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is quite strong, since it's a flavor of Kubernetes. We don't have any doubt about that aspect because we have never seen the infrastructure down for a long time, like a day.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling it is quite easy. We can scale to as many nodes as we want and scale down to as many nodes as we want. That is fast because we have an automated script in place to scale up and scale down the infrastructure. We are quite happy with the solution in that regard.
How are customer service and technical support?
Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support compared to other vendors. AWS will get on a call for any problem and start a screen-sharing session. They will immediately start fixing the issue, whereas with Red Hat and OpenShift, we have never seen similar support. When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift. Support-wise, they are still lacking.
A friend called me and they are using OpenShift 4.6. They installed a Prometheus box and they upgraded OpenShift and they upgraded the registry. After upgrading, one of the nodes was not able to run the container. When they raised a case, the support guy said that they needed to maintain the old images. Why, when they upgraded the OpenShift, do they need to maintain the old images? My friend called me and told me this and that it is not mentioned in the documentation. He said he raised a case and then followed up with support for the last four days, but there has been no response. The documentation was not clear. Now, we are facing this issue and we don't know how to solve this problem.
That was when focusing on upgrading from 4.6 to 4.7 or 4.8. It seems OpenShift never looks at how to manage earlier versions they sold in the market. Without the proper guidance or support for the product, people will not continue with the product. They need to keep that in mind. It shouldn't be that they only sell the product to the customer and ask them to run the show. They have to think of continuous support. That's why I give it six out of 10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before OpenShift we were only using Docker. There was no Kubernetes in our infrastructure. With Docker, there is no scalability. It is just a package. In terms of scalability and availability, Docker will fail. That is why we chose OpenShift as a platform.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is okay because there is a straightforward installation process to follow. It is guided by their people and they know how to implement things. We only faced an issue when we started running the infrastructure and that's when support was not up to the mark for OpenShift.
Deployment is quite fast because we have a CI/CD pipeline and we use GitLab for the source code. It can be done within 30 minutes or an hour for the UAT stage. When going to production, there will be a software assessment and then the time needed depends upon change requests and the change window for the application.
We have an implementation strategy for OpenShift. We have prepared a baseline saying that if a given application comes onboard with OpenShift, the team has to learn some basic technical stuff. They have to create a Dockerfile and create the source-to-image. Then they have to use the repository and onboard or copy their source code into it. The baseline documentation exists for people to follow. We will then deploy their application to OpenShift and there will be a dedicated team to further support the onboarding process.
What was our ROI?
We have seen return on investment. Applications used to run in VMware, but now they are running in OpenShift. There are benefits in terms of scalability and availability, and they can spin up more microservice applications and that is something that cannot be done in the VMware platform.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it. If people really want to make use of this platform, they don't care about the licensing and costs.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My team members evaluated Amazon EKS and Pivotal Web Services. OpenShift was the market leader in terms of a container platform and that's one of the reasons we chose it for our company.
What other advice do I have?
If you really need an application, meaning one million customers are going to use the application, then this platform will be quite significant. If you only have 10 or 20 or 100 users of an application, OpenShift is not the right choice. The cost is quite high. For that number of people, there is no need to run in a container platform. You need a large number of concurrent users accessing an application and then OpenShift provides the scalability.
We have not considered building our own container platform because it's very tedious to manage the infrastructure and you need a highly skilled person who knows Kubernetes very well, and OpenShift very well. We don't have that kind of team or people with the skill sets.
When it comes to security, we have the Prisma Cloud image scanning so that each and every image is scanned and we get a report regarding the kinds of vulnerabilities there are in particular images. That way, in case there are any vulnerabilities or critical patches that need to be applied to the images, they will be taken care of before going to production. In addition, we have used SonarQube for code scanning and Prometheus for monitoring.
On top of that, there are security properties in OpenShift as well, such as user authentication, user level, access level. But at the image level, we need specialist software to scan the images and report the vulnerabilities. If an application requires additional security in terms of images and the packages, we configure Prisma Cloud in the CI/CD pipeline, so that at each stage it will scan and evaluate the software and report the vulnerabilities to the respective teams.
When we are developing our application to deploy into OpenShift, it can be challenging to refactor the application or redo the application. It takes some time for the team to do that kind of infrastructure stuff at the coding level.
We don't use OpenShift's CodeReady Workspaces because that is for new infrastructure, for people who are new to the OpenShift platform. We just use Docker images and deploy the application.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
System Installation Solution Department Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born to do so
Pros and Cons
- "I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born for that. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces in OpenShift."
- "I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."
What is our primary use case?
OpenShift is a primary tool in my daily work and in the project I have been working on in recent years – TV streaming services used widely in the U.S. and outside. OpenShift is used for intensive DevOps and running pieces of the project adhering to the microservices architecture. The project's architecture includes physical servers in tens of datacenters. OpenShift plays a central role in developing, testing, and running specific software.
How has it helped my organization?
Our small team developed and rolled out everything to production in a short time, mostly thanks to OpenShift. It saves time. Using it, I just work on integrating services without worrying about containers and whatever is needed for them. OpenShift is a tool that does a lot of work for you. You just need to invest some time learning it.
What is most valuable?
OpenShift helps by doing a lot of work for us. I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born to do so. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces of our TV services in OpenShift.
What needs improvement?
I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated. This scares newbies from learning it. I hope that the OpenShift developers will improve this "dark side" of OpenShift.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
OpenShift has been running for the past three years, since the project started. We were developing the project's architecture, trying different solutions. In the end, we chose OpenShift as a well-known and intensively developed software, with many really useful features.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Application architect, Senior UNIX system administrator, Middleware specialist at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The CI and CD are fast, easy, and secure.
What is most valuable?
The CI and CD are fast, easy, and secure. Customers need this product and Red Hat certifies it on the RH product. The container customization with S2I is problematic.
How has it helped my organization?
In a couple of months, we can move from physical infrastructure to a container. There is no need to worry about service, since Red Hat does it for us. Consequently, we can focus on development.
What needs improvement?
I think that container development needs to be improved. The source 2 image is very comfortable, but it is not documented. There are no precise guidelines from RH. The source 2 image is the biggest addition that Red Hat gives to Kubernetes, but you cannot depend on Red Hat for every customization.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for 1 year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable, but it must be well designed.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not encountered any big issues with scalability, but the application must be designed for scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
In Europe, support is not as fast as it needs to be. If you follow Red Hat's guidelines when designing the architecture, it has a very difficult blocking situation (you must be skilled on the OpenShift product before putting it into production...as usual!).
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I prefer Kubernetes. But customers need very good support from developers, which Kubernetes do not have.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was not straightforward. You must understand every single component. Only then is everything clear and goes fast. Teaching developers how to implement the application with new methodology is problematic.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I think OpenShift PREMIERE costs a lot more, compared to the support given in Europe. If you buy directly from the service on the cloud, the level of support is not the same.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In order to understand OpenShift, you must try Docker. Afterwards, you must understand orchestrators like Kubernetes (the OpenShift underground) and Swarm. You must work with developers. I also implemented Jenkies and Nexus in order to attain full, real automation.
What other advice do I have?
It is a very good product. But before implementing it, verify that the product matches your expectations. Remember that the product changes very quickly, so read news as often as you can! This is not the only solution, so be ready to work with it. But this solution was selected by Red Hat.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Team Leader at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
Has high availability and good stability
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications."
- "Not a ten because it's not a standard solution and the endpoint protection user has to prepare with documentation or have training from other people. It's not easy to start because it's not like other solutions."
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is to move applications to OpenShift in order to remove legacy solutions.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications.
What needs improvement?
I don't really see any improvements that need to be done.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using OpenShift for two to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We don't have bugs or glitches. We only have problems that are connected to our deployed applications, the applications that weren't fully prepared for the OpenShift deployment.
How are customer service and technical support?
I haven't contacted their technical support. Our devops team does contact them. They contacted them in regards to some problems with the operations. They were satisfied with the support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was very simple. It was done by our devops team. They did the entire deployment.
What other advice do I have?
OpenShift is the way of the future. I would recommend it.
I would rate OpenShift a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it's not a standard solution and the endpoint protection user has to prepare to use it with documentation or has to get training from other people. It's not easy to start because it's not like other solutions.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Chief Operations Officer at a tech services company
Valuable features include continuous integration between different technologies and Single Sign-On
What is most valuable?
- Continuous integration between different technologies
- Single Sign-On
- Security enhanced
- Easy deployment and follow-up of entire pipeline process
How has it helped my organization?
We connected Jenkins as the main build operator with API calls to the OpenShift Pipeline. It is amazing the amount of time saved. You can see the logs of pipeline process on Jenkins and follow it in real-time or by notifications if something goes wrong. We used Slack for build notifications as well.
What needs improvement?
- Build
- Deployment
- Product delivery
These areas would save time for the entire team.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used this solution for one year so far. We have been following all the improvements on the tool since the launch.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
There were only deployment problems on my end, but I did have to reconstruct pipelines.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There were no stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There were no scalability issues, but only some Docker issues.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Customer service is perfect.
Technical Support:Not available.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I started using another technology, whose name I don't recall. The goal of OpenShift is to make things easier by connecting all tools in one switch.
How was the initial setup?
The first installations were tricky. There were some bugs and workarounds, but it was never hard.
Newer versions were smoother and the problems no longer exist.
What about the implementation team?
The first implementation was done on my own, where I was learning, testing, and exploring. All the documentation is updated on their website.
What was our ROI?
The ROI is in terms of productivity and saving time. I can't measure how much money I saved by using this technology, but know for sure that the money was well invested.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Go for it. Red Hat is professional on solutions.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I tried Rancher and other similar technologies, but their goals weren't the same as mine.
What other advice do I have?
Try using OpenShift Origin (free version) for a instance. It is pretty stable and has new nice features. The code is on GitHub, so you can always suggest improvements and bug fixes.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Right now the major point is cost effectiveness. The improvements I am expecting will be better presented when in full production.
What is most valuable?
The pod solution and the on-demand solution are well suited, although I have feelings of loss regarding not using VMware.
It is promising though. The project we are on is large scale so further information would be far more pertinent when fully deployed I think.
How has it helped my organization?
Right now the major point is cost effectiveness. The improvements I am expecting will be better presented when in full production.
What needs improvement?
For some reason there have been some DNS issues. At this time I am not convinced it is OpenShift though. I will have to circle back to this one.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have just bought the solution and started using it recently.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There have been some DNS issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We did not yet encounter any issues with scalability but I am looking forward to our first "go day."
How are customer service and technical support?
This isn't really an issue. I haven't really called upon support yet. Red Hat reps have been really quick to respond on other issues though.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using VMware which is more expensive for no good reason. Thank you OpenShift.
How was the initial setup?
Linux in general is a different flavor. Nothing out of the unexpected. Though, as in all things, there is room for improvement. One solid BIN would be nice.
In the installation of ORIGIN, using the playbook and Ansible install in the Docker, there are fixed points which would make the install easier.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Save money and get OpenShift. Literally.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated VMware, but then I am biased. I will always choose Red Hat as I know all too well what it does as opposed to other solutions. I am not knocking other solutions, but Red Hat wins in the long run.
What other advice do I have?
Do your homework. Take the time to analyze what you really want and need. I am not saying this is the absolute answer to all your questions as that would be unreasonable and naive. I personally believe that at least 75% of cases probably should be directed at Red Hat in general.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: December 2024
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