OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
Kubernetes is powerful, but managing it yourself takes time. Red Hat OpenShift offers a user-friendly interface, built-in developer tools, and security features, all on top of Kubernetes. It simplifies management and gets you developing faster with all best practices and …
K3S supports constrained resource environments but does not have the governance controls needed for our company Rancher RK2 is being actively developed for constrained environments where Red Hat OpenShift is too heavy.
OpenShift offers a complete suite of plugins and services already set and configured. Saving time to connect with authentication services, monitoring, logs and CI/CD.
Well, in our case, because I have two use cases, one is with the operator, which obviously is super easy with OpenShift because it's just click, click start aside from the issue from the operator. But that's a different interview. And the other point is for the web portal that our portal team uses, it's very easy. Two perform a task needed for them to do their deployment, their pipelines, and their daily Java.
It provides you with a landing pad to modernize what you have in a phased approach so you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can take small pieces of work and implement those on OpenShift over time. It enables us to be able to implement things like GI ops configuration as a service, and infrastructure as a service using the tools that are native to OpenShift, which gives us far greater reliability and consistency as far as monitoring for any kind of drift and configuration or unauthorized changes. So it pretty much gives us a lot of visibility on things that are otherwise relatively difficult to see using the old means of doing what we do. So it provides us with a modern set of tools to accomplish all those objectives.
Upgrades can be stressful to watch - often cluster operators report that they are failing even though the upgrade is proceeding without issue.
Native observability is lacking. The canned dashboards are great, but to really dive into an issue, you need to be proficient in PromQL or have a third-party product installed for correlation.
It would be nice to be able to review logs for containers that have been removed, at least for a few hours after they're gone. Instead we have to rely on log aggregators to view historic details.
Leverage OpenShift Online constantly at both the free and paid tiers. While AWS is convenient, it often brings more administration than I want to deal with for a quick application (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress blog). OpenShift also simplifies the DNS registration and ability to share application environments with team members
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
Applications deployed to OpenShift clusters stay responsive when peak load hits or when the traffic dies down - since the platform reacts by scaling out or scaling in the deployed applications elastically - achieved through' policy sense and response automation - leveraging monitoring, measuring (metrics), auto-scaling to meet SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs. This approach works for stateless or stateful business logic hosting applications. The deployed applications perform consistently, stably, and securely across many deployment platforms - public clouds, private data centers, at the edge, or on factory floors - hosted by bare metal or virtual environments.
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
We had some existing apps and were looking for a platform to modernize our app deployments and scale for future growth. Based on Kubernetes, OpenShift offers more flexibility and customization. We could deploy any type of containerized application, not just Cloud Foundry-specific ones. I particularly liked the built-in security and its focus on rapid and automated deployments. Moreover, our cloud strategy isn't set in stone. OpenShift's flexibility means we could deploy on-prem, in multiple public clouds, or use a hybrid approach - something other products couldn't offer as expected.
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
We never faced any major outage with the OpenShift platform. It's been running fine except for our network timeouts. That's it for this. It's not about, the pods themselves are running fine, but identifying this kind of issue hasn't been easy, but it didn't have any real business impact. It is just about other sre just to better serve our client and improve the platform's reliability.
