AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh aims to give end-to-end visibility and high-availability for applications. There is no additional charge for using AWS App Mesh. Users pay for the AWS resources (EC2 instances or requested Fargate CPU and memory) consumed by the proxy that is deployed alongside containers.
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Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
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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.
If your workloads are primarily based on AWS infrastrucure, where you might have EC2, EKS, Cloud Watch solutions, this service is native and good for you to maintain application level metworking. Also if you want to assess how secure inter service traffic could be achieved without a lot of custom writing, AWS App Mesh is a fine solution.
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
I wouldn't necessarily say there is look everyday technology transform. I can see a trend wherein Red Hat OpenShift is adopting all the new technology trends and helping their customers align with their priorities and the emerging technology trends. I wouldn't call out various scope for development every day. There is scope for development. It is all how the organizations adopt it and how they deliver it to their customers. I don't want to call out there is scope for development. It's happening. It is a never ending process.
At the moment, I don't have anything to call out. We are experiencing Red Hat OpenShift and we can see every day they're coming up with new features as and when they come up with new features, we want to experience it more and more. We are looking for opportunities wherein this can be leveraged to help our users and partners.
This is the current strategy for the company, most of the products in the organisation are aligning to Openshift and various use cases it support. Also lot of applications are being developed for AI use case, openshift.AI provides opportunity to host and leverage the AI capabilities for these applications
We rated AWS App Mesh as part of a comparison with Microsoft Azure AKS + Istio. While we rated its usability 6/10, recognizing its strengths in AWS-native integration, the difficult learning curve and limited flexibility made it less appealing for broader use. Also AWS announced the retirement of AWS App Mesh by the end of this year.
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
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
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.
I was not involved in the in person training, so i can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen seamlessly without any issue.
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
Istio is high on operational costs as compared to AppMesh. HIgher learning curve for Istio as compared to AppMesh. Multi cluster support in AWS. App Mesh has IAM integration which is a plus for AWS workloads.
The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
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.
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
That is a complicated question and one that's not easy for me to answer. There's a lot of factors that go into all of the stuff that we just don't have an easy way of measuring. And we realize that while we're implementing Red Hat OpenShift, we've tried to start measuring some of that stuff, but we don't have a baseline to go on. So it's hard to say. What I can tell you is general experience with the platform has been extremely positive from the development aspect. Teams have been very, very happy with the speed at which they're able to do stuff. They've been happy with that. The way it works in one environment is exactly the way it works in the next environment because we don't have configuration drift, that type of thing, and has had very positive impacts. But we didn't have a baseline to start with. So I can't talk about getting there faster or anything like that.
