Azure Functions enables users to execute event-driven serverless code functions with an end-to-end development experience.
$18
per month approximately
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
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.
They're great to embed logic and code in a medium-small, cloud-native application, but they can become quite limiting for complex, enterprise applications.
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.
They natively integrate with many triggers from other Azure services, like Blob Storage or Event Grid, which is super handy when creating cloud-native applications on Azure (data wrangling pipelines, business process automation, data ingestion for IoT, ...)
They natively support many common languages and frameworks, which makes them easily approachable by teams with a diverse background
They are cheap solutions for low-usage or "seasonal" applications that exhibits a recurring usage/non-usage pattern (batch processing, montly reports, ...)
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.
My biggest complaint is that they promote a development model that tightly couples the infrastructure with the app logic. This can be fine in many scenarios, but it can take some time to build the right abstractions if you want to decouple you application from this deployment model. This is true at least using .NET functions.
In some points, they "leak" their abstraction and - from what I understood - they're actually based on the App Service/Web App "WebJob SDK" infrastructure. This makes sense, since they also share some legacy behavior from their ancestor.
For larger projects, their mixing of logic, code and infrastructure can become difficult to manage. In these situations, good App Services or brand new Container Apps could be a better fit.
OpenShift virtualization has a little room for improvement. I'm coming from it as a Rev customer. There's some things in that OpenShift virtualization that were in Rev that I would like to see in OpenShift virtualization. I realized that they're chasing the VMware crowd and that's fine, but from us old Rev customers, we'd like to see some things that was in Rev around via migration and things of that nature that could be in OpenShift virtualization, I hope is being planned to be put in.
OpenShift is really easy of use through its management console. OpenShift gives a very large flexibility through many inbuilt functionalities, all gathered in the same place (it's a very convenient tool to learn DevOps technics hands on) OpenShift is an ideal integrated development / deployment platform for containers
The virtualization part takes some getting used to it you are coming from a more traditional hypervisor. Customization options are not intuitive to these users. The process should be more clear. Perhaps a guide to Openshift Virtualization for users of RHV, VMware, etc. would ease this transition into the new platform
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.
Every time we need to get support all the Red Hat team move forward looking to solve the problem. Sometimes this was not easy and requires the scalation to product team, and we always get a response. Most of the minor issues were solved with the information from access.redhat.com
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.
This is the most straightforward and easy-to-implement server less solution. App Service is great, but it's designed for websites, and it cannot scale automatically as easily as Azure Functions. Container Apps is a robust and scalable choice, but they need much more planning, development and general work to implement. Container Instances are the same as Container Apps, but they are extremely more limited in termos of capacity. Kubernetes Service si the classic pod container on Azure, but it requires highly skilled professional, and there are not many scenario where it should be used, especially in smaller teams.
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
They allowed me to create solutions with low TCO for the customer, which loves the result and the low price, that helped me create solutions for more clients in less time.
You can save up to 100% of your compute bill, if you stay under a certain tenant conditions.
All of the above. Red Hat OpenShift going into a developer-type setting can be stood up very quickly. There's a very short period to have developers onboard to it and they're able to become productive much faster than a grow your own type solution.
