Lumen Cloud Application Manager (formerly AppFog from CenturyLink) is a cloud-agnostic application and infrastructure management platform with integrated Managed Services. The centralized platform manages workloads across on-premises and third-party cloud environments, allowing for greater scaling and transparency.
$50
per month
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 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.
It was very good to use in small scale projects. Considering the high end projects with many instances and multi-platform architectures, it is better to test before the application is deployed. I think few of the questions can be general - who are the system users and what size is the application focussing on? How much resources are required? Will the application require any additional services?
Red Hat OpenShift overall is a pretty fantastic product. However, I think there is a steep learning curve for administrators of the clusters, and a complicated configuration depending on the amount of integrations. Also, the cost of standing up clusters has perpetually increased, which has become a rather expensive endeavor especially when talking about machine learning,
Obviously, it does container orchestration very well because it's the main purpose of the product. Creating routes has been very easy with the product, creating accessible routes, managing quotas, managing our workspace and our workload has been very efficient with this as well as managing our horizontal scalability.
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.
Primarily because it used to have a good free tier earlier, which it does not anymore. It's simple, and things are available to use. Compared to it's competitors, it does has less features, but that kind of acts in its favor. That adds to the simplicity, and ease of use for a new user.
We've done work on Docker and we've done work in Podman, which aren't really apples to apples as far as OpenShift because they're just purely containerization tools. They're not necessarily platforms. We did an evaluation on a tool, another Kubernetes-based tool, and I don't even remember the name of it. I cannot think of the name of this tool. It's a VMware tool. I don't remember. They have a Kubernetes solution that they offer. But as far as the features, functionality, and cost of ownership, OpenShift outshines those others that we've looked at. So it seems to be the market leader.
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.
