CloudFoundry is a free, open source cloud computing platform supported by the non-profit CloudFoundry. It is not tied to any particular cloud service, but can be self-hosted or run on any cloud service preferred.
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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.
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.
Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization.
Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs.
Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance.
Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources.
SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running.
Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs.
Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze.
Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings.
Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications.
Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints)
Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time
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.
Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have.
Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana.
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.
While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services. Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.
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
Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations.
Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins.
Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify.
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.
