Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift

The Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it. Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:

• Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services.
• Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible
• Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure

Incentivized

Have great user interface for new developers to adopt Kubernetes than a plain vanilla Kubernetes cluster. cluster management is getting easier and easier in each new version cost needs to be optimized to provide a competitive rate compared to other Kubernetes options in the market More approved / certified operator for other tools like New Relic will be great.

Incentivized

• Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers.
• GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version.
• GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Not as intuitive as it could be
• Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
• Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps

Incentivized

• Because of how different virtualization is done, there is a learning curve to overcome when switching to it from another hypervisor.
• Documentation needs to be improved. Just finding the details to set it up is a burden that will keep some people using it.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Google Kubernetes Engine has a good UI and documentation that facilitates setup and helps get projects moving along quickly
• Its built-in logging integrations with StackDriver make it easier to monitor the application and log issues quickly
• Automated orchestration, deployment, and scaling of nodes and networking are all easily configurable with yaml files

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

During our peak season (holiday season October-January), when our loads on high-traffic weekends were up significantly, OpenShift reliably held its ground and adjusted to the spikes perfectly. We saw no disturbances or slowdowns in any of the applications, and our customers were able to buy what they needed during their holiday shopping with no disruptions.

Incentivized

Very good Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.

Incentivized

From what I remember of Pivotal Cloud Foundry/Tanzu, OpenShift has a lot more features. Ultimately, our team went with OpenShift. After trialing multiple providers, we decided OpenShift was the best experience. We also had more confidence in Red Hat.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence.

Incentivized

• Positive: Allowed us to start and produce working software regardless of our experience level.
• Positive: Integration with other Google Cloud services that we wanted to use anyway.
• Negative: It's kinda clunky, and some scenarios seem Google Kubernetes Engine-specific instead of being more integrated with other Google Cloud services or the web UI.

Incentivized

• Positive: Reduction in physical and virtual machine footprint
• Negative: Lack of native end to end o11y has caused a great deal of focus from our enterprise monitoring folks
• Positive: OCP has allowed developers to have a quick and easy space to experiment

Incentivized