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.
Well, in our case, because I have two use cases, one is with the operator, which obviously is super easy with OpenShift because it's just click, click start aside from the issue from the operator. But that's a different interview. And the other point is for the web portal that our portal team uses, it's very easy. Two perform a task needed for them to do their deployment, their pipelines, and their daily Java.
Multiple systems to interface for a task in the company (example: to sell an item your POS must communicate with the inventory software, then to accounting, then to service, etc).
When a task must bring information from several external services.
When you have to deal with multiple APIs.
Not recommended for:
Data transformation (although Talend has a software for that that works with Talend ESB)
It provides you with a landing pad to modernize what you have in a phased approach so you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can take small pieces of work and implement those on OpenShift over time. It enables us to be able to implement things like GI ops configuration as a service, and infrastructure as a service using the tools that are native to OpenShift, which gives us far greater reliability and consistency as far as monitoring for any kind of drift and configuration or unauthorized changes. So it pretty much gives us a lot of visibility on things that are otherwise relatively difficult to see using the old means of doing what we do. So it provides us with a modern set of tools to accomplish all those objectives.
Network of observability, so having one single screen to see to have some network-related metrics for the pod levels. Also at the cluster itself level and more importantly is ease of use for troubleshooting when there's any timeout. This has been the single kind of issue I've been facing for my three years of experience with OpenShift and it hasn't been an easy task for such troubleshooting.
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.
We had some existing apps and were looking for a platform to modernize our app deployments and scale for future growth. Based on Kubernetes, OpenShift offers more flexibility and customization. We could deploy any type of containerized application, not just Cloud Foundry-specific ones. I particularly liked the built-in security and its focus on rapid and automated deployments. Moreover, our cloud strategy isn't set in stone. OpenShift's flexibility means we could deploy on-prem, in multiple public clouds, or use a hybrid approach - something other products couldn't offer as expected.
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.
I'll say a lot of positive impact because when we started making this product aware to all the application domains in our business, they saw how easy to use. I mean we are giving a lot of control to the development team, how they can scale their application, how can they check the health of the application, and what action they can take if they are in any kind of failure or even meeting the business's SLA. So there are a lot of capabilities and those are really new features they can use. Those I think are a good use of OpenShift.
