Decent, but a high price to pay for avoiding cloud lock-in
September 17, 2021

Decent, but a high price to pay for avoiding cloud lock-in

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (self-managed)

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat OpenShift

We use it to run containerized workloads across the enterprise, both for long-running containers, as well as short-lived batch job containers. The business problems it addresses are consistent provisioning of infrastructure in a self-service format. And it provides capabilities like load balancing, auto restart, monitoring, and security for workloads running on it.
  • Nice user interface
  • Fine grained access control
  • Easy way to shell into a running container
  • Slow to adopt Docker features like multi stage builds
  • Inconsistent with Docker build behavior
  • No Redhat supported client libraries for k8 APIs to Redhat CRDs
  • Easy access to container terminal
  • Ability to carve a cluster into multiple isolated namespaces
  • Ability to run it both in prem or in any cloud
  • Self-service namespaces let devs immediately provision infra resources rather than waiting days for a VM
  • It is hosting several critical applications for our business
  • It helped our organization adopt containers before we had a clear cloud strategy
Redhat has a high license cost but offers support and the ability to run workloads anywhere with practically no changes.
Red hat allows easier shelling into a container to inspect what is wrong, VS ECS or EKS. There is a lengthy blog post on how to do that for ECS on AWSs blog. However, since ECS/EKS manages the cluster for you, it has lower personnel cost. Back when we purchased Openshift, the cloud vendor offerings weren't as mature and our cloud strategy wasn't clear. Now that that has changed, though, we may not renew Openshift for cloud usage (maybe on prem only).

Do you think Red Hat OpenShift delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Red Hat OpenShift's feature set?

Yes

Did Red Hat OpenShift live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Red Hat OpenShift go as expected?

No

Would you buy Red Hat OpenShift again?

No

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Azure App Service
Great if you want a cloud-agnostic platform to run containers, and have a large platform team to install, maintain, and admin it. Not great if you have autonomous teams that are in control of their own infrastructure, and need to be able to change cluster-level settings, or if you don't have a lot of money for an upfront license charge.

Red Hat OpenShift Feature Ratings

Ease of building user interfaces
Not Rated
Scalability
8
Platform management overhead
5
Workflow engine capability
8
Platform access control
10
Services-enabled integration
7
Development environment creation
10
Development environment replication
8
Issue monitoring and notification
Not Rated
Issue recovery
8
Upgrades and platform fixes
8