OpenShift - To be or not to be
September 21, 2021
OpenShift - To be or not to be
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (self-managed)
Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat OpenShift
Our company is trying to build a hybrid K8 cloud environment, which is composed of the public cloud (Azure) and an on-premise private cloud. For the on-premise private cloud, we are evaluating both VMware's Tanzu Grid and the Red Hat OpenShift options. We did the POC with OpenShift by deploying the containerized traditional mainstream Spring-based Java services application, as well as the Python-based AI/ML predictive model services. Based on the multifactor benchmarking, we eventually decide to opt for Tanzu Grid.
- The same as many similar K8 vendor solutions, OpenShift provides a managed Kubernetes environment with advanced facilitative components built-in.
- It provides the life cycle management/monitoring toolset to help users better visualize and understand both the application and infrastructure environment.
- Provides the scaling and recovering mechanism to ensure the high resilience of the application.
- CI/CD pipeline integration following the DevOps concept.
- The monitoring feature is still not mature, at least not in satisfying our requirements.
- Logging is somehow tricky. We can not stream all log info in real-time. Maybe it is our setup issue because we only see a partial log. This is a very negative part of our evaluation.
- The installation and set up process is a little complex.
- Only has the Jenkins as the CI/CD.
- As long as we stay in the pre-built component suite it is fine, but if we want to add more 3rd party components into the portfolio it is not straightforward.
- Documentation is not sufficient and it is also hard to find troubleshooting info from a public forum, requiring the purchase of the professional service from RedHat, which will lead to bigger cost concerns.
- The auto-scaling setting is not perfect. It can not apply ad-hoc changes after the initial set up.
- Kubernetes
- CaaS (Container As A Service)
- Managed environment
- We wrapped up our POC with the conclusion to not use OpenShift. From the perspectives of setting up, future extension, maintenance, the richness of the features, and ROI, we don't think it will meet our requirements to support our business objectives.
- VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly Pivotal Labs)
I can not find VMware Tanzu Grid from the production list, as that is quite new, so I quoted Tanzu Labs as a placeholder. Tanzu provides the same plus many more features, compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Tanzu is better integrated with the VMware-based VM infrastructure. The most attractive thing is the Tanzu Mission Control panel, which enables us to manage and monitor many different K8 platforms from all public cloud K8 providers like Azure, Google, and AWS, as well as the Tanzu Grid set on-premises. Therefore, our maintenance and support are much more efficient. In addition, it also gives us the capability to easily migrate our application across the platforms, to avoid a vendor lock-in scenario.
Do you think Red Hat OpenShift delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Red Hat OpenShift's feature set?
No
Did Red Hat OpenShift live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Red Hat OpenShift go as expected?
No
Would you buy Red Hat OpenShift again?
No