Item: Red Hat OpenShift
Rating: 8
Author: William Yee

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are just starting our journey with containers. We currently are trying to move all our DevOps tools to containers. Once we have our self-hosted dev ops tools on Red Hat OpenShift, we can upgrade them easily. This is really difficult with our dev ops tools sitting on VMs. In addition, we would be able to retire our VMs and use less resources.

For developers, we are working on creating a pipeline to build and deploy python applications. We currently have 4 python applications. They are using source to image and works with few issues. We do not have any automation at this time. Going to try to automate as soon as possible.

Pros and Cons

It's very easy to set up source to image for a project from git repository.
The oc and odo command line tools are easy to install on Windows.
Overall context help is available on most screens.

User interface is a bit hard to understand for a novice
Provide an ai search. It's annoying to dig through many menu items to get what I'm looking for.

Return on Investment

Provides great potential to retire VMs
Quicker turnaround to test and run upgrades
Easy to deploy and test python and java applications

Key Insights

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?

Yes

Would you buy Red Hat OpenShift again?

Yes

Other Software Used

CloudBees Continuous Integration, Sonatype Nexus Vulnerability Scanner, SonarQube, Sonatype Nexus Repository OSS, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Bitbucket Server (discontinued)

Likelihood to Recommend

Red Hat OpenShift removes many of the complexities in deploying containerized applications. It is as simple as loading up the image to run and it just works.

Fantastic and easy to get java and python applications working in a container. Developer doesn't really need to know about the infrastructure. Simply will have a containerized application that can run and an image that can be deployed right away.

Users and Roles

10 - Currently, Red Hat OpenShift is being used for Dev Ops tools. We are starting to roll it out for other business groups. When software needs to be installed, we are trying to do containers instead of Linux distributions.

Support Headcount Required

3 - Right now, it's installed and we haven't set up governance and policies yet. Minimal support with wide open use right now.

Business Processes Supported

Start getting teams to think about installing images and use containers instead of VMs.
Get developers to run apps as containers instead of VMs and processes on Bare Metal OS.
Quick deployment and test right away even if code is not done or perfect.

Innovative Uses

Just starting our journey. Users and developers are still somewhat confused. Working on educating and calming the anxiety of new technology.

Future Planned Uses

New software will be containerized apps.
Less requirements for VMs and quicker turn around time.
Developers don't need to know that app is running on a container.
Eventually shift some apps out to the cloud when it's reasonable.

Ease of Use

Teams are intimidated with new technology. Red Hat OpenShift takes a lot of the knowledge overload off initial learning. It just works and it is easy to get something up and running.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

Overall, the evaluation and selection went well. Nothing significant to change.

Open for Shifting Installation

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat OpenShift