Item: Red Hat OpenShift
Rating: 8
Author: Jon Sturdevant

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Red Hat OpenShift is used within our organization for helping to modernize and speed up application delivery. The business problem that we're trying to address is trying to figure out ways for us to move our applications faster to production, and get features out there quicker so that we can turn around more stuff for our customers. The scope of our use case right now is primarily business-facing application stuff that we use for helping our subscribers and our providers, but it also includes our internal-facing applications as well. So any internal tools that we use for doing our own work and a lot of that same type of stuff all gets migrated to Red Hat OpenShift.

Pros and Cons

One of the big advantages of Red Hat OpenShift is, especially over Kubernetes itself, is that it provides a lot of built-in operators for doing a lot of different things right out of the box that you don't have to worry about trying to configure. So one of the big ones is, I mean, right in your face is that user interface and being able to work with it inside of a browser. And I think that works very, very well.

So I don't know that this is a specific disadvantage for Red Hat OpenShift. It's a challenge for anything that Kubernetes face is. There's an extremely large learning curve associated with it and once you get to the point where you're comfortable with it, it's really not bad. But beating that learning curve is a challenge. I've done a couple presentations on our implementation of Red Hat OpenShift at various conferences and one of the slides I always have in there is a tweet from years ago that said, "I tried to teach somebody Kubernetes once. Now neither of us knows what it is."

Return on Investment

That is a complicated question and one that's not easy for me to answer. There's a lot of factors that go into all of the stuff that we just don't have an easy way of measuring. And we realize that while we're implementing Red Hat OpenShift, we've tried to start measuring some of that stuff, but we don't have a baseline to go on. So it's hard to say. What I can tell you is general experience with the platform has been extremely positive from the development aspect. Teams have been very, very happy with the speed at which they're able to do stuff. They've been happy with that. The way it works in one environment is exactly the way it works in the next environment because we don't have configuration drift, that type of thing, and has had very positive impacts. But we didn't have a baseline to start with. So I can't talk about getting there faster or anything like that.

Application Development and Delivery

I think it's been a positive impact and it's still transitioning. So we are with Red Hat OpenShift and ever getting more and more teams working with it, finding that we can really standardize a lot on how we do that delivery. And we haven't, haven't ever had that in the past, right? If there are 12 different teams, there are 12 different ways to do app delivery and now we're all starting to converge into a single pattern, which I think has been very good. It's definitely eased some of the cognitive load for development teams so that they can get to where they need to go faster and don't have to learn new technologies

Performance

And as far as integrations and stuff like that, I definitely give it a 10. It hasn't had a significant impact on anything we've integrated it with. I guess the only caveat that I'll put on there is it has a lot of self-healing capabilities built into it, which is great, except I am impatient. So when things start breaking, I start looking into them. And my team jokes that we have this rule of thumb of we have to wait four hours and let Red Hat OpenShift try to do its own thing to fix it before we try to intervene. So that has been tough.

Alternatives Considered

So I mean not anywhere near the same level, right? But we've looked at the Amazon solutions for it. The AWS solutions. There's one that I wasn't part of that I didn't really look at, so I guess I won't speak to that one. But AWS has been the only one that I've really looked at. So I think from a feature standpoint, I didn't really have a huge difference one way or the other. I think the reason we ended up choosing Red Hat OpenShift is the ability to run it on-premise. We want to be able to run it within our data center so that we can host our own internal private applications without having to worry about all of the stuff that's required to run it on the public web.

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Red Hat OpenShift again?

Yes

Other Software Used

IntelliJ IDEA

Likelihood to Recommend

So that's been something we've worked through right as we're migrating a lot of our business applications over. We've got a wide range of them. Some of them are relatively new, we'll say the last five years. Those have migrated without too many issues. We've been able to put those over there, put them in containers and it's been good. We have a handful of applications that are very old and like pre-net old. Not that we do a lot of net development, but those are hard to move over. Right. Primarily because our infrastructure is Linux-based, so we don't have any windows there. So it's been very difficult for us to start migrating some of those right now. We're requiring those teams to upgrade to newer versions of.net before they even consider coming to us and running their workload on our platform.

Red Hat OpenShift review

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat OpenShift