Item: Red Hat OpenShift
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat OpenShift

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Red Hat OpenShift to run a variety of both containers and virtual machines. We have multiple clusters, consisting of bare-metal, VMware-based, and Nutanix-based. This allows us to test a variety of deployment scenarios alongside various tools and applications. This also allows us to create temporary environments for development testing, multi-cluster tool testing, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ease of deployment on a variety of infrastructure providers.
Tight integration with other Red Hat products.
Strong catalog of Red Hat and third-party operators

Cons

Documentation could be more detailed and include graphical aides.
Better partnerships could assist with automated bare-metal provisioning.
More reference architectures for accommodating various use cases, with detailed instructions or resources for repeating them.

Return on Investment

Increased productivity by automating certain workflows
Confidence in infrastructure repeatability by placing all configuration in code and committing to source control
Increased complexity and greater training overhead as this is new technology to the organization

Efficiency

Red Hat OpenShift GitOps (via ArgoCD) has significantly helped our organization deploy both infrastructure and applications in a much more rapid manner compared to previous manual efforts. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization has given us the ability to explore alternatives to VMware, which is an ongoing effort.

Infrastructure

The ability to deploy the same platform with the same features and capabilities across environments both on-premises and in the public cloud has been incredibly helpful. Maintaining that consistent experience has helped keep our training requirements and associated cognitive load within acceptable limits.

Alternatives Considered

SUSE Rancher and Tanzu Application Platform

The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere.
SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Red Hat OpenShift go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Red Hat OpenShift again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

Red Hat OpenShift is well-suited for organizations that require a comprehensive application platform that can be deployed on variety of infrastructure providers, both on-premises and in the public cloud. Red Hat OpenShift is also good for those who embrace automation and infrastructure-as-code, as well as those organizations who have an application modernization initiative.