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Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 8.9%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 11.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon AWS13.6%
Red Hat OpenShift11.6%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry8.9%
Other65.9%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.
Vasundhara  Joshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly scalable since applications written in Java and .NET do not create issues for its users
Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. However, if we go for Azure or some other cloud, we can get a lot of information. I believe there is not much information for Pivotal Cloud Foundry since it may be some license issue. If you go for Azure, the migration process is straightforward. Since we have been given 10 GB of space in the public cloud, we are utilizing it in our company. So, we are trying to deploy our application on the cloud, and for us, it is like a trial process for now. From our total application rate, I can say that only two to three percent is on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Currently, half of the code is in the shell script, which is causing issues. Also, most people in my organization have worked on Java-related code. For most of the applications, they are using the same, that is, shell script and AUTOsist, and so we haven't migrated yet. So that is the reason that we are planning to opt for a hybrid model so that we don't have to migrate completely to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management
Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup is not difficult and it did not take us more than one day."
"User friendly solution."
"It's a flexible solution."
"It is intuitive, easy to deploy, and rather quick to deploy and set up. There are a number of native services in the ecosystem. These services are built into the cloud and are mature enough to support you in many ways."
"The most valuable feature is the availability, as we work in different availability zones."
"The product is reliable and quite stable."
"This solution is stable and reliable."
"It has many choices of computer options, storage options, and even database options."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"Its security is most valuable. It's by default secure, which is very important."
"The solution is easy to scale."
"We have found the cluster management function to be very good with this product."
"The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application."
"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."
"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."
"I am impressed with the product's security features."
"Valuable features include time to market, avoiding vendor lock-in, and the ease of working in a multi-cloud environment."
 

Cons

"Its interface could be better because there are so many services right now in the product that it is quite difficult to navigate around in this. Its interface could be a subject of improvement."
"AWS could be improved with more integration, but I can see that they're developing these features and working very hard on their platform."
"The price could be better."
"Monthly costs can be high if you don't maintain your usage"
"The pricing is reasonable but there is always room to be better."
"I would like to receive some alerts when my consumption is getting out of the normal range."
"There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases."
"They currently have fewer regions in Asia, especially in India, China, and other places. They can maybe put more data centers in this region."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"Needs work on volume handling (although this is already better with GlusterFS). Security (SSSD) would also be an improvement."
"While Red Hat OpenShift is stable, monitoring and reporting capabilities need improvement. Integration with tools like Grafana and Prometheus is necessary for capturing logs, and manually managing these aspects is time-consuming."
"The latest 4.0 version of OpenShift disabled a few of the features we previously made use of, although this wasn't a huge deal."
"The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications."
"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management."
"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift."
"They could work on the pricing model, making it more flexible and possibly lower."
"One area for improvement is the documentation. They need to make it a little bit more user-friendly. Also, if you compare certain features and the installation process with Rancher, Rancher is simpler."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an expensive product."
"Pricing is good. It's average."
"We are reducing costs year-over-year."
"The pricing of Amazon AWS is high compared to any other cloud provider."
"It's expensive."
"When I first started using the solution I used a free trial, and then we upgraded to a pay-as-you-go subscription. We have an allocated budget of $50."
"Licensing fees depend on the contract. It can be monthly or on-demand resources."
"A few of our customers pay for it yearly and monthly. Sometimes, when it's related to the data, the pricing seems to be high. It could be cheaper on a transactional basis."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."
"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."
"The cost is quite high."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise112
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderfu...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expand...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the fle...
Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective....
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
What needs improvement with OpenShift?
Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has cro...
What is your primary use case for OpenShift?
We already were having that microservices architecture, so there was not much change from that perspective. We had sm...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat and others in PaaS Clouds. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.