OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

As an IT service provider, we work on enterprise technologies for our customers.

We have multiple customers with multiple domains, but the majority of our experience is in the banking and telecom sectors. In banking, they're using the OpenShift platform for their microservices-based requirements, and similarly on the telecom side, they are using it for the microservices-led solutions.

We started with the on-prem deployment of OpenShift Container Platform, version 3.2. But currently, we are also helping our customers to migrate to 4.x and to cloud solutions. The plan is to move to a cloud version, strictly on AWS. We are exploring the OpenShift Container Platform cluster, and ROSA (Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS) the latest one with the managed services. By mid-2022, we'll probably be on cloud with this.

OpenShift eliminates distractions so that we can focus on innovation and other things. It completely removes overhead for the developers in terms of managing the orchestration of Kubernetes container clusters. It provides all the built-in features for managing these requirements. As a result, our team is more focused on development and on innovations in the underlying services. With microservices or applications that are deployed on OpenShift, they are able to focus more with the business requirements and innovate by further optimizing efficiently, utilizing the resources at a Kubernetes level.

Some of the primary features we leverage in the platform have to do with how we manage the cluster configurations, the properties, and the auto-scalability. These are the features that definitely provide value in terms of reducing overhead for the developers.

Also the Kubernetes cluster management or orchestration is provisioned through the UI and the CLI.

We are using the Red Hat OpenStack OpenShift Platform. It is much faster in terms of deploying the cluster. As of now, our experience rolling it out is more on the on-prem, but I think with the 4.0 version there is a little bit of a change regarding the way it is deployed, either using the installer base or user-driven installations. It takes a couple of days just to roll out the entire cluster and configure it so that it is ready for the applications or the services to be deployed on the cluster.

The robustness, the availability in terms of resilience, and the service availability with the multiple cluster nodes configured automatically, is pretty good. Even if load balancing is required across multiple clusters with the SDN network, it's pretty good. We haven't had many issues when it comes to robustness. We are happy with the performance provided.

From our experience on the on-prem, we know that there are 10 layers of security provisioned by the OpenShift platform, starting from the kernel level, and including the clusters and the container level. That definitely helped us to achieve a lot of enterprise security requirements in terms of accessibility and managing the infra part or the cluster part.

For running business-critical applications, the solution's security is pretty good. We are able to achieve consistent efficiency and availability for all our critical service requirements, when spanned across multiple DCs with the load balancer and DR solutions. We don't have to spend much on it, once we orchestrate the cluster with the proper configurations. At that point, everything is taken care of automatically.

At the service level, I don't see a very granular level of security as compared with the container-based clusters. It is at the Kubernetes level, not at the service level.

Also, when I compare it with the other container or Kubernetes technologies, we have pretty good documentation from OpenShift, but with the recent trend of cloud-native, fully managed serverless services, I don't see much documentation about how a customer should move from on-prem to the cloud, or what is the best way to do a lift-and-shift. Even if you are on AWS OCP, which is self-managed infra services, and you want to use the ROSA managed services, what is the best way to achieve that migration? I don't see documentation for these kinds of use cases from Red Hat. There is some room for improvement there.

We have been using OpenShift Container Platform, as an organization, for the last three or four years.

The stability is pretty good. The industry has been using these enterprise solutions over the long term and we haven't heard of or seen any issues with stability. Of course, it depends on the way you configure it or manage it. But given best practices, the stability is pretty good.

The solution gives us the flexibility to start with a small number of nodes and to scale it to the maximum number of nodes. As of now, we haven't gone beyond whatever the limitations are, in terms of the number of clusters or nodes, within OpenShift. We are well within the limits and are able to achieve our requirements. That aspect makes it more flexible.

Scalability is definitely one of the positives with OpenShift, where you can have a distributed cluster across multiple DCs or multiple Availability Zones with AWS. The only thing we don't see is much documentation. If we want to maintain Active-Active disaster recovery or hot and warm availability requirements, even in on-prem, how do our clusters scale across different regions or different availabilities? And how do I manage the internal cluster storage being replicated across multiple clusters? How does that work, and how do we prove it? That's another use case where, when it comes to documentation, there is a little gap.

But overall, scalability is pretty consistent and achievable with OpenShift.

I'm not involved much in post-production support. Usually, it is the customer team that gets into those kinds of requirements. But what I heard from our customers is pretty good, in terms of the support provided by the Red Hat. We know that they have a very good enterprise support team and provide support fairly quickly for technical issues.

On AWS, we have seen they have OCP-dedicated infra, which is completely managed by Red Hat. Now with ROSA, where AWS and Red Hat are both managing it, we are expecting a similar kind of support from Red Hat.

Whether Red Hat acts as a partner with our customers depends on the customer. Most of our customers use Red Hat enterprise support for technical issues with OpenShift Cluster Platform. But they don't get deeply integrated with Red Hat in terms of exchanging ideas or innovating new solutions. But Red Hat is always providing its innovations and doing research into new products. That has definitely helped our customers.

We embarked on OpenShift as our first enterprise container technology.

There are open-source-based Kubernetes services provided by AWS and there are a number of cluster-based solutions available. But what Red Hat and OpenShift did was that they packaged all of their solutions within their platform so that it provides added features. For our finance or banking customers, adopting an open-source solution is challenging, but the enterprise-grade support from Red Hat makes it much easier for them to adopt the OpenShift cluster.

As for building our own container platform, initially we tried with Dockers, but when we compared other Kubernetes cluster technologies to OpenShift we found that OpenShift is a much better solution in terms of the features.

With the on-prem solution, with OCP, where you have control of your infra, I feel the setup is straightforward, because you know OpenShift 4.0, or other versions, and how to install it. You have the resources and the skill sets and it is easy to just start with that part.

But ROSA is a very new approach, with the fully-managed and serverless cluster. I feel there are some gaps there because you don't have control of infra provisioning. AWS and Red Hat directly provision things once you provide the configurations. But if a customer wants to use a fully managed service with some level of customization, we don't see how we can easily achieve that.

On average, if it's a single-cluster deployment for five nodes, it may take three days to get the infra up and running. And then, to do all the configurations and get the applications deployed, it probably takes another one or two days, including the testing and readiness of the infra. So a total of about five days is the optimum timeline to get a single cluster up and running with the services deployed in it.

As we are exploring the cloud migration side of things, we definitely have a deployment plan where we use the templates, including Terraform templates, when it comes to infra and core provisioning. We then have a clusterized deployment as a basic migration approach or a phased approach. We leverage tools like the Migration Toolkit from Red Hat itself and some AWS tools which are relevant if there are challenges with agent installation and the like.

We have seen return on investment from using OpenShift. The TCO is much better, comparatively, over the course of three to five years. We have seen a reduction in infra and cluster management operational costs. These are some of the aspects where we have definitely seen a return on investment.

OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS.

Initially, we had this interim state where we wanted to move as a lift-and-shift, meaning we wanted to move OpenShift to OpenShift. We had three choices: OpenShift Container Platform, the OpenShift dedicated platform from Red Hat itself, and ROSA with the fully managed services. For lift-and-shift, we wanted to maintain an as-is state and made a decision to go with AWS OCP, which helps us to control our infrastructure and deployment requirements, while maintaining the as-is state. Price-wise, this option is less than ROSA. In ROSA, we would need to pay the cost for the underlying AWS resources we would be using, plus a nominal cost to Red Hat for managing every cluster and every worker node.

There is no doubt about things, feature-wise. In terms of scalability, availability, stability, robustness, OpenShift stands out. It's the cost and support factors which make the decision a little difficult.

If a customer is looking for a fully controlled or fully managed container technology, OpenShift is definitely a choice for them. But there are other services available, like AWS EKS, which come with similar kinds of services. It depends on if you need a deep-dive solution: Do you want to maintain your own infra or do you want fully managed services? And do you want to leverage other OpenShift cluster services? But OpenShift is the choice.

We don't use the full-fledged automated services for OpenShift clusters as of now, although we do use a few of the automated services. What we are using currently is sufficient and it helps us to meet a lot of audit and telemetric requirements.

In terms of using it for cloud native stacks and meeting regulatory constraints, we are still exploring that. We are currently looking at the AWS OCP and ROSA platforms. ROSA provides flexibility in terms of installations and managing the entire infra. ROSA is completely managed by automated serverless services, where you just provide the initial configurations for the kind of a cluster you need and it automatically provisions the infrastructure for you. Whereas with OCP you have control over the infrastructure and you can play with your cluster orchestrations, configurations, et cetera. In these ways, with the cloud services, we do have flexibility, but the cost factor may be a differentiator in terms of the on-prem and the cloud versions.

We definitely plan to use the CodeReady Workspaces, but we are not there yet. The idea is to move on to the AWS Workspaces.

Overall, I would rate the solution at nine out of 10. It has everything. For me, it is not a 10 because the support and the pricing costs stand out.

We are using OpenShift Container Platform to build microserivces which are financial business logics, such as payments, transfers, KYC etc. These serve as the defacto logic consumed by any channel. We are also leveraging the networking and securing capabilities of OCP which serves to secure and control on granular level.

First and foremost we have benefited vastly in cost reduction.

The abstraction provided by OpenShift of the underlying infrastructure gives us the ability to extend the application across data centers (on-prem or cloud) that gurantees the uptime by 50%.

The ability to push new changes without hampering the current version given us almost 100% business continuity and zero downtime deployments.

OCP gives the ability to use the resource effectively which has helped in maximizing the use of underlying infra and it further has the intel to scale up the  the running app in case it is running out of resources thus auto-scalablility is inherent when apps are ran on OCP.

It would be unjust to not mention the automation capability introduced by OCP makes the whole development and deployment seamless and almost eradicates the operational overhead of running this platform.

The auto scalability feature, which is based on smart agendas, determined from pre-prepared rules is the most valuable feature. You can also create different routes for deployment. Deployment types can be provided with an identifier, such as AB deployment. This really helped in rolling out releases without disrupting services for the end-users.

Secondly, there is the ability to control at a granular level. For example, they can release two versions of the same service and control the traffic towards it to a specific percentage.  Other organizations don't seem to use this feature in the same way we did. Additional rules can be specified to determine individual versions of a service, and rules for governing users access to such services.

Marketing can also make use of OpenShift by analyzing logs to provide useable data. This is one of the features that I really like about OpenShift. It is also a secure environment, with user access configurable at a very granular level. Depending on the API and the ecosystem, it is possible to completely plug and integrate. You control how the deployment works and the testing process.

With OCP 4.x the capability of configuring and controlling your ingress controller has also introduced an immense ability to provide an experience which is pertinent to a particular app. With this we can introduce app specific compliance and security without enforcing similar requirements on all services, which was the case with earlier versions.

From a networking perspective, the routing capability can be matured further. OpenShift doesn't handle restrictions on what kind of IPs are allowed, who can access them, and who cannot access them. So it is a simple matter of just using it with adequate network access, at the network level.

It should be possible to whitelist IPs so that you can allow and restrict access to the API. That would be a fantastic feature. OpenShift would then encapsulate the entire security and access. This is one improvement that I would seriously want our client to have, and for that reason, I have joined the OpenShift community, and it is a project I could probably work on myself. 

The second thing is that deployment is more of a strategy rather than a feature in OpenShift. Although you can create different routes, and it works fine, it is not an innate feature of OpenShift that it understands that you want to run specific versions of the same service as needed. Though you can define routes to serve different versions.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for almost four years.

It is very stable when it's running. So far, I haven't found any issues. We went through operating system upgrades. We did need to perform some patching, so there was some vulnerability and there were many tasks we had to undertake to assist with stability. In fact, we use two clusters. One of them is used for non-production purposes. It is a developer's structure and is a very stable solution.

Further by the design OCP will keep running the cluster is left with only one node, which makes it very robust and reliable platform.

The auto-scalability feature, which is based on smart agendas, can be determined from pre-prepared rules. You can also create different routes for deployment. Deployment types can be provided with an identifier.

This is very flexible and saves resources when you don't need them, and scales up when you do. This is a very powerful feature.

We used the Redhat TAM service. They assign a technical application manager to you, and we have used that. The support is very, very responsive. They respond very quickly. What I like about them is that they have a very precise, clear and rationale way of working they will ask guide you to take a decision towards one single solution you require. That's it. They will come back to you and provide pinpoint in-depth guidance into the problem that you have.
Unlike most support companies, you usually obtain a workable solution in a good time frame.

Positive

We were using 3.x and now we have swtiched to managed OCP 4.x on cloud. This has given us helped in reducing cost and given the ability to expand and configure OCP without involving infra team, what was a months process has reduced down to minutes.

This was an in-house implementation.

Costs reduced by 70%, this includes infra and operation costs.

It is a costly solution but then again, it's intended for enterprise-level business, and the license has to reflect that. It is appreciated what the GPU's processing power requirements will be higher. The licensing is very flexible. The license is related to the processing power you need, and the infrastructure of any clusters which go with that. If your current application, internally, has more then 5 workflows that have significant resources requirement I will suggest to consider using OCP. Anything below would be more costly on OCP in terms of license and infra setup.

We had a comparison between OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Services and Elastic Kubernetes Services (AWS) but OpenShift is more mature, it has understands the corporate more especially from security and compliance perspective. We also have the leverage to be multi-tenant with OCP over IaaS that lets us leverage the best of all infra flavours out there.

A common mistake is to assume that the solution can change the architecture type. e.g. some people think by using this solution they can change their application architecture into a microservices architecture. OpenShift is an orchestration platform. These types of solutions are not intended to be run as a microservices architecture. Very often, the two become synonymous which leads to decisions which incur huge costs. Especially the conventional thought process kicks in and OCP looks more like an application server rather than a platform.

As the cost of this product is expensive it should only be considered for large enterprises. There will also be a need to hire technical people, and this may also involve a training cost.

There has to be a cost-benefit. It can be done as a single solution, but the solution itself has to be huge. 

You also need to make the best use of the solution. If you are processing millions of transactions, that would describe an adequate use. You need to calculate the solution costs against the work it is designed to do, otherwise, it becomes a cost overhead. Certainly, for a single application, it would be a waste of money.

I would rate OpenShift Container Platform a nine out of ten.

Last but not the least, considering running multiple application on OCP to maximize the cost of licenses and it the budgeting of OCP should not reside with an application team where it will hard for them to budget and run the platform and would innately require other application teams to have a separate cluster which dissolves the whole purpose of OCP.

The product is used to deploy applications. We provide the base image that has the fundamentals for the BPM product. Then, it's in our docker farm and another image is created that extends the base image. The second image adds application-specific requirements on it. Basically, it's layering the application on top of the base image and a new image is created and that is deployed onto OpenShift.

The OpenShift platform is built on the Docker Ecosystem. The image we create is easily portable. OpenShift is built on top of the Docker Ecosystem which is one advantage.

It has run time. It has all the binders required. Once built and once tested that it is working, it'll work wherever it's deployed. 

On OpenShift, it's easy to scale applications. We can easily scale up or scale down.

It's a container platform. It uses resources efficiently - specifically on the CPU RAM limit. We can create as many containers as needed. The underlying resources are utilized well.

It's intuitive and user-friendly. They have a very good UI, through which we can add all the artifacts required for OpenShift. Also, they are providing API through which also we can work on the projects. Apart from that, they also provide the CLI, a command-line interface. In my view, I think it's very good. I don't see anything more that is needed.

Everything is good. I don't see any need or any improvement that can be done. They cover CI/CD and I have not seen something which is missed in this product.

The initial setup can be hard.

It takes some time to learn everything. There's a learning curve. 

I've used the solution for four or five years. 

It's very stable. We've never had any failures. It was always up and running. It's very reliable. 

Our company is quite large. I'm not sure how many people are actually using the solution. We have a small team, and, of us, about four are using it. However, that's not indicative of the company as a whole. 

So far, the scalability is good. 

We're using it regularly, on a daily basis. 

I haven't reached out to support. For this product, we are focused more on the application side. We use the platform, however, our focus is on the application side. Whatever happens, the team that maintains and does the upgrade of the platform, interacts with the vendor. We never interacted with the vendor for OpenShift.

I tried AWS. It's also a cloud product, however, not exactly the same as OpenShift. They offer a different set of services. It's not a past product platform, it is a service product. I have used AWS, which offers cloud services. We cannot really compare both of them.

At the outset, the initial setup was not easy. The learning curve is always there. The lack of materials at that point in time also made learning a little bit hard. However, after some point, we had very good documentation and we could easily handle the product. We could easily start working on it. It's gotten better over time. For the first three or four months, it was hard, however, after that, it was easy.

The first deployment took around four to five months as we had to develop an agent data rate. It took some time. However, the changes, usually, could be done in a week or so. It was not a long time. Every week we can easily make the changes.

There's no maintenance. We don't do it. We use the platform and some other team will automatically do the upgrade. We don't have to do it ourselves. It's done by a separate team.

I'd rate the solution four out of ten in terms of ease of setup.

We handled the implementation ourselves. The solution does not offer any consultants or integrators. We managed everything through the UI.

I cannot speak about the pricing. We never interact with the vendor for that. There is a separate team who takes care of the platform and they work with the vendor for pricing.

While my company has some sort of partnership with eh solution, I am just an end-user.

It's my understanding I'm using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I would recommend this product. It's easy to develop applications and it gives you the option to manage your cloud on a private platform. We don't have to rely on public infrastructure. In the private infrastructure, we can have our server and use this product and make the application secure.

We are moving as many applications as possible to a containerized environment. In terms of our environment, we have multiple data centers. One, of course, is for redundancy. Most of them are hot-warm. They're not hot-hot or hot-cold, depending on how you look at it, but pretty much everything that's important is fully redundant. That would be between our own private data centers and within Amazon across regions.

We have an on-premises and private cloud deployment. Amazon is the cloud provider. We've got some Azure out there too, but Amazon has been the primary focus.

Centralized control of container resources is most valuable.

There should be a simplification of the overall cluster environment. It should require fewer resources. Just to run a simple Hello World app, it requires about seven servers, and that's just crazy. I understand that it is fully redundant, but it's prohibitively expensive to get something simple going.

We've had a very difficult time going from version 3 to 4. We need to go to version 4 because of multiple network segments that may be running in a container and how we organize our applications. It's very difficult to have applications from different domains in the same container cluster. We've had a lot of problems with that. I find it to be an overcomplicated environment, and some of the other simpler containers may very well rise above this. 

It has probably been in use in the organization for about a year and a half.

It is fine. I've not heard anything negative about either the performance or the reliability.

Scalability is one of the primary reasons for going with a containerized environment like this. I have not heard that we've had any restrictions there, and I would be shocked and remarkably disappointed if we did. We have not hit any scalability issues yet.

I personally do not have any experience with them. I'm quite sure our low-level implementers do. 

They were just different JBoss containers. It really wasn't a containerized environment. We're looking at some of the AWS solutions.

I didn't do the initial setup. Some other people did that. We're all pretty uber geeks. So, I'm quite sure that we'd be able to figure it out naturally. Because it's a fully-featured and complex environment, you'd have to bone up on OpenShift to figure out how to install it properly, but I wouldn't expect it to be onerous.

Our implementation strategy was to start moving applications to be containerized and then implement them in the OpenShift. We were moving to OpenShift running on our own ECS on Amazon, but we have a lot of on-prem as well.

We're still working out the kinks. A part of that is our own dysfunction in terms of how we organize our apps, and then there is the problem with running apps from different domains in the same container. Some of those are our own self-imposed problems, but some of it is due to the OpenShift complexity.

We definitely hired different experts, but for the most part, we went out and hired people with the expertise, and now, they're employees. So, I'm quite sure there were consultants in there, but I don't know that offhand. 

We have not yet seen an ROI.

It depends on who you're talking to. For a large corporation, it is acceptable, other than the significant infrastructure requirements. For a small organization, it is in no way suitable, and we'd go for Amazon's container solution.

Additional costs are difficult for me to articulate because ours is a highly-complex environment even outside of it.

Ensure that you need all of the features that it has because otherwise, it's not worth the investment. Be careful what version you're getting into because that can be problematic to change after you've already invested in both the training and the infrastructure.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Considering some of the problems we've had, even though some of them are self-imposed, I would hope that a containerized environment would be flexible to be able to give us some options there. 

Our customers value the monitoring and logging functionalities which are also our most valuable features. 

Our customers like the service mesh, so we integrated these to improve customer satisfaction.

It is difficult to deploy the OpenShift cluster in a bare-metal environment. For example, when there are errors during the cluster deployment, it is hard to find the error on any documentation. So, from the cluster deployment perspective, there could be improvements.

Also, the machine config and machine config tools need improvement. The machine config tool implements changes related to files over the worker and master nodes in OpenShift. However, sometimes it starts without warning, and it is unclear how the error can be fixed.

In terms of additional features, it will be good to have the support of the CNI or OVN for the Multus CNI. Currently, in OpenShift, the additional networks added by the Multus and the pods do not support the OVN CNI plugin. OVN is supported in OpenShift, but only for the non-Multus interface, which is the primary interface of pods.

We have used OpenShift Container Platform for the past four years. We are using version 4.10, and it is deployed on-premises.

It is a stable solution. We have not had any issues or found any big bugs. However, even though it is stable, we observed that the latest versions of this solution are usually less stable than the previous versions.

Therefore, if I were to rate the stability, I would give it a six out of ten because there are a few minor issues in the latest version.

OpenShift Container Platform is great from a scalability perspective. To my knowledge, there is no limitation when adding many compute nodes in OpenShift. It just requires a lot of hardware since we use on-premises at my company. You will need to increase the capability of master nodes if you want to add worker nodes.

I will rate the scalability a six out of ten.

Technical support from Red Hat is very good. They are proactive and always reply accordingly, depending on the tickets' priority. We never have any issues with the support. I will rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was very complicated. It took us about a week to deploy a basic three-master and a two-worker node cluster. I was also not aware of the OpenShift documentation at the time.

From an administrative perspective, it is difficult for new people to understand. A few coworkers from different backgrounds who moved to use OpenShift found it challenging. However, it was not as difficult for me because I am familiar with OpenShift.

I rate the implementation experience a five out of ten.

I don't know the exact licensing costs as I never purchase licenses for my organization.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Regarding advice, it depends on the use case and what kind of platform a company wants. For example, if they want something on Kubernetes with at least basic amenities, like logging and monitoring and similar things out of the box, then OpenShift is good for them. But, if they want to modify the Kubernetes how they want, it is not a good solution because it is not flexible. OpenShift Container Platform gives you a lot of features out of the box, but you cannot modify it. So, if they want to use Kubernetes how they want, then the open-source Vanilla Kubernetes is better for them than OpenShift.

Our use case is primarily to do with DataPower. We wanted to configure DataPower and move away from appliances to a software-based solution, which is CP4I. DataPower is an IBM product, and we were using their firmware machine. We wanted to move from hardware or firmware to software, and CP4I is a software-based solution for DataPower, and that works primarily for any Kubernetes, but IBM had both. So we moved to Kubernetes, and on top of that, we had CP4I.

We did the implementation for one organization. It was widely used, and there was a huge customer base. It was primarily in the telecom domain. Those APIs were used, and we were getting a lot of incoming traffic and outgoing traffic through DataPower.

This solution is deployed on our private cloud.

The architecture is the best. The solution is scalable if you are on a container-based solution. I can easily spin a new container or create another image, so that was the benefit. It was scalable, and I could easily ramp up and ramp down the services based on the need.

OpenShift is not very old. They have built an entire layer on top of Kubernetes. Getting the solution quickly and troubleshooting quickly are both areas where I think it needs some work. 

It wasn't very problematic for us because we were getting the solution. They also needed to do some experiments in their own lab, because our use case was a little different, and we were one of the few who were implementing it for the first time with Cloud Pak.

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.

It wasn't stable while we were testing it, but now it's really stable.

I would rate technical support 4 out of 5. 

The deployment was very easy, which is another benefit. The orchestration and management were also very user-friendly and easy.

We used our own technical team for deployment. The team, including support and everything, was around five to six people. They were working on services also, like creating and deploying the APIs. We had the infrastructure team who were managing the clusters.

It also depends on the size and how many master nodes there are, how many worker nodes you have, and the mechanism you're using for logging. I was using Prometheus and Grafana. It all depends on how huge your architecture, how huge your infrastructure is.

We definitely did the ROI on this new implementation, and we found that in the long run, it was going to save a lot.

We paid for Cloud Pak for integration. It all depends on how many VMs or how many CPUs you are using. They do the licensing based on that.

It was not very cheap, but it was affordable for the organization. They had the enterprise ELA, which means they had the enterprise licensing agreement with IBM. So it worked for them, and it wasn't very expensive.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

We are using it for a payment system.

We run business-critical applications on OpenShift. It is very good.

Since we had limited time for our project, this solution was very helpful in getting us into production within a short time frame.

The management console is easy to use. You can easily install some components with OpenShift Operator. 

Red Hat's security throughout the stack and software supply chain is good. It is a lightweight operating system. You don't have to worry about the security patches on the system. You can update the entire environment with security patches, which is a nice feature.

It has an option to install OpenShift without connecting it to the Internet. We tried this, but it was very hard. We couldn't manage to use that option. We wanted to use it offline for installations, updates, upgrades, etc., but we didn't find the offline installation and updates easy. This could be better.

We have been using it for two months, since December, with an important project.

I find the platform stable.

It is scalable. The problem is the license.

It is used not only with our company, but with some banks.

New banks or another organization may come to use the product going forward. 

We use the technical support, but not much. Some of my friends use it more in-depth. I think it is not so great, but useful. By starting at Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3, accessing the right person sometimes takes us time.

We were previously using a container platform with Onsite, but we were using it for different applications, like servers.

We went with OpenShift because we knew that we already had Linux systems running on Red Hat and were getting support from Red Hat, e.g., we are using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux system.

The initial setup was not complicated. It has many documents. Since we bought in a company, they had some predefined documents, which was helpful for us. 

It took two to three weeks to do the initial five online installations, then we installed three different clusters in one week.

We had a step-by-step plan that we followed to implement this solution. We installed the machine, then the images on the machine. We ran them after the cluster was up, then we installed the Operators.

We worked with a local company during installation. Those guys did the installation. They did not have in-depth product knowledge, but they were helpful. I think the company was a partner of Red Hat.

Take some time to understand and learn the product before starting it.

Our Red Hat products integrate well in our company. 

My company has a background with Red Hat. The people from our company had established relationships with Red Hat.

I would rate this product as an eight out of 10.

We have working nodes in the OpenShift Container Platform, we have six working nodes and we have a master working node. We have a Jenkins pipeline to operate our deployment and, CI/CD operations. We create some pipelines to deploy the code to the containers and those containers activate on OpenShift Container Platform ports or working node ports.

We had old-fashioned programs before switching. We started to create a new architecture for our developers. After generating our Java framework, we were looking for a new platform to run our systems. For our business clients, we need flexibility, and scalability, while we are searching the environment, because of the regulations. We need some private cloud options, and cloud vendors did not have private options.

I have found the ability to scale up is most valuable. If you do not have any hardware limitations, you can scale up during your busy timelines. It is an excellent tool so you can deploy these products to any of the public clouds. If the regulations allow you, it is straightforward to deploy your codes to another public cloud or another platform. OpenShift Container Platform gives you an opportunity to be flexible.

The monitoring is problematic. The product monitoring tool does not work for us. We had to purchase the Dynatrace solution to monitor our product and our applications, and this is a weakness of OpenShift Container Platform. If there was some orchestration with mini services because microservices can be complex.

I have been using OpenShift Container Platform for the past four years now.

The scalability is excellent. Last year we had some hardware limitations, we reached the limit of our hardware platform. After we enhanced our hardware we have not received any additional alarms.

Technical support from my experience is the middle of the road.

Neutral

The initial setup can take twenty-five minutes if it is a large stand-alone monolith. We have six steps in our pipeline. It changed to application certification, for little microservices, it takes approximately two to four minutes. We have six administration users who arranged the pipelines and port visualization for port monitoring.

We currently have an annual license renewal.

I would recommend using OpenShift Container Platform, giving it a rating of eight out of ten.