OpenShift Reviews

We use OpenShift for Health and Human Services to build an integration platform and deliver services. We use it to support public sector companies and organizations and we build an integration platform for the Medicaid information system.

We started using OpenShift because we have an alliance and connection with them from one of our previous projects.

We want to build a solution that can be deployable to any cloud because of client requirements and OpenShift allows us to do this. 

This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We are not yet using this solution in production so I cannot speak to scalability yet. 

The customer support for this solution is good. We have a consulting agreement, so we are getting good support.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

We do see a return on investment from using the solution.

I would advise others to review the applicability of the solution to your business. There can be some limitations on the usage of this solution for some products and software.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We are using OpenShift as a microservice platform.

The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the containers.

OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network.

In a new release of OpenShift, they should add Kibana, Grafana, and Elasticsearch.

I have been using OpenShift for approximately two years.

OpenShift is stable. However, I feel it could be better but the local implementor is not giving us all the information.

We use OpenShift on a daily basis. We have one engineer for the operation and a pre-engineer for monitoring. Additionally, we have more than five to handle the daily work.

We are using a local vendor for the support. They can handle level one and two support when we have issues.

The initial setup of OpenShift is complex. We have two types we do, but active active does not work, only active passive does.

We used a local vendor to do the implementation and maintenance.

I rate OpenShift an eight out of ten.

Our service order management platform was cloud-native. We deployed its microservices on Red Hat OpenShift. When we did that, we were able to increase the capacity of order processing from 100,000 a day to at least 400,000 orders daily. That is the incremental capacity that OpenShift gave us.

The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good.

We deployed some microservices to handle Airtime Advance and Data Advance. This product from the consumer commercial team needed a throughput of around 2,500. They were able to get that from Red Hat OpenShift.

The self-healing of pods is a valuable feature. This feature goes a long way in helping us ensure our uptime for services, improving the performance of the system.

The solution provides us with the flexibility of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints. Since most of our services were deployed on-premises, this allowed us not to get into data privacy issues for services with personally identifiable information belonging to customers. It is microservice-ready from a cloud-native perspective, which is a benefit.

With the automation that OpenShift gives you, you can automate as much as possible. This goes a long way in reducing time to market and errors due to human intervention. So, if an organization can do a lot of automation, e.g., automating deployments, that can go a very long way in reducing the time to market and the time required to fix issues that arise out of deployment.

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.

I was using this solution at my previous company. I left that company in October of last year.

We implemented the project mid-2019. We went live just before the pandemic in 2020.

It is very stable.

From some issues in production where some nodes went down, we just needed to improve in monitoring the Red Hat cluster. Then, we could know when there was degraded performance and repair it before it could cause an impact to the customer.

It is able to scale based on load.

The support is amazing. They stick to the SLA, and even go out of their way to research and assist customers to resolve issues. I would rate the support as nine out of 10.

Red Hat is amazing. With the proper leadership in place and proper partnership, you can do a lot more with Red Hat. There is a very active community where they share codes, information, and ideas.

Positive

Initially, we used to run Vanilla Kubernetes, which is open source. Then, we realized we were short on skill sets. Another organization had done a PoC of Red Hat OpenShift, and it passed. So, our organization was gracious enough to allow us to spend money on Red Hat OpenShift licenses. That was in 2019.

With Vanilla Kubernetes, we were not able to successfully implement service mesh. That comes already preconfigured for you with Red Hat OpenShift. 

In terms of traffic routing and firewall management, it was a nightmare managing that in Vanilla Kubernetes. However, with Red Hat OpenShift, you only add specific IPs in firewalls, as opposed to the nightmare that we used to see with Vanilla Kubernetes.

Red Hat's commitment to open source is one of the reasons that we went with it. We knew that we would get continuous updates. Also, the option of keeping our OpenShift cluster up-to-date with new services was a headache that we passed onto Red Hat. 

Initially, the deployment process was complex. However, with repeated use, it made more sense. Deploying TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition and optimizing it on Red Hat OpenShift is complex.

We teamed up with Red Hat's OEM to do the Red Hat OpenShift implementation. So, it was a small team. We just did a waterfall implementation, not agile.

We did see ROI.

The solution's CodeReady Workspaces reduced project onboarding time by over 50% and time to market by 70%.

The organization really wanted to go open source for a very long time to reduce its CapEx and OpEx costs.

We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO.

The pricing and licensing for OpenShift is okay.

At the time of our evaluation, our options were only OpenShift and Vanilla Kubernetes. Now, there is also VMware Tanzu, which wasn't as mature a product when we did the PoC in 2019.

I am currently implementing VMware Tanzu in my new role at another company. I have not seen any significant differences between Tanzu and OpenShift.

Go for this solution.

Red Hat does a good job of ensuring that their solutions are operable and you can take advantage of the features within a solution.

We also had Red Hat Ansible for automating server provisioning and some operational tasks.

We didn't get any security breaches from Red Hat OpenShift.

I would rate OpenShift as eight out of 10.

OpenShift is a containerization platform.

OpenShift provides faster container orchestration without the need to know the guts of an already complex system. Kubernetes is complicated for an organization to do correctly on its own, so OpenShift streamlines that process and makes it easier to get up and running.

It allows flexible and efficient cloud-native stacks. You've got a lot of capabilities, such as build packs to automatically access development solutions or different languages like Spring Boot or .NET. Everything is in one place and addresses the developers and administrators.

Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes. OpenShift's security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is pretty robust. Including advanced cluster security, OpenShift covers almost everything out of the box.

We are also using Linux Rail and Ansible, and all these Red Hat products have some awareness. However, it's hard to say because some of them previously existed as non-Red Hat products.

One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. 

These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic. They shouldn't be linked together so that when you upgrade one, you must also upgrade the other. It doesn't make sense if they aren't related as operators.

I have been using OpenShift for three or four years.

OpenShift is mostly stable. It's designed so that you seldom notice if it's unstable. I have no complaints.

OpenShift is scalable. It automatically scales.

I rate OpenShift support seven out of 10. There is room for improvement. We sometimes find the answer before the vendor. You get bounced around to various people and must repeat the issue even though it's all documented.

Neutral

Setting up OpenShift is pretty straightforward, and you can do it in under 30 minutes if you know what to do. We have four admins who maintain it. It requires a lot of maintenance because the underlying platform moves quickly. Kubernetes moves quickly, so new versions are constantly coming out. Keeping current requires lots of maintenance. We do upgrades monthly.

Vendor support is one reason to go with OpenShift. It's an open-source product, but you can pay for support. 

We looked at all the options, including Upstream Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, and Rancher.

I rate OpenShift eight out of 10. Red Hart is a good partner for the most part. Like anything, it depends on who you work with. Some people will regurgitate the documentation, while others will bring their experiences from other locations.

We use the solution for container orchestration and management. 

We have found the cluster management function to be very good with this product. Also, each new version of the product has made upgrading easier and faster to carry out.

We experienced issues around desktop security, which stopped us from implementing a new feature that had been developed. This needs to be improved in order to expand the usage of the product.

We have been working with this solution for around two and a half years.

We have found the solution to be very stable.

We have found the solution to be very scalable during our time using it, and we now have a large number of transactions passing through the product.

The technical support is good, but they have been slow to respond in the past. The issues were resolved effectively, but it took some time for this to happen.

Positive

The initial setup of the solution was hard, and took around three months to deploy completely.

We used a third-party vendor for our implementation, and they were very knowledgeable.

Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period.

I would recommend that organizations pay a lot of attention to the initial design and setup of the solution to ensure that it is optimized for their needs, as it isn't easy to make changes once this is complete.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use OpenShift for the deployment of microservices architecture and containerizing applications.

The product is easy to use. It has valuable features for integrating CI/CD pipelines, repositories, and support from open-source communities.

The product’s integration with Windows containers and other third-party products needs improvement.

We have been using OpenShift for three to four years.

It is a stable platform.

The product is expensive to scale for smaller businesses in an on-premise environment. They can instead opt for a public cloud setup. The enterprises that can afford the cost should only opt for it if they have a specific use case or want to transform applications.

We receive remote and on-call support services on purchasing an enterprise support subscription.

The implementation is not as straightforward as VMware products. It requires prior experience for easier deployment.

The product’s pricing is expensive. It has the biggest market share right now as a containerization platform. It is the highest-selling product.

Vanilla doesn’t have essential features like CI/CD integration, repositories, and community, similar to OpenShift.

I rate OpenShift a nine out of ten. It is a wonderful product. I advise others to choose the environment size properly. You can deploy it on a public cloud and not necessarily on-premises. You can decide depending on the workload and data localization requirements.

We use this solution as part of our containerization so that we can manage different applications in the system. We use it to make the CICD pipeline and integrations smoother.

This solution really makes a lot of the containerization work really simple and reduces complexity which is important for us.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is the great customer service and the ability of our team to get assistance when we need it. 

This solution has been used by our business for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate the support for this solution a nine out of ten. 

Positive

It seems like we're getting a pretty high return on our investment because of our ability to navigate, integrate and migrate across platforms. We have gone from one cloud platform to a new platform and that has been almost seamless and exceptionally simple.

This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten because this solution has been able to adapt to our needs as we continue to innovate. 

I primarily use the solution for deploying Springboot applications and Engine X among other things. 

In the company, if transactions rise, we can scale up the solution easily. It's flexible and we're able to ensure it meets our needs based on its ability to autoscale. 

The deployment is easy.

The security is good. I'd rate it 4.5 or five out of five. I'm satisfied with the security on offer. 

The product can scale well automatically. 

OpenShift can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud. It helps us comply with regulatory issues that would require at least a portion to be covered by on-prem usage. 

The automated processes are really great. It helps with development time and the end product quality. It helps by being so flexible, which translates into easier development. It helps take some stuff off our plate. 

The solution's code ready workspaces have reduced project onboarding time. It's really simple to deploy on OpenShift. The reduction levels have been around 35%. It also reduces time to market due ot the faster development times. The reduction has been around almost 20% based on some administration we ned to handle in order to maintain compliance.

The flexibility is nice, yet comes with great sacrifice. It's much more complicated in general. We'd like the flexibility on offer to be simplified a bit so that we don't have to do so many workarounds. 

The interface could be simplified a bit more. 

I've been using the solution for one and a half years.

The stability of the product is good. There may be a few bugs, however, in general, it works quite well. 

The product is scalable. 

We have 100 or hundred users on the solution right now in our organization. Most are developers. Some are end-users. There might be a handful of admins as well. 

Technical support isn't used really. I've never called them personally. 

We previously used a different solution. We switched to this product since it was more flexible.

We have considered building our own container platform as well since we needed something on-prem. However, OpenShift already provided what we needed, and so it wasn't necessary. 

I'm not sure if we also use any other Red Hat products. 

The initial setup was not done by me. I only work with the solution. 

I don't directly deal with pricing or handle the negotiation on licensing. I can't speak to the exact price. 

We're a customer and end-user. 

I do not use the solution on the vendor's open stack platform.

It's a good idea to explore the solution first before really jumping in. Also, companies need to understand the costing and the SSL before jumping into a deployment. 

I'd rate OpenShift at a nine out of ten.