OpenShift Reviews

We are modernizing our data staging environment and moving from traditional virtualization. A year ago, we started deployment with the container. We moved to OpenShift because we wanted to modernize the application with quick deployment and portability and explore the users of that particular containerization feature.

There is a quick deployment of the application, and we can scale out efficiently with the help of OpenShift. We can run containers quickly.

The GUI functionality in the black command is great because, in Docker, we get only CLI. In the OpenShift, we get the GUI interface, and we can manage the GUI itself.

There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift, but we do in Kubernetes. So, it'll be great to get an orchestration platform like Rancher or Kubernetes.

We have been using this solution for one year. We were using version 4.6, and we upgraded to 4.10. It is deployed on-premises.

OpenShift is more stable than the Docker Platform. As a result, it is a stable platform for container workload deployment.

It is very scalable. We have deployed approximately 30 plus apps with the help of OpenShift. We require one senior system engineer for maintenance. We plan to increase the workload on OpenShift once we get a staging environment.

We evaluated Docker before moving to OpenShift.

The initial setup was a bit complex because we needed to configure the work upload and the master mode. We also need to run many containers inside to run the OpenShift Platform, which is complex. The deployment was done in-house with the help of Red Hat as an OEM.

It helps us utilize our resources conservatively and minimize our footprint. We can reduce the virtual machine and move it to the container, so it saves the computer, memory, and network resources.

We get a bundled cost with one of our product suites, but I am unsure of the exact costs.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would suggest working on your application to migrate it. For example, if you go with OpenShift, you need to convert your application virtual machine to the container version. I would also recommend networking inside the load balancer and the routing capability.

We're going to deploy the entire core banking of the bank on the platform.

It helps us through consolidation, ease of use, portability, and because I can use microservices. It's like a one-stop shop for most of my containerized applications that are going to be deployed.

The most valuable features are that 

• it's cloud agnostic
• the containerization and security features are outstanding.

The cloud-agnostic aspect means I can move to AWS, Google, or Azure. That means it is not a limitation. It gives me flexibility.

For running business-critical applications, on a scale of one to five, where five is the best, OpenShift is 4.8.

Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses.

They should partner with Jenkins. It goes without saying that I need Jenkins for my CICD. If Jenkins comes with support, that's good. But if there is a licensed product, I need to secure that license and then I will get support. 

Although the bundling with OCP is better than that offered by others, they can work more on it.

We implemented OpenShift in January 2023, so about six months ago, but we have not fully used it. It's the first time that we've installed it, and we're yet to implement.

It's pretty scalable because of the architecture. I don't see any issues in terms of scaling up or across. During our design phase, we had to scale across and as far as the design was concerned, it was pretty easy.

We can also scale it back. We can reduce or expand as per our needs.

In the future, it will be used by our entire bank, with between 8,000 and 10,000 users. 

We intend to expand the usage but we have to wash our hands of the core banking system first, which itself is a huge system. Once we're done with that, we'll think about other applications.

The forums and services are perfect. Excellent.

Positive

We did not have a previous container platform solution. We did try to build our own but it failed, badly. Building a container platform is not an easy task.

The initial setup is in between straightforward and complex. It's not so easy but not that tough. But we do require a lot of training.

Our deployment took one month.

Red Hat did most of it. We just provided them with the bare metal and away they went. It was a very time-bound project, and the Red Hat team was there. Our teams also worked with them. It was a collaborative exercise. On our side, there were 10 to 15 people involved, but there were five key people.

The CodeReady Workspaces should help reduce time to market if I use the CICD pipelines. That's what we aim for, and that's what the container platform is built for. That's something that goes without saying.

We're using Red Hat Linux across the bank for servers. We will use quite a number of Red Hat products during our core banking deployment, including AMQ, Process Automation Manager, and a couple of other products that are bundled with OCP.

The integration is something that is out of the stack. It's more of a middleware conversation and the middleware for us is an IPaaS. It's less about the stack and more about the application. I don't think there are any issues communicating via APIs. And the access management is pretty adequate. I can plug in any IM or document archival solutions. It's pretty easy to integrate.

Red Hat, as a vendor, has shared ample information with us to help us make decisions. That is where a partner comes into play and we're pretty happy with Red Hat.

Our organization is the product and we have applications that are based on microservices. Our microservices are deployed on OpenShift.

The security features and the support from Red Hat are strong and they have helped our organization.

Integrating the gen case and the CSC pipeline has allowed us to automate processes in OpenShift, reducing the time taken significantly. The system runs smoothly without any issues.

The most valuable feature is the auto scalers for all microservices. The feature allows us to place request limits and it is much cheaper than AWS.

The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement. There are vast metrics and if OpenShift can provide the geometric thread that would be helpful.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable with no downtime.

The solution is very scalable.

Generally, our tickets are resolved within 15 days.

Neutral

Based on feedback from my colleagues, the initial setup is complex with a lot of dependencies to set up the environment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support. The support fee is expensive.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We currently have 100 people using the solution made up of architects, developers, DevOps teams, and testing engineers.

Maintenance is required every two months to restart the ports that get hung up. The solution requires between two and five people for maintenance.

We have built our own container platform. We have lots of products deployed on OpenShift. And there are lots of namespaces all deployed on the same OpenShift control platform. Everything is running fine.

OpenShift is a very stable solution with a lot of support features. I recommend the solution.

We use OpenShift mainly for building middleware services and web applications. All the applications we have transformed on the microservices architecture have been deployed on OpenShift.

OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide. 

Making use of features, such as serverless technology we easily integrate these services with OpenShift. It would be a win-win, because then you can choose the best of all the worlds, and then build your solution.

I have used OpenShift within the last 12 months.

OpenShift is a stable solution.

The scalability of OpenShift combined with Kubernetes is good. At least from the software standpoint, it becomes quite easy to handle the scalability through configuration. You need to constantly monitor the underlying infrastructure and ensure that it has adequate provisioning. If you have enough infrastructure, then managing the scalability is quite easy which is done through configuration.

We have approximately thousands of users using the solution. The business applications that we build, our customers use them regularly, this includes the banking and insurance applications.

All the platforms that we have, whether it is Pivotal, VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft, or Amazon, are partners or we have an alliance with them. We regularly speak to them and we discuss with them the challenges we face. We have a good relationship with the support.

The initial setup on the OpenShift platform took us a long time to complete for the whole department. It took approximately one and a half months to set it up properly. 

Once the implementation was complete we started looking at how we can achieve reusable scripts for the developers. In a way that they can create the scripts in a quick fashion, instead of them doing the configuration and deployment themselves. It takes time for the implementation, and then it's complex overall too. Once you learn it, then it's quite easy.

The team we have is small for maintenance and support. We have approximately six people managing the whole platform for the entire department. Earlier on, there were more, but the platform has matured, and then the number of applications the platform used to run is going down because they're being moved to Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. We keep the team approximately four people who will manage the platform for the next couple of years for the whole department. After that, everything will be on either Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS.

We are in the phase of moving out of OpenShifh to cloud-native services of Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS.

If anybody is looking for a solution that can work on-premise as well as on the cloud and gives the flexibility of not tying the solution to the underlying platform, then OpenShift is one of the popular choices you can make.

I rate OpenShift an eight out of ten.

Application deployment using YAML with Docker containers, creating services and providing routes. It is simple to build configurations and deploy your changes and promote them to different environments.

We are better able to manage application development and promoting from development to staging to production using configurations.

They could provide a template for application deployment and building services and routes so it can all be promoted as a bundle if needed.

This would allow the promotion of the application (which includes the Spring Boot jar, the Kubernetes Service, the Kubernetes Route, dependencies such as properties or secrets) from development through the production environment.

We have been using the solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I did not use the technical support but I do look up plenty of resources on the OpenShift blog which is useful.

We were using individual Tomcat on VMS for a high availability and scalable architecture.

The setup is straightforward if you understand concepts from a Kubernetes cluster development. I have done CoreOS cluster development so I am familiar with much of the setup.

I would try the online public OpenShift instance first and see if it is something that would provide benefit to each enterprise architecture and then go on from there.

We have found RedHat OpenShift to provide the best solution and ease of use.

Try out OpenShift or read up on it first to see the benefits. Also build a Kubernetes cluster yourself to know what goes on under the hood in OpenShift.

We use this solution to support our clients and specifically for package delivery and the ordering of individual items. 

We are evaluating a few others products that are complementary to OpenShift including Advanced Cluster Management, Advanced Cluster Security, and Depth spaces. 

This solution helps us to account for peak seasons involving higher demand than usual. It also gives us confidence in the security of our overall systems. 

OpenShift allows us to take advantage of the cloud in terms of sizing, especially during times when the prediction of volumes is difficult. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability and maturity. It is also easy to start to use and offers good customer support. The Red Hat team assists us whenever we have questions. 

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. 

We have been using this solution since 2017. 

This solution offers excellent stability and we have not experienced any issues.

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten for support. Their customer support is outstanding and we always get the answers we need very quickly. Their technological know-how is good and we are able to get assistance from one architect without getting passed on. 

Positive

Setting up OpenShift 4.0 is simple. It takes between 45 minutes and one hour. 

We have seen a return on our investment. We received payback for our projects in one and a half years which has been advantageous for us.

The model of pricing and buying licenses is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on-demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole. 

We evaluated other solutions including Rancher. OpenShift is built with the developer in mind which is advantageous versus most other products on the market. We also chose OpenShift due to the peace of mind of knowing it is a solution supported by Red Hat. It is also an easy-to-use solution for our developers and has a great administrative interface.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We have a PaaS solution built on OpenShift with more templates and shared services for a containerized application environment.

So, the solution built will be using PaaS that is built on Openshift and hosted in a hybrid PaaS (dedicated & AWS) for building, deploying, and managing microservices-based applications.

We will be using many features of OpenShift for scalability, availability, and security (TLS/OAuth, IdAM integration).

This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch. As the organization for which I am building solutions is embarking on a digital transformation journey, OpenShift is providing one of the key platform capabilities for the digitization of the application landscape.

The features that I find most valuable are:

• DevOps
• Container orchestration
• Scalability
• Multi-cloud options
• Flexibility in choosing routers, load balancers, and monitoring tools
• Configuration options for creating an automated DevOps pipeline using tools like Maven, Ansible, and Jenkins
• Easy configuration for scalability

Most of the configurations are command based. If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great.

You need to have in-depth technical knowledge of the platform to do any kind of application setup due to the complexity of configurations related to infrastructure, security, etc.

Maybe in the future, we can get multi-cloud options such as GCP, Azure, etc.

I have not used any other container orchestration platform, except Kubernetes, which is the base platform for OpenShift.

My role was not one of evaluation, so I did not participate in choosing the product.

I use the solution for deployments with Java applications in the environment.

The solution has helped us in faster deployments of the applications.

The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with multiple applications, including inference tutor and container platforms. It helps us enhance the deployment process and make it faster.

The solution encounters lengthier downtime issues for virtual upgrades. In this case, we have to opt for alternative upgrade strategies. This area needs improvement. Also, they should release its serverless version.

I have been using the solution since 2018.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is easy to scale. Our organization plans to increase its usage for the next five years.

The solution's technical support is excellent.

The solution is easy to configure and run.

The solution generates a return on investment.

The solution is expensive but cost-effective.

The solution is an excellent platform with a fast return on investment. I rate it a ten out of ten.