Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

Red Hat is acquired by IBM, there is still a separate entity, but we are more on the partner side.

I work with IBM, and most of our solutions are on the OpenShift platform. I work with our business partners to enable and help them with the technical pre-sales and setup role. So, I'm not involved in production engineering systems but rather in demos, first application implementations, and POCs.

The user experience and security are some of the key features. There are two key differentiators that you have certainly worked on from the customer's perspective.

It is actually very well laid out for a computer product. But maybe, since it has security built into it, it is sometimes very difficult for people to grasp.

It is much easier to work with Kubernetes than OpenShift. On the inside, all the security and other aspects are very much required by the container.

It has a difficult learning curve. Those are the areas where, from a customer perspective, OpenShift is a little challenging compared to other Kubernetes solutions.

I have been using it for five years. 

I would rate the stability of this solution a ten out of ten.  It is very stable.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It is a scalable solution. Our customers are mostly enterprise businesses for Red Hat OpenShift. 

The technical support is good. One challenge is that sometimes it may be difficult to find the answers to your questions if you are not a Red Hat customer. Many of the answers require you to log in to the Red Hat portal. Unless you are a customer, you cannot ask for a solution. On those lines, it is a little difficult. Otherwise, technical support is good.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy and one being difficult. 

The initial setup is a little difficult because installing and configuring it is very involved. I don't see it as easy yet.

It's deployed on both the cloud or on-premises. On the cloud, it's much easier where it is managed OpenShift. If we go to managed offerings like Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, Azure OpenShift, or IBM Cloud, it is much easier to provision. But if it is self-managed, where you have to do everything yourself, it is difficult.

Red Hat OpenShift is self-managed, not from a cloud provider. If you are doing it on the cloud, then it is just a couple of hours. But if it is self-managed, then it will depend on the infrastructure, networking, and all that. It is still a team, but not yet a resource to have all that correctly set up.

It has been a good solution to deploy all containerized applications, like our AI and ML applications. We're not missing out on that capability.

The ROI is definitely much better because once it is set up and done, it is very easy to manage and have applications deployed. The user experience is very good. So once you have it in place, it's easy to do the day-to-day operations, and eventually, scalability and all those things become clear.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is a very good solution overall.

I would definitely recommend it to others.

We use the solution to manage our digital assets like containers and applications.

Integrating the product into our existing infrastructure was easy. We did not face any issues.

The price must be improved.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

The product’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. We have around 15 users.

The support people help us whenever we require their assistance. A partner provides us with the first-level support. The support has been good, but it is not direct support. We have a problem that has not been fixed for a long time.

Positive

I rate the ease of setup a six out of ten. The project was ten months long. The deployment took a month.

I rate the pricing a four or five out of ten.

I have also used Docker and Kubernetes.

I will recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is, as an open system, to deploy containers on AWS or other platforms and then manage them.

The most valuable feature for me in the OpenShift Container Platform is the option to manage different containers and environments and also being able to switch among them.

My impression is that this solution is pretty expensive so I think the pricing plan could improve.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

I would rate the stability a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the technical support of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

I was not involved in the initial deployment but I heard that it's not too hard to set up with all the support available.

I would rate the pricing of this solution a four, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the most expensive and 10 being the least expensive.

I would advise other people looking into this solution – if they could afford their pricing plan – to go for it as it's a great product.

I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

We primarily work on middleware applications to communicate between front and backend services and use the solution to deploy our platform as a container. Our entire application goes into OpenShift containers.

We initially started with OpenShift 2.0 and 3.0, which were on-prem platform versions. Then we moved on to OCP 4.0, a hybrid platform in the Red Hat cloud.

We don't use the solution on the vendor's OpenStack Platform; we integrate with vendors, but they have their own capabilities and manage their services and infrastructure. We build our services and then deploy them on the OpenShift platform, and if the vendor deployed their services or APIs on a different system, then we integrate with them, but we don't control vendor platforms.

When we first came to the microservice platform, we deployed our applications on a VM service, and it became tough to manage the VMs, as we added endpoints to endpoints. Then, we learned about OpenShift, Docker, and containers and were given OpenShift to deploy our microservices as a container to make our server management easier. Having a CI/CD pipeline with the container and Dockers means we don't have to spend time on deployment, pipelines, etc. The product increased our productivity and sped up our process, which helped us a lot.

When we had the VM infrastructure, the developers' building services had to spend significant time doing the deployments. Many of our developers didn't know how to use Linux commands, so we had to train them. As a result, the time spent on training, building, and deploying the packages was very high. OCS reduced that significantly, and containers are slightly quicker than VM servers, which positively affected our productivity.

Our developers can now focus on the development code, and as we moved away from a VM model, our system downtime was significantly reduced. Even when first deploying an application, the container is already running because we always have an active instance there. So, the rollover, service startups, deployments, and productivity saw significant boosts, and we were able to deliver more value to our business as an application team.

The solution's security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is very reliable. When it was on-prem, it was by default secured by our company firewalls and security tools, and now it's in the cloud, which has its security and systems in place. This provides stability to our infrastructure.  

We communicate on OpenShift under STDPS and TLS 1.2-based protocols, so whenever we contact our front and backend systems, we have certificates, handshakes, and the TLS protocols in place. These prevent any unauthorized access to our services, which makes out job easier and allows us to prioritize security.  

OpenShift provides the flexibility and efficiency of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints. When we first onboarded the solution, we evaluated that it would not cause any regulatory limitations, and it's the only platform that was introduced to the application teams as a result. The main regulatory concern for a container that's being consumed by any service is security, and the solution provides this.  

The product's automated processes affected our development time, which is our most significant time saving, and when development time is reduced, so is the time required for production deployment. If the developers consume less sprint time, we minimize deployment time and increase overall productivity. This way, OpenShift provides our teams with a lot of flexibility and capability.  

Whenever we onboard or deploy services that talk to Oracle Database, they take a lot of time to become active and serve the incoming request, so it would be good to see some improvement here. This could be an OpenShift issue or an internal network problem within our organization.

OpenShift is an excellent platform, but AWS is fighting a tough fight, so Red Hat must continually improve its product.

I've been using the solution for about four years, first in a developer role and now as an architect.

The tool is very stable; we haven't seen any downtime since moving to OpenShift architecture. We had some minor issues here and there, but these were nominal. The VMs are also highly stable; we didn't see any problems with those.

The scalability is excellent, and it's one of the aspects we love most about OpenShift. We can drastically improve our output if throughput increases and we have the CPU resources and memory.

Our company has over 10,000 members of staff, and 60-70% of our APIs and teams are on OpenShift. 

When we encounter issues, we reach out to our DevOps team, and they can help us. They may reach out to the Red Hat team, but 90% of the time, they can assist us themselves.

Positive

We previously deployed our code to a VM platform and switched for several reasons: scalability, time reduction of the development cycle, and building and deploying. We don't have to manage the infrastructure or pay for all the hardware required, and VMs are a heavy solution. OpenShift has lightweight components, which helped us transition from a VM environment.

I wasn't involved in the deployment but in migrating my team's project to OpenShift. I was new to Docker-based platforms, so it was initially difficult for me to understand, but with some knowledge transfer, it was straightforward to pick up.

The migration from our legacy service to OpenShift was rapid; it took us a couple of days to write a Docker file and set up the environments, and we were good to go.

In the case of a single service, the deployment takes two to three minutes if the Docker image is ready beforehand.

Regarding deployment, our application team consists of 15-20 developers continually working and deploying their services on the platform.

We carried out the deployment internally; we had good documentation, and an occasional Google search helped us through the process.

From my perspective as a technical individual, I've gained much knowledge from using the solution. Still, regarding an ROI from a financial perspective, I'm not privy to those discussions.

It's possible that we evaluated other options, but I was not part of that team. 

I rate OpenShift a ten out of ten. 

Project onboarding time is a major pain area for us, but OpenShift isn't the issue; it's a company problem. When we want to onboard a new project to the platform, it takes some time due to internal processes which aren't dependent on OpenShift. If we manage to streamline our company processes, there's no reason for problems to occur while onboarding.

We didn't consider building our own container platform. As the application team, we weren't asked to do that; we were provided with OpenShift and started using it.

Red Hat is very supportive and an old organization, so it's easy to trust them.   

I am using it for my critical system, specifically for the payment system.

Especially the security side is nice. On the other hand, there is firm support in the background. This is helpful for me since I am also native to Bandit system. On OpenShift side, I can get support from Airflow. It is a good aspect. It is important for critical systems.

I have used it for approximately three or four years.

I would rate stability between seven and eight out of ten.

It is easy to expand. Scalability is rated nine out of ten.

Quality of support may be improved. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Neutral

It is not too simple, however, it is not too hard either. It was a normal installation.

I know Kubernetes, however, I am not aware of other alternatives nowadays.

It is easy to expand it. I would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

We have a monolithic application, and our primary use case is to implement microservices. We needed Kubernetes, but instead of going with plain Kubernetes, we chose OpenShift because it has a well-designed UI, more advanced features, and better security.

The product provides great visibility in the form of metrics over our systems. The infrastructure team monitors the platform with their personal tools and dashboards and can see how it deals with loads, security threats, if bugs are present, etc. Then they can send reports to the rest of us in the organization.

The solution's CodeReady Workspaces reduce project onboarding time in the region of 10-15%.  

The CodeReady Workspaces also reduce the time to market; a rival vendor released an offering we had to counter, so we used the platform to implement and deploy our counter in three to four days.   

One of the best features is monitoring; we can see metrics via visual aids when the load increases, for example.

The software is user-friendly and straightforward to use, which is favorable to a developer.

The system also takes care of itself regarding scaling; the platform can up and downscale automatically depending on demand.  

With OpenShift, there is no need to learn new technology, as the skills required for Kubernetes carry over; the commands are interchangeable. Therefore, OpenShift is a developer-friendly tool.

We use the solution on the vendor's OpenStack Platform, and in terms of the ease and speed with which it enables us to create infrastructure, it's very straightforward. We can set up an environment within a day or two, and it's a very convenient way to develop.  

The infrastructure created by the solution on the OpenStack Platform is very robust; we created communication metrics: a shield where all VMs, master, and worker nodes communicate from subnet to subnet. We designed these and gave them to Red Hat, where they developed the ISO clients for deployment from day one. After gaining hands-on experience, we could create our own and implement a cluster.   

OpenShift is highly effective at creating infrastructure that can be flexibly sized to meet specific needs on the OpenStack Platform. The minimum basic configuration is three masters, three infra, and two worker nodes. When a load starts passing through this setup, and we reach a certain threshold, say the worker machines are running at 60%, we can add another node, another VM. We have added eight to ten VMs in this way before. After experimenting with different configurations, we get a feel of which one to implement for a specific use case within the production environment. If we want to scale up, we add worker nodes; nothing else is required.  

OpenShift provides solid security throughout the stack and the software supply chain; the solution has an inbuilt image registry and doesn't allow outside images, making the system more secure. The platform also features a Compliance Operator, which assesses the compliance of API resources and the nodes running the cluster.  

I want to see more incorporation of native automation features; then, we could write a code, deploy it directly to OpenShift, and allow it to take care of the automated process. Using this method, we could write one application and have elements copied or pasted to other applications in the development process.

There are some gaps in the solution's security, so there is room for improvement in the security and compliance features. Protection against ransomware attacks would be welcome, much like in Google Apigee.

We've been using the solution for two years.

OpenShift's current stability as of 4.10 is excellent; I don't see any issues. From 4.0 to 4.6, the product wasn't stable, and in many cases, nodes went down, taking down other nodes, and we had to follow up on clusters a lot. After 4.8, the stability issues were fixed, and we haven't had a problem in a year.

The platform is highly scalable; we simply need to add VMs to accommodate the amount of traffic we have, which is a straightforward task. Eight to ten VMs is sufficient for millions of users, and we can easily implement them in a cloud-based or on-prem environment. There are around 50 total users across our Dev Teams, and the solution was able to support one million users of our applications per second without an issue. 

Overall, the customer support is good. There's a ticket process with a priority level from one to three, indicating the highest and lowest priority, respectively, with two in the middle. Level one means production is impacted, and support responds rapidly to help with a client team. There are some delays with the lower-priority tickets, but they are there when we need them most. They could have better internal communication so they are all on the same page, as we are sometimes asked the same questions by different people and have to re-explain the issue.

Neutral

We previously used Kubernetes and switched because it's more complex from the developer, management, and maintenance perspectives. It doesn't have a proper UI, so knowledge of Linux is required to operate the CLI. However, with OpenShift, a newcomer can log in and run the solution using the UI, which is an excellent capability for a development company. OpenShift isn't restrictive; anyone can use it, making it a good choice.

In addition to the UI, OpenShift has more advanced features, such as the Internal Image Registry, which can restrict malware images. The product is also straightforward to deploy and has good integrations with other tools like Jenkins.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took two days. At most, two staff members are required to deploy and maintain the solution.

The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We recently experienced a Log4j vulnerability issue, and the OpenShift team released a patch to which we upgraded, but they could have done a better job.

Regarding the platform helping us meet regulatory constraints, I have yet to deal with this area.

In terms of automation, most people I know use Github, Jenkins, or some other third-party platform and integrate with OpenShift.

We didn't consider building our own container platform because Kubernetes is an excellent platform, and OpenShift is built on top of it. We're satisfied with what we have and see no need to start from the beginning.  

Red Hat is an excellent partner; we never shared code, but we used to have review meetings where we shared room for improvement with the product and gave some suggestions. For example, we would like a backup process or system implemented, and we have communicated this to Red Hat.  

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 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.