Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Reviews

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.

We use it mainly for the retail space.

Everything is packaged into OpenShift Container Platform, whereas with Kubernetes, you have to create many operators. With OpenShift Container Platform, you just have to point and click.

The setup process is not great and could be better.

We have been using this solution for about two years, deployed both on cloud and on-premises. We can fire up an OpenShift cluster in Amazon. We are using the latest version.

It is very stable and solid. 

It is a scalable solution, and we have more than 500 users. We have about 15 people that manage all the different clusters.

The setup of OpenShift Container Platform is a bit complex when you set it up for the first time, but it is good after setup. The first time we deployed, it took about two days, but since we have mastered the solution, it no longer takes as long. We did not use any integration. Because we buy the Red Hat licenses, they just give us the green light.

We have seen a return on investment.

It costs about $10,000 for a three-year license.

We tested Swamp, Rancher and the US version of Kubernetes before OpenShift Container Platform.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten and recommend it to others.

Our company deploys the solution as a container platform that balances node availability and load. 

The most valuable feature is that the solution can be deployed in the cloud which removes the expense of a server. Everything you need is provided in the cloud where you can make clusters, add masters and worker nodes, and install ports. 

The solution includes an integrated file agent and a control center director that embeds within the release. It is much easier to configure the install or file agent through the GUI than having to work on command lines in a CLI. 

The solution does not work on a route-wise NFS.

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The solution is more stable than others because it allows for redundancies. Data can be stored on the PV and transferred to many worker nodes. 

The solution is easily scalable by joining worker nodes with masters. 

For example, your customers increase so you want to jump your worker nodes from four to forty. You simply install the solution, join worker nodes with masters, and create a larger cluster of servers within a matter of minutes. 

I serve as a DevOps expert for my customers and don't have the need to contact support. 

Our company used Docker but switched around the time it was acquired by Mirantis. 

The initial setup is straightforward. If you have an adequate amount of CPU and memory, then setup can be as fast as eight minutes. 

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten. 

We currently use both Kubernetes and OpenShift. 

It is beneficial to be aware of Linux or Unix concepts when working with the solution and managing clusters. 

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

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.

The solution being used for application containization.

I like the Flexibility of the solution. 

Metrics monitoring feature needs improvement.

I have been using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for five years.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for Red Hat OpenShift is to deploy applications. We utilize the platform to manage multiple pods and ensure seamless scaling of our nodes and servers to meet the demands of our high-availability applications.

The platform has significantly improved our organization by enhancing productivity and reducing the time required to deploy applications. It allows for faster deployment and continuous delivery, which has streamlined our development processes.

The most valuable features of Red Hat OpenShift include its integration with Kubernetes and the user interface, which enhances the end-user experience and accelerates the deployment process. These features contribute to increased productivity and efficiency for our developers.

The product could benefit from additional operators and tools integrated with OpenShift. Furthermore, enhancements to the user interface and including more features would be beneficial.

I rate the platform's stability a seven out of ten.

The platform is scalable. 

I have opened some tickets but did not receive the required technical support.

Neutral

The initial setup was complex. I rate the process a two out of ten.

The implementation was done in-house.

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

The platform's most valuable features include cost reduction through VM application migration to containers, scalability for controlling memory and CPU usage, and the reliability offered by application containerization.

One area for product improvement is the support limitations within the subscription models, particularly the restricted support hours for lower-tier subscriptions.

I have six years of experience working with the OpenShift Container Platform.

The product has proven to be very stable, crucial for supporting our applications effectively.

Setting up the OpenShift Container Platform was straightforward. It's primarily deployed on-premises, although I've also utilized cloud solutions. It takes 15 days to complete the setup. Around three executives are involved in both the deployment and ongoing maintenance. 

I rate the process an eight. 

The migration from VMs to containers has resulted in significant cost savings for us.

The product pricing is competitive and structured around vCPU subscriptions, aligning with our application requirements.

OpenShift integrates seamlessly with our CI/CD pipelines, offering robust automation and deployment capabilities. I would highly recommend it.

I rate it a ten.

It is used for containers.

It is very lightweight and can be deployed very fast, especially when it comes to containers. It can spin the web and the DB very fast, so we don't need to deploy the server and the VM. Everything is in the container.

There is room for improvement with integration.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable.

The solution has good scalability. I rate the scalability of the solution a nine out of ten. There is also room for improvement in the scalability of the solution.

One or two users are using OpenShift in our company, and we hope to increase the usage.

The support is very good. Their response and technical skills are good.

I have used Docker before. We shifted to OpenShift because we were using Docker for self-learning.

The initial setup is complex. The solution is deployed on-premises. However, it can also be deployed on the cloud.

To deploy OpenShift, first, you must get the installer and then prepare a minimum requirement. You will need a key physical server as a load balancer. OpenShift has a lot of roles in its nodes, with worker nodes and master nodes. Since different nodes have their role, the setup is complex. You will need to set up ten or 12 nodes like this. After you have set up all the nodes, you need to do the integration and set up OpenShift.

It takes a month or a year to deploy it.

The deployment can be done in-house. There are two people required for maintenance.

The pricing is expensive for licensing. The customer has to pay for the license.

Before choosing OpenShift, I advise you to know your application landscape very well. Only then will you know if you require OpenShift. If you are unclear about your application environment, layout, and structure, it is potentially not a good idea because you don't understand it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a five out of ten.