Red Hat OpenShift Reviews

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 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 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. 

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.

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. 

I have used OpenShift in two companies. My earlier company was using a CI/CD pipeline. I customized the CI/CD pipeline in Java and then in Jenkins. We used it to deploy applications in different stages in the CI/CD. In my current company we are using CloudBees Core. They have a CI/CD pipeline and using that we deploy with the OpenShift platform.

If any application team wants to deploy an application on a container platform, we offer a platform for that. If they want to deploy a microservice application and they want to use a microservices architecture, we provide a space for that. OpenShift is running on the AWS platform, which means that deployment is highly scalable and highly retainable. People who want to deploy an application with a zero-downtime infrastructure prefer using the to OpenShift platform.

The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application.

One of the valuable features is that it's very easy to package an application and deploy it within a short period of time. Since it will be in the CI/CD pipeline, deployment is very easy. And the automation process is very easy and it's highly scalable. It can be scaled up or down at any time. We don't need a person managing the infrastructure all the time because there is automatic self-healing of the application in case something goes wrong.

I've been working with OpenShift for the past two years.

The stability is quite strong, since it's a flavor of Kubernetes. We don't have any doubt about that aspect because we have never seen the infrastructure down for a long time, like a day.

Scaling it is quite easy. We can scale to as many nodes as we want and scale down to as many nodes as we want. That is fast because we have an automated script in place to scale up and scale down the infrastructure. We are quite happy with the solution in that regard.

Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support compared to other vendors. AWS will get on a call for any problem and start a screen-sharing session. They will immediately start fixing the issue, whereas with Red Hat and OpenShift, we have never seen similar support. When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift. Support-wise, they are still lacking.

A friend called me and they are using OpenShift 4.6. They installed a Prometheus box and they upgraded OpenShift and they upgraded the registry. After upgrading, one of the nodes was not able to run the container. When they raised a case, the support guy said that they needed to maintain the old images. Why, when they upgraded the OpenShift, do they need to maintain the old images? My friend called me and told me this and that it is not mentioned in the documentation. He said he raised a case and then followed up with support for the last four days, but there has been no response. The documentation was not clear. Now, we are facing this issue and we don't know how to solve this problem.

That was when focusing on upgrading from 4.6 to 4.7 or 4.8. It seems OpenShift never looks at how to manage earlier versions they sold in the market. Without the proper guidance or support for the product, people will not continue with the product. They need to keep that in mind. It shouldn't be that they only sell the product to the customer and ask them to run the show. They have to think of continuous support. That's why I give it six out of 10.

Before OpenShift we were only using Docker. There was no Kubernetes in our infrastructure. With Docker, there is no scalability. It is just a package. In terms of scalability and availability, Docker will fail. That is why we chose OpenShift as a platform.

The initial setup is okay because there is a straightforward installation process to follow. It is guided by their people and they know how to implement things. We only faced an issue when we started running the infrastructure and that's when support was not up to the mark for OpenShift.

Deployment is quite fast because we have a CI/CD pipeline and we use GitLab for the source code. It can be done within 30 minutes or an hour for the UAT stage. When going to production, there will be a software assessment and then the time needed depends upon change requests and the change window for the application.

We have an implementation strategy for OpenShift. We have prepared a baseline saying that if a given application comes onboard with OpenShift, the team has to learn some basic technical stuff. They have to create a Dockerfile and create the source-to-image. Then they have to use the repository and onboard or copy their source code into it. The baseline documentation exists for people to follow. We will then deploy their application to OpenShift and there will be a dedicated team to further support the onboarding process.

We have seen return on investment. Applications used to run in VMware, but now they are running in OpenShift. There are benefits in terms of scalability and availability, and they can spin up more microservice applications and that is something that cannot be done in the VMware platform.

I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it. If people really want to make use of this platform, they don't care about the licensing and costs.

My team members evaluated Amazon EKS and Pivotal Web Services. OpenShift was the market leader in terms of a container platform and that's one of the reasons we chose it for our company.

If you really need an application, meaning one million customers are going to use the application, then this platform will be quite significant. If you only have 10 or 20 or 100 users of an application, OpenShift is not the right choice. The cost is quite high. For that number of people, there is no need to run in a container platform. You need a large number of concurrent users accessing an application and then OpenShift provides the scalability.

We have not considered building our own container platform because it's very tedious to manage the infrastructure and you need a highly skilled person who knows Kubernetes very well, and OpenShift very well. We don't have that kind of team or people with the skill sets.

When it comes to security, we have the Prisma Cloud image scanning so that each and every image is scanned and we get a report regarding the kinds of vulnerabilities there are in particular images. That way, in case there are any vulnerabilities or critical patches that need to be applied to the images, they will be taken care of before going to production. In addition, we have used SonarQube for code scanning and Prometheus for monitoring.

On top of that, there are security properties in OpenShift as well, such as user authentication, user level, access level. But at the image level, we need specialist software to scan the images and report the vulnerabilities. If an application requires additional security in terms of images and the packages, we configure Prisma Cloud in the CI/CD pipeline, so that at each stage it will scan and evaluate the software and report the vulnerabilities to the respective teams.

When we are developing our application to deploy into OpenShift, it can be challenging to refactor the application or redo the application. It takes some time for the team to do that kind of infrastructure stuff at the coding level.

We don't use OpenShift's CodeReady Workspaces because that is for new infrastructure, for people who are new to the OpenShift platform. We just use Docker images and deploy the application.

We use the product primarily for CI/CD activities across different platforms using Argo CD and Tekton to deliver applications.

The platform's documentation could be more comprehensive to cover the full spectrum of user needs. Sometimes, achieving specific goals is challenging due to a lack of detailed guidance.

I've been using Red Hat OpenShift for about six months.

I would rate the product stability as an eight.

The platform is scalable. 

I'm not directly involved in the deployment process, but from what I've observed, it seems manageable.

I would recommend Red Hat OpenShift, especially for its automation capabilities. It's a solid platform, backed by reputable companies like IBM, ensuring stability and security.

I rate it an eight.

OpenShift's storage management could be better. In the next release, OpenShift should include a console for running scripts.

I've been working with OpenShift for a year.

OpenShift is stable.

OpenShift is easy to scale.

The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform.

OpenShift 4 is more convenient than 3 because it has better features, which is characteristic of OpenShift's update history. I would rate OpenShift as eight out of ten.