Red Hat 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 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. 

OpenShift as a solution is quite broad depending on the industry you are applying it to. For example, telco companies use the entire breadth of applications that the client wants from the web to their middle tier up to the back end. 

OpenShift is a platform for ensuring that your apps are running reliably. 

OpenShift has 100% compatibility with Kubernetes. I find using kubectl, and kubectl commands to be valuable.

The security features of OpenShift are strong when in use of role-based access. The solution is easily compatible with other solutions and the features are easily installed.

OpenShift could be improved if it were more accessible for smaller budgets. I currently mostly use Raspberry Pi, which will be over to use Kubernetes. As a platform, I am using Raspberry Pi rather than using a very large configuration computer. 

The solution requires eight or more cores of CPUs, multiplied over the number of nodes needed to make OpenShift reliable, making it susceptible to failures.

In the future, I would like to see a roadmap to have Wasm supported. If you have WebAssembly as an alternative to Docker, it would be great.

I have been learning how to use OpenShift for years, but actively using it for six months.

The solution is stable. We haven't experienced downtime. 

OpenShift is easy to scale. You just need to make sure you have the capacity to purchase and the number of nodes needed. Scalability only depends on your budget.

Currently, they are more than 10 users of OpenShift in the organization.

Technical support has been efficient, supportive, and communicative. They do not drop the ball. I would rate the customer service and support of OpenShift a five out of five. 

Positive

Previously, I had experience with VMware's Kubernetes version. VMware was very difficult to install. I could not understand the route they were taking and why there were so many steps. 

The initial setup of OpenShift is straightforward if you are an experienced platform engineer. Installing on AWS or Azure could be more complex. The product has a Terraform command to install everything.

If all of the tools that are needed and all the hardware is there, the implementation should be straightforward. I would rate the initial setup a four out of five overall.

Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it. OpenShift is more expensive than other solutions, however, I think it is worth it.

Anyone looking to implement OpenShift in their organization should start with the most minimal setup for configuration. There is an OpenShift version with just the single master with a built-in worker. You will only need a single CPU and you can start with at least three masters and a single worker and scale from there as the need arises, whether it is to add additional worker nodes or as your app grows.

There is no product that compares to OpenShift. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 overall.

We are not using it for our core banking or any critical application. It's just for our remediation services. We have an ITSM tool, which is running on that, et cetera.

The support is very strong in Turkey. We are very happy with its capabilities. The steps are easy in terms of usage.

We need some kind of a multi-cluster management solution from the Red Hat site. With that, we have got some problems; however, right now, we can manage to run the solution without any problems.

The stability has been good. We haven’t had any real issues up to this point. It’s been reliable, and the performance has been good.

The scalability is fine. We haven’t had any problems in that regard.

The main reason that we chose OpenShift rather than Azure or AWS was the scalability. It’s the best one on the market.

We have gotten both local and international support from Red Hat company, so we are covered. We are satisfied with the solution’s support in general.

There isn’t really any initial setup to worry about.

I don’t have any information about the licensing costs or the process.

I’d rate the solution eight out of ten.

It's both very easy to start and learn and to improve yourself to manage Kubernetes environments. It’s very portable. You can easily switch from this product to another if you want. It's not like that with other products. For example, if you have an Azure solution, it's not that easy to port everything over.

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.

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.