OpenShift: Product Overview and Insight

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Bottom Line

OpenShift delivers a high level of flexibility. It accommodates both cloud-native and legacy applications and it runs in Amazon Web Services, an enterprise datacenter or an organization’s cloud an on-premises infrastructure. It leads the pack with excellent user experience and integration features, as well as strong runtime, orchestration and image management capabilities.

Not surprisingly, OpenShift integrates well with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible, OpenStack, and JBoss middleware. It also integrates well with Amazon Web Services and supports the public cloud provider’s microservice frameworks.

OpenShift can help enterprises deploy containerized workloads on any cloud or on-premises using standardized components like Kubernetes and OCI compliant containers. By tapping into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CoreOS, OpenShift provides a secure environment needed to run enterprise applications. By integrating Operator Framework to OpenShift, Red Hat has made it easy to deploy the platform and other application services anywhere.

Product Description

Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform provides an on-premises Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) approach to container management. It uses Docker containers that are managed by Kubernetes. The environment runs on the Linux operating system.

Red Hat aims to provide a container application platform that speeds development and deployment through a highly robust and integrated set of tools. It includes application images and templates to facilitate development. OpenShift supports applications in Java, Node.js, .NET, Ruby, Python, PHP and other languages, and provides JBoss middleware simplify integration and orchestration.

OpenShift also provides access to a private database instance in either classic relational or modern NoSQL datastores. It works entirely with Docker-formatted Linux containers and includes a Docker API to help developers connect to content. The product also supports the use of GPUs for machine learning.

Features

Container Tool

Docker, with Kubernetes management.

Compatibility

Linux

Management

A fully integrated container stack allows supports an open framework for container management. Users can select their own registry, networking, storage and CI/CD tools—or use default tools in OpenShift.

Integration

Powerful integration features and APIs. Kubernetes provides service discovery, routing, load balancing, configuration management and multi-tenancy. Supports service brokers from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Scheduling

Strong scheduling features.

Networking and Security

Uses open and cloud-native standards. Uses virtual private cloud integration to configure clusters to existing VPC and on-premises networks using peering. Offers built-in support for port forwarding, which provides secure communicate with your pods. Includes built-in cybersecurity tools and protections. Offers a secure internal registry that is integrated with each cluster.

Monitoring and Logging

Offers built-in logging and metrics visible through the Prometheus dashboard. However, the product lacks a unified operations console.

Pricing

OpenShift Online pricing ranges from free (for one project and up to four users) to starting at $50 per month for professional projects and hosting (up to 10 projects). Enterprise prices vary greatly.

Red Hat OpenShift Overview and Features at a Glance: