Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

In our country, our customer's main use cases for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform  involve a journey that has begun to migrate the old legacy banking solutions towards the new containerized platform. Hence, in these cases, the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform  is a de facto standard, and there are a lot of requirements regarding that.

Currently it is mainly used in banking, and in some telcos as well, but we are not exposed to telcos right now for the OpenShift. We are mainly focused on financial sectors.

In terms of features in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, I find the orchestration itself quite useful for my customers because it integrates with lots of tools. For the platform plus, the security layer and automation itself are quite amazing.

Regarding how Red Hat OpenShift 's policy-based governance helps to maintain application security at scale for my customers, that is also another education part we have to explain a bit. We face a struggle in explaining it to our customers as well, but the feature is quite good.

Regarding the learning curve, the customers actually do not need the technical nitty-gritty details; they need to know about the containerization journey because they are not familiar with it. They know it as a theory, but they don't understand anything about its practical implications. That's the main challenge. The solution itself doesn't require a high learning curve; it is actually quite good to manage. However, application developers and managers have to understand the beauty of it, and that is the challenge. If Red Hat can execute some programs regarding that, it will help.

Regarding Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, it is expensive according to market feedback. Notably, the platform plus is perceived as quite expensive and some features from an infrastructure perspective are lacking.

I have been working with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for approximately two years from now.

Regarding the auto-scaling capabilities, in most cases, the applications are not ready to handle the auto-scaling part. The reason is that the development was not done that way.

In most cases, the software has to support that auto-scaling feature, and we face that scenario quite often. In very few cases, the applications are quite ready, but in most cases, they don't support it.

I have no complaints regarding the stability of the platform. It is always stable.

Not yet have I ever been in contact with Red Hat support for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, but there may be some scenarios coming in the future.

Neutral

We have experience with VMware solutions, as we are quite familiar with these infrastructure solutions.

We are quite familiar with VMware Tanzu, VMware ESXi , vSphere, vCenter, and vCloud Foundation as well.

Regarding the initial setup, it is pretty easy to set up the container platform.

Regarding return on investment, my customers have not yet seen value in money while or since implementing the Container Platform. We can only comment on that one or two years later, as the customers just began to adopt it. We need to see at least one or two cycles before commenting on that.

Regarding whether Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is expensive or if the price is reasonable for my customers, to me, the services it provides should incur some costs, but based on market feedback, it is quite expensive. Notably, the platform plus is quite expensive according to the market. While the features it provides and the benefits it adds should have some upfront license fees—this is quite okay with me—marketing it is seen as expensive.

If I summarize the main benefit of this solution for my customers, it is the management of both virtualized and containerized environments, where the containerization will be more focused in the future. The benefit is clearly visible. However, for the customers who are mainly virtualization focused, the benefits are not quite exposed to them, resulting in struggles with customers who focus only on virtualization as they want some alternative to VMware, VMware ESXi  and similar solutions.

Through my experience, I do not actually have any suggestion for improvement for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform because it is a platform as a service provider cloud. While we work with OpenStack  as an infrastructure as a service provider system, OpenShift lacks some of its features from an infrastructure perspective. However, from an application point of view, the current features are quite good, and the flexibility of using the system is commendable. In the near future, there will be some upgrades according to market demands, but actually, nothing to blame at it.

Before planning to use the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, my advice is that each customer should have a try from a technical point of view, as businesses think in a different way. Before deciding, they should compare features side-by-side and should not ignore OpenShift. Once they have tried it, I think they will stick with it.

It is scalable for my customers, and it is easy to scale.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform a nine.