Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

I work with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, specifically the Container Platform, OCP. We are using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to deploy our application for continuous deployment, to deploy it on this application, and to administrate our application. To see everything, if we have an incident or we have a problem, we go to this platform to check where the problem is, and if we have to fix it or increase resources, we do it in this platform.

I have been working with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for less than six months as we are migrating to this platform. We are starting to use it. We have other people that are helping us to administrate it to administrate our application on this platform. I am not the most senior one in this area, but I can share what I have seen and how we use it.

The powerful thing about Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is for deploying how to install our application, how to deploy it, and it is easy to work with this platform to do DevOps or CI/CD. It is easy to do CI/CD with this platform and to add functionality in our application. We can add functionality in our application easily with this platform. We can go quickly from dev testing, integrating, and deploying quickly with this platform.

The integrated CI/CD pipelines of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform have a time-saving impact on our development process. When we use the CI/CD functionality, the main saving is really important compared to combining many other tools to have the same result. In Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, you have everything integrated, but in other platforms, you have to set up many tools to have the same output. In Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, it is ready to set up, or almost set up; you only have to configure it. Time-saving is one of the important things.

I have something regarding Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It is a little bit complicated to set up Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on a local server. You have to buy or have many resources, many physical resources to set it up. If they could do something lighter to set up or a light version for a personal computer or something that does not need enormous resources, that would be helpful.

I have been working with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for less than six months as we are migrating to this platform.

The auto-scaling capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform have helped handle workload variations. Scalability is the main argument. You can configure it easily by just modifying one file. You can scale your application as you want, easily. It is really the easy part that is interesting in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, to scale.

I rate the customer service as three out of ten.

Before Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, I used something else; it is a tool of IBM called WebSphere. I decided to switch from WebSphere to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform because IBM stopped the support of WebSphere to let everyone move to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

From my perspective, this configuration process of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is straightforward. With the internet, you can handle it.

I participated in a part of the configuration of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, not the setup. In Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, you have two profiles, an administrator and a developer. I belong to the developer part. I participated to configure one part of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

I am not really in the financial part to see the benefits of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, but we see that we have less spending costs. I think we had to move to this platform because our older platform is not yet supported. We had to move to this platform. Maybe we had to move to this platform more than we did it by choice, more so than searching for financial advantages.

Before choosing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, I was not the only one evaluating options. The big managers chose to follow the IBM advices.

I am not really in the financial part to see the benefits of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, but we see that we have less spending costs. I think we had to move to this platform because our older platform is not yet supported. We had to move to this platform. Maybe we had to move to this platform more than we did it by choice, more so than searching for financial advantages.

I cannot really describe how Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's policy-based governance has helped my organization in maintaining application security at scale because we have other services that are more focused on security and respecting confidentiality. I think it respects everything to be integrated in a professional area.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's developer-first workflow has contributed to enhancing my team's productivity by helping us to increase our reactivity. When we have problems, we can fix them quickly. I would say the main benefit is having more reactivity to address a bug or problem to fix. My overall rating of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is eight out of ten.

The primary use cases include troubleshooting issues, installation, implementation, and design.

The benefits I have seen from using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform include that it provides a seamless application business, and the business is never going to be impacted because deployments and upgrades can be completed without impacting the real business. Seamless activity can also be performed on the cluster without impacting the application.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's policy-based governance has helped my organization maintain application security at scale because ACS is also there, and Red Hat is always maintaining things with hardening methods, always coming with hardened images, and we are frequently upgrading the minor and major versions, so it will be mitigated in that way.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's hybrid and multi-cloud support will help to move applications, and if in the future any other platform wants to move, it is easy for the application to move from one platform to another without major impact.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's auto-scaling capabilities have helped handle workload variations majorly at the HPA level at the pod level, but at the node level, we are not using the cloud mechanism, and that is why we are not enabling the node level.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's developer-first workflow has contributed to enhancing my team's productivity because we have many custom scripts that give us reports of everything, ODR, and health-related things, so based on productivity, we are taking actions on that.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries to upgrade the second level and gets stuck, so that area should be enhanced.

The strictness of the SSD and HDD also should be aligned, because in some environments, we cannot strictly make some rules related to HDD, since Red Hat is strictly making a rule after 4.16 to adopt SSD instead of HDD, which in some environments will not allow, so some workaround should be done on that.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the best option, but as many companies and the world are mainly looking for security purposes, the clear text format needs to be adopted instead of any third party. Red Hat has to develop its own product, as HashiCorp and CyberArk Conjur exist, but Red Hat needs to protect the clear text format because the secret should not be seen by anyone. Currently, it is a clear text method allowing anyone in the namespace to see the username and password, which should be controlled in that way.

The major improvements needed are related to upgrade time and strict rule-making.

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

Before Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, I also worked with OKD separately and Kubernetes.

The initial setup for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is straightforward because I am using extra features like govc from VMware to update the parameters and these kinds of things, so it is easy on that, with no issues.

I feel that the pricing of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform depends on the salespeople, as they can decide that, with some companies giving a cheap price and others giving a high price for the same things. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

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.

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.

We run multiple applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Currently, we host all our customer-facing applications on Red Hat OpenShift ROSA and a few on Azure ARO. We deploy them via pipelines using Bamboo, Jenkins, or whatever the specific development teams choose to use.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform handles security and compliance within our deployments effectively, so I would rate it as nine; it's quite secure with the SCC it employs and the image security features in place.

Approximately 200 users in our organization work with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and we have roughly 900-1,000 applications running on the platform.

The features such as Red Hat operators, CI/CD, the monitoring stack, and the observability stack enhance our application scalability and management.

Building source to image helps us significantly here as well.

The cluster scaling features, such as the auto-scaling of cluster nodes and application replicas using horizontal and vertical pod auto-scaling, significantly impact our operations.

I would like to see advanced cluster management added in future releases, such as a single pane of glass to manage multiple clusters without needing to pay an extra subscription for it.

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

The deployment process was initially a bit of a challenge because of the DNS Route 53 on ROSA, but the on-prem part was simple.

The deployment process was a bit tricky four years ago, particularly when we did ROSA on the cloud, and I would say it required some improvements to be less complicated, but I haven't done any recent deployments in the cloud to gauge if improvements have been made since then.

There haven't been any issues so far; it remains stable with no downtime or crashes, and even the upgrades are handled seamlessly without issues.

In terms of stability, I rate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine based on my experience.

The product is scalable based on my experience; however, there are some limitations preventing changes such as those allowed with Open Source solutions like EKS, which provides more cluster control.

I rate the scalability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine, as I haven't encountered any issues with scaling a cluster or applications.

There are some occasions when support from Red Hat is not what we expect; in instances of outages, it sometimes takes a substantial amount of time to resolve issues.

My thoughts on the technical support of Red Hat are mixed; initially, when we logged a priority call, the assigned engineers were not senior-level, which delayed our support. However, we ultimately received the help we needed, but they should prioritize skilled engineers for urgent issues.

Based on my experience with technical support, I rate it five out of ten.

We chose Red Hat as our primary vendor because after working with previous vendors such as SUSE, we found Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to be a more mature, secure, and overall better product for our needs.

When we first started out, the deployment took one or two days when we did a user provision installation for on-prem. We did UPI before, and we managed to change it as well, because later on we found out that we could do installable provision installation for VMware on-prem. Obviously, there's installable provision installation for the clouds as well.

Basically, two people from our company were involved in deployment, along with guidance provided by the service provider, Red Hat, mainly for Azure ARO and AWS ROSA.

We didn't really use third-party help, just some guidance, so we did it ourselves. Initially, we got some guidance but managed to resolve issues independently by consulting them and receiving direction when needed.

The current licensing cost for this solution is around $23,000 per year, per month.

Regarding the current licensing cost, I would rate my satisfaction around seven or seven and a half; there's always room for improvement, especially in financial institutions where budget is a concern.

I requested a document to compare EKS and ROSA because we found costs slightly increasing due to different licensing models, but for total cost of ownership and less complexity, we want to examine each product thoroughly before deciding if we'll save $1,000 a month by transitioning to EKS at the expense of hiring more engineers for maintenance.

I definitely recommend Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to other organizations due to its high availability, security, ease of use, and all the built-in features it offers.

We do no maintenance for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform since ROSA is fully managed, and that's why it is a bit more expensive than EKS. The fully managed service includes 24/7 support, scheduling, and upgrades; we only need to inform Red Hat support about upgrades, and they manage the process end to end.

Overall, I rate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine; although I would say ten, I think it's important to allow room for improvement.