Integration and automation have transformed deployment and maintenance
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for approximately two years from now.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have no complaints regarding the stability of the platform. It is always stable.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
Regarding the initial setup, it is pretty easy to set up the container platform.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Openshift for data platform
What do you like best about the product?
Automating deploys of applications using helm charts
What do you dislike about the product?
Setting up authentication using htpasswd
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Long wait times to deploy a demo and test environment
OpenShift makes everything easy and clear
What do you like best about the product?
OpenShift is by far the best managed k8s solution that ever has existed. It’s strong and robust and so easy to use.
What do you dislike about the product?
There's still no great way to debug crash boot loops. Figure that out and you'll make lots of admins very happy!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Deployment of thousands of microservices
Microservice Build and Deploy
What do you like best about the product?
ease of development and Deployment & next gen AI development
What do you dislike about the product?
RedHat OpenShift AI limited to certain models only and not supporting other products
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Developing Microservice level offering and Production grade performance as well as security implementation
Easiest platform to get started with, and to scale with your need
What do you like best about the product?
As a Red Hat partner, the ease of getting started with OpenShift makes it the perfect platform to bring to new and existing customers for modernizing their existing workload, or to deploy new cloud/native apps to.
What do you dislike about the product?
The continuing and never ending changing in subscriptions (CPU core count), and different products (OCP, Kubernetes engine, Virtualization etc) can make it extremely hard to predict how its going to be prices when its time to renew.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
OpenShift is the perfect platform for a "any cloud, anywhere, and on-prem" platform. Build in tools like s2i and gitops makes it the perfect self/service platform to developers.
The Enterprise for Kubernetes
What do you like best about the product?
That is a platform for your application, ready for the Enterprise and full of functions for all the needs. It's ease of use and very complete
What do you dislike about the product?
As a Solution Architect (for pre-sales) sometimes it's hard to sell because of the costs, in terms of subscriptions costs and hardware needs
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It offers a platform for my applications, very stable and easy to use, with all the features that I need
OpenShift on a university
What do you like best about the product?
For yours use is the resilience and ease to go to production for any of yours systems, the system although can have some issues, it normally won't affect the uptime of the deploy applications, after migrate to the OpenShift, after the initial learning curve to migrate all the pipelines, it became a breeze to deploy new system from the zero.
What do you dislike about the product?
The learning curve is little steep, between versions a lot of things change and can break, search on the docs articles for help is sometimes difficult to find what you're looking for
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Giving the dev teams more tools to develop the systems, before that they didn't had access on some parts like logs, console, etc. For the infra team, it make a lot easier to deploy new systems with automation that now the devs interact.
Expanded the capacity to deploy applications
What do you like best about the product?
OpenShift pipelines improve the deployment capability of applications
What do you dislike about the product?
update process slow and problematic
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
orchestration
Best of both worlds - Containerization and Virtualization
What do you like best about the product?
Manageability and a single pane to handle.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes its easy to get lost in the plethora of features. A steep learning curve.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The challenge of having multiple products to manage VM's and containers. It also resolves having multiple support contracts.
Observer of our Openshift Red Hat engagement
What do you like best about the product?
So far it seems to be a reliable virtualization platform
What do you dislike about the product?
It's fairly complex initially, a small learning curve to navigate
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Container management and virtualization
