Azure Functions vs. Red Hat OpenShift

They're great to embed logic and code in a medium-small, cloud-native application, but they can become quite limiting for complex, enterprise applications.

Incentivized

Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.

Incentivized

• They natively integrate with many triggers from other Azure services, like Blob Storage or Event Grid, which is super handy when creating cloud-native applications on Azure (data wrangling pipelines, business process automation, data ingestion for IoT, ...)
• They natively support many common languages and frameworks, which makes them easily approachable by teams with a diverse background
• They are cheap solutions for low-usage or "seasonal" applications that exhibits a recurring usage/non-usage pattern (batch processing, montly reports, ...)

Incentivized

• One thing is the way how it works with the GitHubs model on an enterprise business, how the hub and spoke topology works. Hub cluster topology works the way how there is a governance model to enforce policies. The R back models, the Red Hat OpenShift virtualization that supports the cube board and developer workspace is one big feature within. So yes, these are all some features I would call out.

Incentivized

• My biggest complaint is that they promote a development model that tightly couples the infrastructure with the app logic. This can be fine in many scenarios, but it can take some time to build the right abstractions if you want to decouple you application from this deployment model. This is true at least using .NET functions.
• In some points, they "leak" their abstraction and - from what I understood - they're actually based on the App Service/Web App "WebJob SDK" infrastructure. This makes sense, since they also share some legacy behavior from their ancestor.
• For larger projects, their mixing of logic, code and infrastructure can become difficult to manage. In these situations, good App Services or brand new Container Apps could be a better fit.

Incentivized

• So I don't know that this is a specific disadvantage for Red Hat OpenShift. It's a challenge for anything that Kubernetes face is. There's an extremely large learning curve associated with it and once you get to the point where you're comfortable with it, it's really not bad. But beating that learning curve is a challenge. I've done a couple presentations on our implementation of Red Hat OpenShift at various conferences and one of the slides I always have in there is a tweet from years ago that said, "I tried to teach somebody Kubernetes once. Now neither of us knows what it is."

Incentivized

This is the current strategy for the company, most of the products in the organisation are aligning to Openshift and various use cases it support. Also lot of applications are being developed for AI use case, openshift.AI provides opportunity to host and leverage the AI capabilities for these applications

Incentivized

The virtualization part takes some getting used to it you are coming from a more traditional hypervisor. Customization options are not intuitive to these users. The process should be more clear. Perhaps a guide to Openshift Virtualization for users of RHV, VMware, etc. would ease this transition into the new platform

Incentivized

Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.

Incentivized

Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.

Incentivized

Every time we need to get support all the Red Hat team move forward looking to solve the problem. Sometimes this was not easy and requires the scalation to product team, and we always get a response. Most of the minor issues were solved with the information from access.redhat.com

Incentivized

I was not involved in the in person training, so i
can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly
with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not
hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen
seamlessly without any issue.

Incentivized

We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.

Incentivized

The learning curve is quite high but worth it.

Incentivized

This is the most straightforward and easy-to-implement server less solution. App Service is great, but it's designed for websites, and it cannot scale automatically as easily as Azure Functions. Container Apps is a robust and scalable choice, but they need much more planning, development and general work to implement. Container Instances are the same as Container Apps, but they are extremely more limited in termos of capacity. Kubernetes Service si the classic pod container on Azure, but it requires highly skilled professional, and there are not many scenario where it should be used, especially in smaller teams.

Incentivized

We utilized the Thycotic Secret Service to manage all our application secrets, resulting in seamless integration with our applications. We developed all the applications using Red Hat Fuse (currently migrated to Quarkus). We used the built-in Kali Linux support of OpenShift to manage and configure the services and API. Additionally, the Red Hat Developer Studio facilitates faster development.

Incentivized

This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful

Incentivized

• They allowed me to create solutions with low TCO for the customer, which loves the result and the low price, that helped me create solutions for more clients in less time.
• You can save up to 100% of your compute bill, if you stay under a certain tenant conditions.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to see where we need to be in the container world. I'm going to call it a net neutral impact, not negative or positive. It has given us a sense of what we are ready for and what we're not ready for. You know where you stand.
• You don't know what you don't know, so it helps us know what we want to know.

Incentivized