We do have applications onboarded in the Red Hat OpenShift test. We have tier-one and tier-two applications. Especially with auto-scaling Ments, spinning up the containers, the developers can easily deploy their applications onto the clusters and it can have when the need increases by spinning up more instances of your applications. So it maintains a better response time and meets the SOE.
Pros
Mainly with right-sizing the applications, making the applications brought into this microservice architecture. So these are the ones that we noticed with the applications like we have migrated the applications from monolith to microservices and they're doing extremely well.
Cons
I would say if OpenShift can provide us more insight into capacity management and maybe add a little bit of chargeback thing, so that will be more into the insight and observability. That's what we will need from a management perspective.
Likelihood to Recommend
So when you want to move or you want to explore the container platform, I would say OpenShift is the best in the industry where you can get premium support. So it is all based on your needs if you need support is one of the important aspects if you want to put your tier-one workloads in a container platform, I would definitely recommend OpenShift. Less appropriate. With the licensing and the pricing. So if you are looking for tier-three applications, maybe.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Hospital & Health Care company, 5001-10,000 employees)
We have especially open enrollment, right where three, or four months we have a high traffic, especially on the enrollment side. So that's where we started the OpenShift but now it gets used across all the domains like claims, Medicare processing, and all the data for the application. So across all the applications we use. So I can say all business-critical applications run on the OpenShift. So one problem that, especially on the open enrollment we had scaling because those three, four months, the volume surge like 50 times, 200 times, right? The earlier challenge was to add the hardware and there are always delays that take a couple of months. But with OpenShift we can able to do it in just a few days. I think those scaling when we have a sudden burst of workload, was the major challenge for OpenShift was able to work on.
Pros
I'll say the first one is obviously high availability, right? Because now application earlier, if you take any application that used to run WebSphere legacy platform, we'll have a side or B side. And that was not a true failover. But now with OpenShift we can add multiple ports, you can have four ports or eight ports, 10 ports how your business or application needs. So it's very what you call no downtime and literally there is no downtime.
Another example you can say the patching now we have to patch due to compliance every month. So we do rolling updates so there is no downtime so I'll say highly available, scalable, another security is another great feature that we can use core os. So those are the key features
Cons
So one thing I can think of is the cloud where we are going because now we are seeing workload going to AWS or Azure. I think there'll be a lot of integration needed from the OpenShift, how we can leverage more cloud services as the industry is moving toward that direction.
One thing I can definitely mention, we are trying to do a database. First I'll start with the Redis in-memory database. So we had that installed on the openshift. But the way Redis in-memory works is they have their own DNS. And now with the state full set it was challenging when we patched and it did not work. We had to do a manual intervention. So those are challenges especially when you have state full workload like databases, how do you scale those, right? So those are big challenges that we can overcome.
Likelihood to Recommend
Basically, if you want to do rapid development, that's where the product is well because there is a CICD pipeline that is well integrated. So the continuous, if you want to bring any new feature, or new release right to the market, it's very useful how you can use the OpenShift in that way. I think it still needs work on the database as I mentioned earlier, those kinds of workloads. Also the traditional workload. For example, we are now trying with mq, the middleware layer on the OpenShift. But I think still there is less flexibility, what I can say. I think that's like a stateful workload. I think that's where the challenge is.
Perfect for hosting different network components from multiple vendors. Effective in delivering and maintaining our own infrastructure applications in our OCP cluster. Allows improvement of systems agility and performance improvement. Automatic load balancing management of centralized applications is thus the best solution for centralizing applications. As well as easy-to-run applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Pros
Flexibility
Stability
Monitoring
Easy to customize.
Easy to migrate.
Cons
More depth in the documentation of the product is needed.
To beginners, we usually have a hard time teaching them to use it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well structured to support multi-cloud enablement. Easy to adapt Kubernetes. Good automation and is perfect for running containers. Ability to edit and apply YAML manifests directly from the OPC console.
I am using it for evaluation purposes to understand the usefulness of this product in terms of its PAAS services. I have been using the public Openshift cloud since it has a lot more cartridges available. I have developed two applications on the Openshift cloud: Kecha and Note. Kecha, is a instant messaging application and Note is a blog-like application developed using Tomcat7, MongoDB, PostgreSQL cartridges.
From developing these applications, I have learned a lot about OpenShift. I really like their devops architecture such as using environment variables per environment for username/passwords, so no need to maintain extra properties files. I like their "hooks" that triggers builds when a code is pushed-in using GIT or you can customize the process how you like using OpenShift marker files. They also have support for Docker integration which makes it more worthwhile to integrate applications using OpenShift now.
Pros
OpenShift is really designed well particularly from a developers perspective. I think as a developer myself I just want to pick my target app-server runtime and choose the cartridges I need using OpenShift and I can just deploy. If you are a newbie or want to try it out you can use the OpenShift public cloud and start from there.
OpenShift Integration with Git makes it a attractive point. You can also use OpenShift marker files to control when to build and when to deploy after each check-in makes it convenient to customize the build and deploy behavior per environment.
OpenShift and Docker integration makes it a very appealing choice.
Cons
I would like to see a public cloud using OpenShift and Docker integration. I am not aware if this is already available now.
I would like to see a tool that can help with extracting log files from the remote server like it being available on a Samba shared folder. And other applications that want to scan for keywords in the application log can check if there have been any errors or exceptions thrown by the application.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would definitely recommend OpenShift or give it a trial period. I think it gives a developer much more freedom in terms of code deployment, build process and even having log file access using RHC commands. One of its strengths is scaling and you can easily configure it using their tools for each application.
