OpenShift

 OpenShift

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family's other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream (akin to the way that Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), OpenShift Online is the platform offered as software as a service, and Openshift Dedicated is the platform offered as a managed service.

The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor container resources and container health, manage users, work with operators, etc. Developer views are oriented around working with application resources within a namespace. OpenShift also provides a CLI that supports a superset of the actions that the Kubernetes CLI provides.

What does Red Hat OpenShift do? 

Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes distribution focused on developer experience and application security that's platform agnostic. OpenShift helps you develop and deploy applications to one or more hosts. These can be public facing web applications, or backend applications, including micro services or databases.

What is difference between OpenShift and AWS?

AWS Fargate only works with AWS cloud services, while OpenShift has more collaboration options. OpenShift is an open-source solution while AWS Fargate keeps its coding secret. AWS Fargate is only available in select regions, while OpenShift Container Platform can operate anywhere.

OpenShift Products

OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift Container Platform (formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise) is Red Hat's on-premises private platform as a service product, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS).

OKD

OKD, known until August 2018 as OpenShift Origin (Origin Community Distribution) is the upstream community project used in OpenShift Online, OpenShift Dedicated, and OpenShift Container Platform. Built around a core of Docker container packaging and Kubernetes container cluster management, OKD is augmented by application lifecycle management functionality and DevOps tooling. OKD provides an open source application container platform. All source code for the OKD project is available under the Apache License (Version 2.0) on GitHub.

Red Hat OpenShift Online

Red Hat OpenShift Online (RHOO) is Red Hat's public cloud application development and hosting service which runs on AWS and IBM Cloud. Online offered version 2 of the OKD project source code, which is also available under the Apache License Version 2.0. This version supported a variety of languages, frameworks, and databases via pre-built "cartridges" running under resource-quota "gears". Developers could add other languages, databases, or components via the OpenShift Cartridge application programming interface. This was deprecated in favour of OpenShift 3^[24] and was withdrawn on 30 September 2017 for non-paying customers and 31 December 2017 for paying customers.

OpenShift 3 is built around Kubernetes. It can run any Docker-based container, but Openshift Online is limited to running containers that do not require root.

OpenShift Dedicated

OpenShift Dedicated is Red Hat's managed private cluster offering, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure marketplaces since December 2016.

Industry 4.0 with OpenShift and the IBM Cloud Pak solutions

The IBM Industry Solution Architectures, including patterns like the Plant Service Bus, make it possible to leveraging IBM’s extensive industry domain knowledge and deep enterprise cloud native skills. This enables rapid transformation to Industry 4.0, mitigating skills gaps, reducing risk, ensuring best-practises in scalability, resilience, and security, and ensuring application portability.

Combined with Red Hat OpenShift and the IBM Cloud Pak solutions, this provides industry vertical solutions that can be deployed on a fully hybrid multicloud basis, enabling application portability between private and public clouds and between cloud providers.

Let’s look at the benefits of Openshift container platform.

1. Innovate and go to market faster

OpenShift enables your development team to focus on doing what they do best – designing and testing applications. When they are freed from spending excessive time managing and deploying containers, they can speed up the development process and get products to market more rapidly.

Consider the case of a company specializing in the design and sale of integrated circuits. The cycle of innovation in this industry is relentless; as new technologies arise, chipmakers who can most effectively design chips for these new uses will be the ones who gain market share. For example, the rapid rise of the smart phone has been a boon to companies that have designed chips to power it.

Orchestrating container usage via the OpenShift platform provides a marked efficiency advantage to chipmakers who utilize containers for the next-generation virtualization benefits they offer. Deploying an increased number of apps on existing system resources enables a chipmaker to provide its developers with an expanded toolset to increase their ability to innovate. In an industry where a chipmaker’s main products can become outdated – if not obsolete – within a year or less, the ability to innovate and bring a product to market rapidly is a significant competitive advantage.

2. Accelerate application development

Deploying and managing containers at scale is a complicated process. OpenShift enables efficient container orchestration, allowing rapid container provisioning, deploying, scaling, and management. The tool enhances the DevOps process by streamlining and automating the container management process. Cutting down on time that would otherwise be spent managing containers improves your company’s productivity and speeds up application development.

Accelerated application development is especially valuable in enterprises where a company’s IT system must accommodate rapidly evolving functions. An example of this is the cybersecurity industry. Companies in this industry face an arms race against hackers, who are continually looking for software flaws to exploit. When an exploit is found, cybersecurity firms are expected to respond with fixes as rapidly as possible – often in days, if not hours.

If the development team at such a firm is delayed by container management issues, it can mean missing out on developing a timely fix; if this happens often enough, it can erode a company’s competitive position vis-à-vis its rivals. By streamlining and automating the container automation process, OpenShift enables cybersecurity developers to focus on accelerating application development, updates, and product distribution.

3. Enterprise-grade, container-based platform with no vendor lock-in

A company’s IT needs can vary greatly from one period to the next. Selecting a proprietary container management platform subjects you to the possibility that your vendor won’t be able to provide an acceptable solution if your company’s IT focus changes. In such cases, the expense and time involved in moving from a proprietary vendor to a new platform can be considerable.

Consider the case of a company with worldwide manufacturing facilities that implements a proprietary container platform tool. If the company shifts its production approach to a process that requires it to change to a new operating system – one that isn’t supported by its containerization platform – the company will face the expensive task of redoing its containerization orchestration on another platform.

With a vendor-agnostic open source platform, users can migrate their container processes to the new operating system quickly – while avoiding the extensive costs often involved in migrating from a proprietary operating framework.

4. Enable DevOps and department-wide collaboration

The DevOps process relies upon transparent communication between all involved parties. Containerization provides a convenient means of enabling your IT operations staff to test instances of a new app. OpenShift assists this process by making it easy to test apps throughout your IT architecture without being impeded by framework conflicts, deployment issues, or language discrepancies.

One industry that can benefit from OpenShift’s enablement of enhanced DevOps processes is the webhosting and development field. Companies competing in this industry are constantly racing to offer their customers enhanced functionality. For instance, as web commerce increases by leaps and bounds, companies and individuals progressively look to sell their products over the web. They can do this by adding web sales functionality to their own sites via widgets designed for this purpose, or by purchasing sites with built-in sales functionality.

A company operating in this field, which requires constantly updated functionality to stay competitive, needs to empower its employees to design and test applications as rapidly and effectively as possible. By enabling developer and operations staff to collaborate efficiently, OpenShift allows web hosting and design companies to link developers and operations staff together to effectively design, test, and deploy applications.

5. Self-service provisioning

Assembling the proper tools to create applications on your system architecture can be a challenge, especially at the enterprise level. OpenShift makes the process easy by allowing for the integration of the tools you use most across your entire operating environment.

This self-service provisioning helps improve developer productivity by allowing your development team to work with the tools they are most comfortable using – speeding up the development process by enabling faster creation and deployment of applications. At the same time, OpenShift allows your operations staff to retain control over the environment as a whole.

Examples of how this feature benefits users can be seen in companies where the development staff must be fluent in a variety of development tools and languages. For instance, a video game development company can benefit from this feature when they need to develop games that are compatible with a variety of operating systems. OpenShift enables the game developer’s programmers to use their favorite tools while developing games for different systems. This results in effective container usage, without forcing the company’s developers to use tools they aren’t familiar with.

CONCLUSION

A major portion of the added efficiency of containerization at the enterprise level, perhaps as much as 50 percent, comes from orchestrating container usage throughout your environment. OpenShift offers a platform for managing your containers across a variety of operating environments, significantly reducing the time necessary to build, deploy, and scale them. As an open source next-generation virtualization tool, OpenShift provides you with the all the functionality you need to optimize containerization usage with your existing IT resources.