Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

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.

Positive

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.

I am using it for my critical system, specifically for the payment system.

Especially the security side is nice. On the other hand, there is firm support in the background. This is helpful for me since I am also native to Bandit system. On OpenShift side, I can get support from Airflow . It is a good aspect. It is important for critical systems.

I have used it for approximately three or four years.

I would rate stability between seven and eight out of ten.

It is easy to expand. Scalability is rated nine out of ten.

Quality of support may be improved. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Neutral

It is not too simple, however, it is not too hard either. It was a normal installation.

I know Kubernetes , however, I am not aware of other alternatives nowadays.

It is easy to expand it. I would give it a rating of eight out of ten.