Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

My main use case for Red Hat OpenShift  is serving telco customers. A quick specific example of how I use Red Hat OpenShift  for my telco customers involves different applications that reside in containers on those particular container platforms. This workload includes different parts such as AMF and UPF, which are the basic functions that I normally use as applications on Red Hat OpenShift.

Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted our organization by adding significantly to our revenues because what we were doing through other vendors shows that with vanilla Kubernetes , there are many features and extra advantages in Red Hat OpenShift. It has had a strong positive impact on our organization by standardizing how we build, deploy, and operate applications across environments. One of the biggest benefits is its operational consistency. It provides a uniform Kubernetes  platform across both on-premises and cloud environments. From an availability and reliability perspective, Red Hat OpenShift's built-in lifecycle management and automated upgrades, along with self-healing capabilities, have improved overall system stability.

Currently, I am not equipped with specific outcomes or metrics that demonstrate this positive impact, but it has significantly improved all these parameters.

The best features Red Hat OpenShift offers include security, hybrid multi-cloud, and bare metal flexibility. The Operator framework and lifecycle automation are also part of it, along with improved CI/CD and GitOps pipelines, and strong security with compliance features.

In my day-to-day operations, I find lifecycle automation to be the most valuable feature. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift provides developers with hands-on extra capabilities and experiences.

Red Hat OpenShift can be improved by reducing its complexity. We could also have better UX, especially for day two operations. There is always some scope for optimization that we can address.

I have been using Red Hat OpenShift for four years.

Red Hat OpenShift is stable and offers the most stability among all the competitors and enterprise-level solutions available.

The scalability of Red Hat OpenShift is great, with many options available to scale it according to your requirement or demand. The extent to which you can scale depends on the environment you are deploying it in.

The customer support is great, and we have many channels through which we can approach them.

We have previously used VMware and Wind River, and while we still use them for some of our customers, we switched to Red Hat OpenShift because we found the best features there.

I do not have any readily available data regarding return on investment metrics, but I can say that we see relevant improvements in money saved, time saved, and fewer employees needed.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing involves a different team that handles all these aspects, so as a SRE, I do not need to worry about these things.

Before choosing Red Hat OpenShift, we evaluated other options such as Mesos, but Red Hat OpenShift is more futuristic.

My advice for others looking into using Red Hat OpenShift is that you need to first get hands-on experience with the technology. It is based on vanilla Kubernetes, but they have added additional capabilities for which having basic knowledge is essential. You should go through their portals and lab environments available.

My main use case for Red Hat OpenShift  involves two cases: the first case is about the migration of QRadar and Red Hat OpenShift  for the cloud, which relates to the process of antivirus, XDR , and SOAR  and SIEM . The second case is the use for the migration in ARO, Microsoft Azure  Red Hat OpenShift, for the migration of OpenCTI from on-premise to the cloud.

A quick specific example of how I used Red Hat OpenShift for one of those migrations is the particular process of the migration about the OpenCTI. The OpenCTI migration involved a process where we used Docker  for the OpenCTI to function correctly when implemented, which was the main challenge.

I do not have anything else to add about my main use case or the migration processes with Red Hat OpenShift.

In my experience, the best feature Red Hat OpenShift offers is that the environment is easy to use. When I say environment needs, I mean that it is easy for the configuration and the management in the different environments. For example, when I use the API key, the configuration and connector, the environment provides easy visibility and allows me to watch the reports for the leadership in the company.

Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted my organization, and now we use it more in the QRadar SIEM  environment. However, in this case, IBM sold QRadar to Palo Alto, and our client changed the SIEM , so Red Hat OpenShift is not functional at this moment for QRadar.

Red Hat OpenShift can be improved by addressing any features, performance, or usability issues. In my view, the performance is very good, and the automatization of the new environment and new machine is fantastic because it is easier for my job in the company. My colleagues display information and the Docker  functionality is good.

There are two small things I would suggest about the SOAR : the connection for the SOAR to send email and send communication to our colleagues and people in the company.

If I could change or improve one thing about Red Hat OpenShift, it would be to provide more information on the web because the information is limited and I need to explore more. I would change this about Red Hat OpenShift because I have known this all year and need more investigation.

I have been using Red Hat OpenShift for about one year, more than one year ago.

Red Hat OpenShift is stable.

In my view, Red Hat OpenShift's scalability is good, although I do not know for certain.

The customer support for Red Hat OpenShift is bad because the support does not respond.

I did not previously use a different solution before Red Hat OpenShift. However, before it, we used VMware.

Before choosing Red Hat OpenShift, we evaluated other options, specifically VMware.

I have seen a return on investment from using Red Hat OpenShift because I save money since I do not need the server in my data center on-premise, and I save money in monthly payments for availability and accessibility in the data center.

I cannot respond to the question about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing because the cost is another area, specifically the area of accounting and finance.

Before choosing Red Hat OpenShift, we evaluated other options, specifically VMware.

My advice for others looking into using Red Hat OpenShift is to explore the tools, understand how Red Hat OpenShift migration to the cloud works, and recognize that the response and return on metric is efficient for good operation.

That is all I would like to add about the features of Red Hat OpenShift. I choose seven out of ten because my use is not total. Perhaps it is interesting for the use, but our environment in the company is easier to use with VMware. I rate this product seven out of ten overall.

I do not have any additional thoughts about Red Hat OpenShift.

I have been using Red Hat OpenShift  for more than six years.

I implement Red Hat OpenShift  for our customers as we are a service provider, and we implement it in our cloud. We provide it as a service for our customers, and we deploy some of the applications that we have implemented in our company and for my personal use.

I deployed and developed an audit application which runs all the compliance requirements for a company, including multiple platforms and multiple standards such as ISO and others, and NCA for Saudi Arabia, and any other standard can work on it. This is one example. I also created a personal application for a t-shirt integrated with AI where we can create an image and print it on a shirt and ship it to the customer. I implemented another application for waste management, which was totally developed and deployed by myself for my personal use and the waste management for one of our customers. Additionally, I had another application deployed for one of our customers, where my role was to deploy Red Hat OpenShift and to make sure their application is deployed and available. This is for bill invoicing and financial operations. For one of the hospitals, our customer, I deployed the application for monitoring diabetes patients. My role there was to deploy it and to make the application available, providing all the requirements, ingress, configuration, storage, and other things. These are examples of what I have done.

Red Hat OpenShift by default is secure, more than native Kubernetes , as it has a limitation for the run as. The container by default does not run as root; this is one of the examples. The integration with ACS allows centralized policy deployment and enforcement, alongside great observability and monitoring. Red Hat OpenShift is actually enterprise-grade Kubernetes  with all the accessories and main features.

One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is that it has the catalog, the application catalog, and the operator hub, which allows us to deploy things easily and straightforward without going into a lot of hassles. This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools. Red Hat OpenShift also provides virtualization capabilities, and I am currently working with Zain to make a project where we will convert F5 appliances to virtual machines and to manage them through Red Hat virtualization, OVE. Red Hat OpenShift is a unique platform because it provides the features for both worlds, containerization, and VMs at the same time, requiring you to learn one skillset in order to manage all of this at the same time.

In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications. In addition, it reduced the time to develop and to deploy a new application; all we need is using Jenkins  for CI/CD. Once we commit any code, it gets triggered, and it will implement the new container in a very flexible and easy way, within seconds. This decreased the time to market and increased agility, allowing us to capture new opportunities very fast.

There is perhaps one thing about the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift. Currently, there are two new ways to deploy Red Hat OpenShift, which are easier with assisted deployment and agent-based deployment. However, previously it needed a lot of requirements on the infrastructure side if we are using UPI, user-provided infrastructure. If the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift itself can be easier and more flexible, it would be great.

I have been using Red Hat OpenShift for more than six years.

Red Hat OpenShift is stable.

It is great. Red Hat OpenShift can scale to thousands of nodes, allowing multiple clusters to be managed in different geolocations and managed by centralized advanced cluster management, ACM.

Regarding scalability, Red Hat OpenShift has a lot of scalability capability, including about two thousand machines in one cluster and multiple cluster management, centralized management through ACM and ACS, which provides a very secure way to manage centrally all the features and to enforce policies.

In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications.

The response time for customer support is excellent, and they go deep and can resolve things easily.

The documentation and support that we get from Red Hat are very sufficient, and this differentiates between enterprise-grade Kubernetes and native Kubernetes or perhaps Kubernetes from other vendors.

We used native Kubernetes before Red Hat OpenShift, actually, deploying it through kubeadm. The issue with Kubernetes is that it is just the engine; Red Hat has all the requirements to give you a complete solution. Red Hat OpenShift provides the complete ecosystem, all the integrations, and the tools which I mentioned before, which are already integrated and easy to be used. You do not need to grab open-source solutions for storage or other things, and you do not have to do a lot of customization, needing to comply with each version. Red Hat OpenShift is tested and vetted, making things easier to be deployed, supported, and managed, and it is more trustworthy.

There is perhaps one thing about the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift. Currently, there are two new ways to deploy Red Hat OpenShift, which are easier with assisted deployment and agent-based deployment.

We are a partner with Red Hat; we sell their services and licenses, and we do the implementation ourselves.

We did not measure our return on investment in a very accurate way, but as I mentioned, we could decrease the time needed to deploy any application, enabling us to capture new opportunities faster, go to market faster, and maintain the availability and security of all our applications.

We work with Red Hat or our distributor in Saudi Arabia. We send our requirements as part of the RFP describing what we need, and we get the pricing from our distributor. There is an easy way to price the subscription of the support per CPU, per VM, so it is easy to be priced, but we depend on an official quote usually from our distributor.

Red Hat OpenShift by default is secure, more than native Kubernetes, as it has a limitation for the run as. The container by default does not run as root; this is one of the examples. The integration with ACS allows centralized policy deployment and enforcement, alongside great observability and monitoring. Red Hat OpenShift is actually enterprise-grade Kubernetes with all the accessories and main features.

Our go-to-market and our deployment for any application, the time is reduced perhaps by eight times. It is very fast because you have consistency for all deployed containers; it is not like a virtual machine where you have to deploy individually for each virtual machine or you have to copy code here and there. It takes seconds because the containers spin out very fast; they are very lightweight. The things that we used to do in days, now take a couple of minutes to be done. So, that is approximately the number—mostly it is reduced by eight.

We are providing our cloud to our customers, so we are a service provider. We deploy Red Hat OpenShift in our cloud and host customers' applications through it. Some of our customers prefer Red Hat OpenShift on Azure  or on AWS , so we deploy it there when needed, but our main deliverable is through our cloud.

We have our own cloud provided by our company, making us a local cloud provider. We are not a hyper integrator, nor a hyper-scaler. We provide it through our cloud and deployed a couple of customers on Azure ; this is what I recall.

I would advise others looking into using Red Hat OpenShift to take the step and to go fast into it because it will save them a lot of money and provide them with all the features, flexibility, security, and others. I give this product a rating of ten out of ten.