Platform has transformed our cloud into a secure, unified home for diverse modern applications
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Red Hat OpenShift for more than six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
We are a partner with Red Hat; we sell their services and licenses, and we do the implementation ourselves.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Effortless Containerization and Deployment
What do you like best about the product?
I appreciate Red Hat OpenShift for its seamless support in hosting our Maximo application suite, notably through its capabilities in easy containerization and simplified deployment processes with pipelines. The platform stands out for its ease of installation and maintenance, which significantly reduces the complexity typically associated with such tasks. Moreover, I find the options like auto-scaler of nodes and descheduler extremely valuable, especially as the auto-scaler adeptly adjusts the number of nodes based on utilization, ensuring optimal load management and consistent performance. This automation is crucial in maintaining a reliable performance without manual intervention. The initial setup was straightforward, facilitated by using playbooks, which helped streamline the process efficiently.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find that the monitoring features in Red Hat OpenShift could be improved. Specifically, there is a lack of inbuilt viewing dashboards that I believe would enhance the usability and effectiveness of the monitoring capabilities.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I find Red Hat OpenShift streamlines containerization and deployment, making hosting applications easy. It supports autoscaling for performance and maintains minimal load, while installation and maintenance are straightforward.
OpenShift makes everything easy and clear
What do you like best about the product?
OpenShift is by far the best managed k8s solution that ever has existed. It’s strong and robust and so easy to use.
What do you dislike about the product?
There's still no great way to debug crash boot loops. Figure that out and you'll make lots of admins very happy!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Deployment of thousands of microservices
The Enterprise for Kubernetes
What do you like best about the product?
That is a platform for your application, ready for the Enterprise and full of functions for all the needs. It's ease of use and very complete
What do you dislike about the product?
As a Solution Architect (for pre-sales) sometimes it's hard to sell because of the costs, in terms of subscriptions costs and hardware needs
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It offers a platform for my applications, very stable and easy to use, with all the features that I need
OpenShift on a university
What do you like best about the product?
For yours use is the resilience and ease to go to production for any of yours systems, the system although can have some issues, it normally won't affect the uptime of the deploy applications, after migrate to the OpenShift, after the initial learning curve to migrate all the pipelines, it became a breeze to deploy new system from the zero.
What do you dislike about the product?
The learning curve is little steep, between versions a lot of things change and can break, search on the docs articles for help is sometimes difficult to find what you're looking for
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Giving the dev teams more tools to develop the systems, before that they didn't had access on some parts like logs, console, etc. For the infra team, it make a lot easier to deploy new systems with automation that now the devs interact.
OpenShift
What do you like best about the product?
Easy of us. GUi makes it easier. Better then the other kubernetes environments I used
What do you dislike about the product?
OpenShift is generally cost more than other kubernetes environments
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Deployment of the application
I'm a Platform Engineer responsible for 5-10 OpenShift clusters in production environments.
What do you like best about the product?
OpenShift makes K8S more accessible, and Red Hat support is world-class.
What do you dislike about the product?
There's not much to dislike. The offline/air-gapped deployment process could be documented more thoroughly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
OpenShift allows our software engineers to develop, test, and release their applications in a centralized way. We've moved from a monolithic approach to software engineering to a microservices model.
Red Hat OpenShift from an administrator
What do you like best about the product?
The automation and self-healing capabilities offered by the cluster operators make administration and updates a breeze.
What do you dislike about the product?
Most of our challenges with OpenShift adoptation have come from our processes (example: container vulnerability remediation) and not the platform. I can't immediately think of anything we dislikes about the platform itself!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Red Hat OpenShift gives us a resilient and easily administered platform for running container workloads in our environment. Integration with our existing application deployment processes give our teams a trouble-free experience when deploying or updating containerized workloads.
Hybrid Cloud for all (workloads)
What do you like best about the product?
OpenShift allows my clients to standardize their entire estate on a single platform. Whether it’s public or private cloud, in the DC or at the Edge, we can trust that there is parity across all environments. And not only for containers, but all workloads from VMs and Serverless, to AI/ML and beyond.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are still rampant misconceptions in the industry about what OpenShift is and isn’t.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Providing parity across all environments, enabling a standard LZ for workloads.
easy
What do you like best about the product?
easy to use, there are lots of good training and courses
What do you dislike about the product?
the complexity, could be much easier for the user
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
development and easy application managment
