Every organization dreams of having a platform up their sleeve that has open possibilities and is powerful. It should be flexible so that it can build anything and works anywhere. Flexibility is an open-source advantage in such platforms and it begins with where you deploy it. In short, all these requirements are satisfied by the one and only Red Hat OpenShift. Let us learn more about it in this article.
OpenShift – Table of Contents
What is OpenShift?
OpenShift is the home of containerization software products that are developed by the company Red Hat. Openshift was started on 4th May 2011. The flagship product of the OpenShift is the OpenShift Container Platform. It is an on-premises platform as a service built around the Docker containers orchestrated and managed by the Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise under apache license2.0. Furthermore, Openshift is an open-source development platform that enables the developers to develop and deploy their applications on cloud infrastructure. Also, it is very useful in developing cloud-enabled services. Red Hat OpenShift provides an enterprise-grade Linux based OS, monitoring, container runtime, registry, networking, and authentication and authorization solutions. To summarize, it is the most efficient tool for container orchestration, allowing rapid container provisioning, deploying,
scaling, and management.
Why OpenShift?
OpenShift not only helps the organizations to accelerate the path to innovations but it also helps them to bring new services and products for their customers. Firstly, it keeps the organizations ahead of their competitions by delivering the applications with speed and gives the best business results. Secondly, it provides a consistent user experience so that the services and digital products of the organization can be deployed across the hybrid cloud for scalability. Thirdly and most importantly, with OpenShift, making changes is quick and simple. This results in addressing business opportunities faster. In conclusion, it helps eliminate all the barriers to the success of an organization’s new application.
Why you should use OpenShift?
OpenShift is responsible for accelerating application development by adding the tools and features that the companies need in order to be efficient and agile. So, with the help of OpenShift, businesses can increase collaboration, deploy applications quickly, and become less soiled and more interactive. Below are some more reasons why one should always go with it:
- Speed: Speed of execution defines whether a business is prosperous or not. With OpenShift, businesses have full control over their pace of innovation. In other words, this means that the applications in a company can get from the concept to production quicker.
- Organizational Consensus: This platform allows the development and operations teams to work together without sacrificing their concerns. Besides, it is built on a stable OS that allows the developers to modify, create, and deploy according to them and use the languages that they wish.
- Holistic Solution: It supports the PaaS environment and IaaS services which increase the interoperability and agility.
- Scale: Containers in OpenShift ensure that applications are independent of the operating system and are packed in their own space due to which the applications become portable and scalable.
- Security: The data of a company is one of its most precious assets. Thus, OpenShift takes this seriously. It is built on the principles and the applications that run on OpenShift have containers that separate the code and the data from each other making it more secure.
OpenShift Features
OpenShift delivers business-critical applications whether the customers are migrating their workloads to a cloud or are building new, cutting-edge experience for their customers. It is trusted by more than 2000+ customers worldwide because of the range of features that it comes with.
- Development –
- Application Development
- Development Tools
- Development Environment
- Language Support
- Testing
- Developer Toolkit
- Architecture
- Data Center
- Virtualization
- Database –
- Database Management
- Analytics
- Auto Scaling
- Storage
- Backup/Recovery
- Infrastructure –
- Networking
- Security
- Virtual Machines
- Management –
- File Isolation
- Access Control
- Network Isolation
- Organization –
- Packaging
- Orchestration
- Container Networking
- Monitoring –
- AI/ML Assistance
- Performance Baselines
- Performance Monitoring
- Analysis
- Multi-system Monitoring
- Response –
- Incident Alerting
- Dashboards and Visualizations
- Root Cause Analysis
OpenShift Architecture
OpenShift has a layered architecture in which each layer is tightly bound with the others using Docker and Kubernetes cluster. It is designed in such a way that Docker containers are easily supported and managed that is hosted on the top layers. additionally, the new OpenShift V3 supports containerized infrastructure. Here, Docker helps in the creation of lightweight containers whereas Kubernetes manages the containers and supports the task of orchestrating.
The two components of OpenShift are Kubernetes master and Kubernetes nodes.
Kubernetes Master Machine Components
- Etcd – It is responsible for storing configuration information that can be used by every node in the cluster.
- API Server – Kubernetes is an API server that provides all the operations on the cluster with the help of API.
- Controller Manager – The controller Manager is held accountable for the collectors that regulate the state of a particular cluster and perform tasks.
- Scheduler – It is the main component that is responsible for distributing the workload, tracking the utilization of working load on cluster nodes, and analyzing which resources are available.
Kubernetes Nodes Components
- Docker – It helps in running the application containers in an isolated but lightweight operating environment.
- Kubelet Service – This service is a small service present in each node responsible for transferring information to and from control plane service.
- Kubernetes Proxy Service – This runs on every node and makes sure that the services are available to the external host.
OpenShift Benefits
Red Hat OpenShift provides the speed, security, portability, and choice that your organization needs to compete with the rivals and dominate the market so that it can become the next industry leader. Let us look at the benefits that this platform provides.
- It lets the development team focus on designing and testing applications. They can speed up the process and get the products to the marketplace faster when they are freed from spending a lot of time managing and deploying containers.
- The OpenShift platform allows efficient container arrangement. Deploying and managing containers can be a complicated process so, the tools in OpenShift streamline and automate this process cutting down the time and improving the productivity of the organization.
- With the help of this vendor-agnostic and open-source platform, the users can easily migrate their container processes to a new OS. Moreover, it helps them avoid the extensive costs for it.
- It is necessary for a company to rapidly and effectively test and deploy applications. This platform empowers the employees and helps the developer and operations teams to collaborate efficiently so that they can effectively test, design, and deploy the applications together.
- Lastly, it has self-service provisioning that improves developer productivity by allowing the employees to use the tools that they are most comfortable with. Further, it allows the staff to gain control over the environment too.
OpenShift New Offerings
To begin with, the OpenShift enterprise offers a secure and multi-tenant OS to its customers and integrated application libraries and runtime. Besides, it enables organizations to implement an exclusive PaaS that meets compliance, security, privacy, and governance requirements. Still, it keeps improving by adding new features and fixing bugs. Now, users can take advantage of the following new features:
- Runtime and Services
- Industry Standard, Web-scale Distributed Application Platform
- Web-scale Container Orchestration and Management
- Robust Tools and best User Experience for Developers and Operations
- Standard Containers API
- Container-optimized Operating System
- Service mesh
- Knative Framework
- Operator framework
Advantages and Disadvantages of OpenShift
OpenShift is the best open-source development platform but regardless of all the features, tools, and operations that it comes with, it has certain advantages and disadvantages that no company would like to overlook before considering this platform. Let us have a look at them so that you can have a better understanding of the product before making a decision.
Advantages –
- Firstly, it is very easy to use and it considerably very fast.
- OpenShift gives its customers free 1 GB access on signup.
- It is built on top of Kubernetes which gives it a solid base to work with.
- This platform has gears and modules consequently that are easy to manage.
- From the developer’s perspective, it is designed well. In fact, it lets them choose their target app-server runtime and cartridges that they need.
- OpenShift’s integration with Docker and Git makes it a very appealing choice. The marker files can be used to control when to build, deploy, and customize conveniently.
- The ability to quickly create an application hosting environment is provided. Moreover, it offers a rich ecosystem of languages, tools, and frameworks.
Disadvantages –
- Firstly, it is very difficult to see how layers can be impacted by and correlate events.
- It is not at all intuitive to swap between different OpenShift accounts. Therefore, it reduces customer satisfaction.
- The OpenShift developers should include more product support; more GUI based management and should help to port the applications. In this case, it has a weak performance.
- Lastly, data storage can be a bit more costly for some businesses.