What is OpenShift?

During the past decade, businesses of all sizes have adopted Kubernetes as the preferred platform for running their applications. However, running Kubernetes presents quite a few challenges to developers and operation teams.

These challenges range from availability to configuration to security and monitoring. In many ways, the standard open-source Kubernetes project lacks tooling and support for enterprise use.

Here are some examples of specific Enterprise needs not covered by standard Kubernetes clusters:

  • Enterprises require user and group management for various reasons, ranging from regulatory to organizational.

  • Many team members prefer visual management tools, standard in other enterprise products, instead of text-based terminals.

  • Security engineers must ensure that individual containers running on corporate clusters are incapable of privilege escalation.

  • DevOps teams require many development and deployment tools to work efficiently with containers, such as CI/CD pipelines and container registries. Budgeting and provisioning such tooling from different vendors is complicated and expensive.

  • Operation teams require standardized telemetry from their clusters.

A whole market of Kubernetes-based tooling blossomed in the past decade, supporting businesses with products covering those needs, but only some of those vendors provide complete enterprise-ready solutions. Red Hat is among those few.

What is Red Hat OpenShift?

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-class platform built upon Kubernetes and provides a full DevOps product ready to use. It is designed with high availability and security in mind and integrates a whole host of DevOps tools in a single package.

Among its features, we can find:

  • Built-in user and group management.

  • Tighter security requirements for containers.

  • More robust namespace isolation through projects.

  • An integrated visual management console.

  • An embedded container registry.

  • A CI/CD pipeline system.

  • A built-in Cloud Native application store featuring ready-to-use applications bundled as Kubernetes Operators.

  • Integrated management and logging features.

Red Hat OpenShift clusters feature more robust security defaults than stock Kubernetes. They can also run in high-availability mode, ensuring the best possible performance for your applications. These characteristics set OpenShift apart as an excellent Kubernetes platform for enterprise users.

The latest version of OpenShift available at the time of this writing is 4.12.

Is Red Hat OpenShift Open Source?

Red Hat OpenShift is a commercial product based on an open-source project called OKD. This acronym means "OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution" and is publicly available for everyone to inspect and contribute. Like the upstream Kubernetes project, OKD developers use the Go programming language.

How can I run OpenShift?

Today, Red Hat OpenShift is available through various mechanisms and formats:

  • DevOps teams can install it in their data centers "on-premise."

  • Major hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud offer managed Red Hat OpenShift installations.

  • Developers can either run OpenShift locally on their workstations using Red Hat OpenShift Local, also known as CRC or "Code-Ready Containers"

  • They can also request a 30-day trial OpenShift cluster, offered by Red Hat, at no charge, for testing and evaluation purposes.

Red Hat OpenShift is an integrated Platform-as-a-Service for enterprise users based on Kubernetes. It is tightly integrated with advanced security settings, developer tooling, and monitoring mechanisms, allowing DevOps teams to be more productive.