OpenShift : shifting towards a new world

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family’s other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream (akin to the way that Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), OpenShift Online is the platform offered as software as a service, and Openshift Dedicated is the platform offered as a managed service.

The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor container resources and container health, manage users, work with operators, etc. Developer views are oriented around working with application resources within a namespace. OpenShift also provides a CLI that supports a superset of the actions that the Kubernetes CLI provides.

What is containerization?

Containerization has become a major trend in software development as an alternative or companion to virtualization. It involves encapsulating or packaging up software code and all its dependencies so that it can run uniformly and consistently on any infrastructure. The technology is quickly maturing, resulting in measurable benefits for developers and operations teams as well as overall software infrastructure.

Containerization allows developers to create and deploy applications faster and more securely. With traditional methods, code is developed in a specific computing environment which, when transferred to a new location, often results in bugs and errors. For example, when a developer transfers code from a desktop computer to a virtual machine (VM) or from a Linux to a Windows operating system. Containerization eliminates this problem by bundling the application code together with the related configuration files, libraries, and dependencies required for it to run. This single package of software or “container” is abstracted away from the host operating system, and hence, it stands alone and becomes portable — able to run across any platform or cloud, free of issues.

Products

OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift Container Platform (formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise) is Red Hat’s on-premises private platform as a service product, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS).

OKD

OKD, known until August 2018 as OpenShift Origin (Origin Community Distribution) is the upstream community project used in OpenShift Online, OpenShift Dedicated, and OpenShift Container Platform. Built around a core of Docker container packaging and Kubernetes container cluster management, OKD is augmented by application lifecycle management functionality and DevOps tooling. OKD provides an open source application container platform. All source code for the OKD project is available under the Apache License (Version 2.0) on GitHub.

Red Hat OpenShift Online

Red Hat OpenShift Online (RHOO) is Red Hat’s public cloud application development and hosting service which runs on AWS and IBM Cloud.

Online offered version 2 of the OKD project source code, which is also available under the Apache License Version 2.0. This version supported a variety of languages, frameworks, and databases via pre-built “cartridges” running under resource-quota “gears”. Developers could add other languages, databases, or components via the OpenShift Cartridge application programming interface. This was deprecated in favor of OpenShift 3 and was withdrawn on 30 September 2017 for non-paying customers and 31 December 2017 for paying customers.

OpenShift 3 is built around Kubernetes. It can run any Docker-based container, but Openshift Online is limited to running containers that do not require root.

OpenShift Dedicated

OpenShift Dedicated is Red Hat’s managed private cluster offering, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure marketplaces since December 2016.

Features of using OpenShift

Standardized developer workflows

With OpenShift as the cloud application platform, the application development organization can standardize the developer workflow and create repeatable processes for application delivery to streamline the entire process.

Multiple environment support (dev/test/prod)

With the OpenShift platform’s ability to support multiple Application Development Lifecycle stage environments (such as Dev, QA, Pre-Prod, and Prod), the Enterprise can adopt and implement the OpenShift platform without changing their current methodologies or processes.

Continuous integration and release management

OpenShift includes Jenkins for continuous integration and release management. Jenkins can perform tests at code check-in, orchestrate the build process, and automatically promote or cancel an application release based on the results. This automated release management becomes a critical part of streamlining the application development. Plus, you can easily tie into your existing Jenkins-based workflows with the Jenkins Pipeline plugin.

Managing builds and deployment

OpenShift is designed for building and deploying applications. Depending on how much you want to involve OpenShift in your development process, you can choose to focus your development within an OpenShift project by using it to build an application from scratch, or bring an application (binary, container image, source code) you have already developed in a separate environment and deploy it to OpenShift.

1.Case study:

The State of Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management, and Budget (DTMB) supports internal and citizen-facing services for 19 state agencies. To keep pace with demand, the department sought to improve development, delivery, and reliability for agencies’ digital services by migrating to a container-based infrastructure. With this new environment based on Red Hat OpenShift, DTMB has reduced application delivery times while creating a scalable, vendor-agnostic foundation for future cloud adoption.

Outcomes

• Reduced time to market for new, digital data services
• Improved infrastructure security with consistent container images
• Created cloud-ready infrastructure foundation
• Adopted collaborative work approach to improve efficiency

2. Case Study:

Cloud service provider ORock Technologies (ORock) needed a technology partner to help it build a secure enterprise open source cloud solution for government and highly regulated industries. Red Hat worked with ORock to build a cloud environment on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a container service on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and to gain Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) accreditation. Thanks to its partnership with Red Hat, ORock holds a unique position in the FedRAMP marketplace, from which it is well positioned to grow.

Outcomes

• Drove growth by providing technology and resources critical to FedRAMP accreditation
• Increased exposure by raising market awareness, building credibility
• Enabled the CI/CD pipeline customers are looking for

Conclusion

A major portion of the added efficiency of containerization at the enterprise level, perhaps as much as 50 percent, comes from orchestrating container usage throughout your environment. OpenShift offers a platform for managing your containers across a variety of operating environments, significantly reducing the time necessary to build, deploy, and scale them. As an open source next-generation virtualization tool, OpenShift provides you with the all the functionality you need to optimize containerization usage with your existing IT resources.