Overview
Red Hat® OpenShift® is an enterprise grade open source application platform for accelerating the development and delivery of cloud-native applications in a consistent way across the hybrid and multi cloud, all the way to the edge. It is powered by Kubernetes as the container orchestration engine, and many more features from the CNCF open source ecosystem, all tested, packaged, and supported together as a comprehensive application platform by Red Hat. It can be consumed as either a public cloud service from the major cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM, or as a self-managed software on the broad spectrum of bare metal and virtual infrastructure across data center, public clouds, and edge.
Kubernetes by itself is an open source software that automates deploying, managing, and scaling containers. Organizations need to manually integrate many other capabilities such as automation, monitoring, log analytics, service mesh, serverless, developer productivity tools, etc. to make it an enterprise ready platform.
Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes technology
Kubernetes clusters are the fundamental computing unit for both Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes. Each cluster has 2 parts: A control plane and worker nodes. Containers with software applications run in the worker nodes, each of which has its own Linux operating system. The control plane is responsible for maintaining the cluster’s overall state (including what apps are running and which container images are used), while worker nodes run the actual production workloads.
The term Docker was once synonymous with containers, but now refers to several things:
- A specific container technology
- An open source community
- A software company
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The difference between OpenShift and Kubernetes
For all that Kubernetes can do to orchestrate containers, users still need to integrate other components like networking, ingress, load balancing, storage, monitoring, logging, multi cluster management, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and more to accelerate the development and delivery of containerized applications—at scale. Red Hat OpenShift offers these components with Kubernetes at their core because—by itself— Kubernetes is not enough.
| Red Hat OpenShift | Kubernetes Open source container orchestration | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | ||
| Push-button, automated node configuration and tools | ||
| Multi-host-container scheduling | ||
| Self-service provisioning | ||
| Service discovery | ||
| Enterprise container host operating system | ||
| Container Image registry | ||
| Validated storage plug-ins | ||
| Networking and validated plug-ins | ||
| Monitoring | ||
| Log aggregation | ||
| Service Mesh | ||
| Multitenancy | ||
| Metering and chargeback | ||
| Developer experience | ||
| Cloud service broker | ||
| Automated image builds | ||
| CI/CD and DevOps workflows and pipelines | ||
| Validated third-party Kubernetes operators and Helm charts | ||
| Certified databases and related data services | ||
| Certified application services | ||
| 200+ certified ISV solutions | ||
| Enterprise operations | ||
| Multi-cluster management | ||
| Zero downtime patching and upgrades | ||
| Enterprise 24/7 support | ||
| 9-year support lifecycle | ||
| Security response team | ||
The benefits of OpenShift vs Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a container orchestration software that helps users manage clustered groups of hosts running Linux containers.
While Kubernetes is the core kernel, in order to build, deploy, run, and manage containerized applications at scale at 1 location, or in a consistent way across a distributed environment such as on-prem datacenters, public clouds, edge, you need more than just Kubernetes.
Red Hat OpenShift provides a complete solution that includes a stable Kubernetes engine with robust security and many integrated capabilities required to operationalize a complete application platform. It comes in several editions including as a fully managed public cloud service or self-managed on infrastructure across datacenters, public clouds, and edge.
Cloud services editions:
- Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift
- Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated
- Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
- Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS
Self-managed editions:
- Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus
- Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
- Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine
Red Hat OpenShift focuses on an enterprise user experience. It’s designed to provide everything an organization may need to orchestrate containers—including enhanced security options and full-time professional support—and to integrate directly into enterprises’ custom IT stacks, which may include:
- Major public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure
- Red Hat products like Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform
- Open source projects like Jenkins
Why Red Hat?
Red Hat has a proven track record with expertise in helping organizations globally achieve success with applications transformation with Red Hat OpenShift, our complementary application and data services portfolio, and broad partner ecosystem.
We are the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, with a comprehensive application platform built with best-of-breed open source community projects, engineered to work together to enable the best in class application development & delivery experience.
We have strategic partnerships and integrations with key application and data centric independent software vendors (ISVs), hardware OEMs, and system integrators. Organizations that use OpenShift on AWS or Microsoft Azure also have the opportunity to use their committed spend on Red Hat products and services.
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