Industry Use-Cases of OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation.
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 OpenShift?
OpenShift is a cloud development Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosted by Red Hat. It’s an open-source, cloud-based, user-friendly platform used to create, test, and run applications, and finally deploy them on the cloud.
OpenShift can manage applications written in different languages, such as Ruby, Node.js, Java, Perl, and Python. One of the key features of OpenShift is extensibility, which helps the users support the application written in other languages.
OpenShift helps organizations move their traditional application infrastructure and platform from physical, virtual mediums to the cloud.
OpenShift supports a huge variety of applications, quickly developed and deployed on the OpenShift cloud platform. OpenShift supports three kinds of platforms for developers and users.
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
In this format, the service provider provides hardware-level virtual machines with some pre-defined virtual hardware configuration. There are multiple competitors in this space, starting from Rackspace, AWS Google Cloud, Rackspace, and many more.
The main drawback of having IaaS after a lengthy setup and investment procedure is that one is still responsible for installing and maintaining the operating system and server packages, managing the network of infrastructure, and taking care of the basic system administration.
2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
With SaaS, one has the least worry about the underlying infrastructure. It is as simple as plug-and-play, wherein the user has to sign up for the services and start using them.
The main drawback of this setup is that one can only perform a minimal amount of customization, which the service provider allows.
Gmail is the most common example of SaaS, where the user needs to log in and start using it. The user can also make some minor modifications to his account. However, it is not very useful from the developer’s point of view.
3. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
It can be considered as a middle layer between SaaS and IaaS. PaaS evaluation’s primary target is for developers in which the development environment can be spin up with a few commands.
These environments are designed in such a way that they can satisfy all the development needs, right from having a web application server with a database.
The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator-oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor the container resources, container health, manage users, work with operators, etc.
Case Study of Ford Motors
Ford Motor Company is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan. The company designs, manufactures, markets, and services a full line of Ford cars, trucks, SUVs, electrified vehicles, and Lincoln luxury vehicles, provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company, and is pursuing leadership positions in electrification; mobility solutions, including self-driving services; and connected services. Ford employs approximately 190,000 people worldwide. For more information regarding Ford, its products, and Ford Motor Credit Company.
Ford Motor Company seeks to provide mobility solutions at accessible prices to its customers, including dealerships and parts distributors who sell to a variety of retail and commercial consumers. To speed delivery and simplify maintenance, the company sought to create a container-based application platform to modernize its legacy stateful applications and optimize its hardware use. With this platform, based on Red Hat OpenShift and supported by Red Hat and Sysdig technology, Ford has improved developer productivity, enhanced its security and compliance approach, and optimized its hardware use to improve operating costs. Now, the company can focus on exploring new ways to innovate, from big data to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Benefits of using OpenShift
- Improved productivity with the standardized development environment and self-service provisioning
- Enhanced security with enterprise technology from Red Hat and continuous monitoring provided by Sysdig
- Significantly reduced hardware costs by running OpenShift on bare metal
Successful adoption of OpenShift and DevOps creates the foundation for new opportunities to innovate
Ford is already experiencing significant growth in demand for its OpenShift-based applications and services. It aims to achieve migration of most of its on-premise, legacy deployments within the next few years.
The company is also looking for ways to use its container platform environment to address opportunities like big data, mobility, machine learning, and AI to continue delivering high-quality, timely services to its customers worldwide.
“Kubernetes and OpenShift have really forced us to think differently about our problems because we can’t solve new business challenges with traditional approaches. Innovation and constantly exploring and questioning are the only way we can move forward,” said Puranam. “It’s a journey, but one that we have a good start on. Thanks to having the right set of partners, with both Red Hat and Sysdig, we’re well-situated for future success.”
