Azure RedHat OpenShift
With the recent partnership of Microsoft and RedHat, OpenShift is quickly becoming a popular choice for containerised solutions. You will already be familiar with containerisation suites, so this will be a quick rundown of what OpenShift is, accompanied by some learning materials provided by RedHat.
What is OpenShift?
Jointly engineered by RedHat and Microsoft, OpenShift is an open-source family of containerisation software offerings that, at its core, is a powerful distribution of Kubernetes capable of running on any infrastructure. Microsoft and RedHat have recognised that running container services in production often calls for additional sets of tools such as image registries, networking, monitoring and logging. All of this is required to be version compatible and often maintained separately. OpenShift is designed to collate all of this into one platform, retaining the functionality that application teams require and easing the management of operations.
RedHat have stated that within OpenShift’s CoreOS, they consider Kubernetes to act as the “kernel” of distributed systems. They have recognised that a task schedular instance operating across multiple machines, capable of managing the state of ongoing workloads operates largely with the same methodology that the Linux Kernel does for managing the workloads of a single host.
OpenShift packages Kubernetes alongside a vast array of additional tooling, out of the box monitoring and centralised policy management. It also natively supports several languages out of the box, such as Go, Node.js, Ruby and Python to name a few. Additionally, with OpenShift 4 being open source RedHat have boasted that there is no vendor lock in. Users can utilise the OpenShift offering wherever they please. You can check out their repository below:
Github — https://github.com/openshift/
The Same but Different
Whilst there are several similarities between Kubernetes and OpenShift, there are also a few noteworthy differences, aside from the additional tooling OpenShift is equipped with, which may sway users’ decisions to opt for the latter. Kubernetes takes a preference in RPM for its package manager, which in turn means Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian are the preferred OS. OpenShift, however, is capable of being installed and ran on RHEL and RHEL Atomic host and by extension, CentOS.
OpenShift also comes with an integrated image registry which Kubernetes lacks, forcing users to configure their own Docker registry as opposed to OpenShift in which a RedHat or DockerHub registry is natively available. This coupled with the OpenShift GUI smoothens out the process of managing your services. The Kubernetes dashboard requires a separate installation process and since there is no login page, users are required to create a bearer token for manual authentication. Whilst this isn’t a particularly demanding task, OpenShift just feels more easy-going and intuitive as it comes with an integrated dashboard and login page making viewing clusters, roles and projects a lot more streamlined.
Both OpenShift and Kubernetes are popular choices when it comes to containerising solutions. Whilst OpenShift appears to be bringing more of a PaaS offering and suite to the Kubernetes stack, Kubernetes does allow for a less opinionated approach to delivery and pipelines. This ultimately makes it easier for containers to be integrated into already established legacy infrastructure. However, with OpenShift doing a large portion of the heavy lifting and coming equipped with such a vast tool set, it may look like the preferred option in the delivery and management of new containerised infrastructure going forward. Azure and RedHat have stated they are also continuously working to add new and beneficial operators to the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem.
Operator Hub IO
https://operatorhub.io/
OpenShift Operators
https://catalog.redhat.com/software/operators/search?rows=60&p=1
It’s apparent that OpenShift is not something which has been designed to replace Kubernetes, rather a turnkey solution with an arsenal of features to complement Kubernetes with specific aims of improving the developer experience.
Why the focus on containerising?
As with all cloud providers, Azure have been placing a large focus on serverless technologies over the recent years. At Ignite, Azure stated that a recent survey carried out by the IDC (International Data Corporation) showed that by 2021, 75–99% of DevOps teams indicate they will be using containerisation for 23% of production workloads. In addition to this, 68% of organisations surveyed have stated that they can see application containerization as a priority over the next 12-months. Given these figures, it becomes more apparent why Microsoft have been funnelling a large portion of their development efforts into their partnership with RedHat and the curation of technologies that support, or further the use of container distributions. This also closely aligns with Microsoft’s aim to diversify their hybrid cloud technology portfolio.
If you would like to find out how companies have been getting on with OpenShift, an Ignite session involving IBM discussing their use of OpenShift on Azure has been made publicly available. You can find it by following the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOuJTKJXI1I&ab_channel=MicrosoftIgnite
Some additional resources on OpenShift:
