Introduction to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform unites developers and IT operations on a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructures. Red Hat OpenShift helps businesses achieve greater value by delivering modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and lower operating costs. Red Hat OpenShift is built on open source innovation and industry standards, including Kubernetes and Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, the world’s leading enterprise Linux distribution. Red Hat OpenShift offers following key benefits:
– greater value for operations and development teams throughout the application life cycle,
– faster application development cycles and more frequent software deployments,
– lower IT operations costs and application portability across hybrid cloud and multicloud footprints.
For application development teams
OpenShift Container Platform provides developers with a self-service platform for provisioning,building, and deploying applications and their components. With automated workflows like our source-to-image (S2I) process, it is easy to get source code from version control systems into ready-to-run, Docker-formatted container images. OpenShift Container Platform integrates with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools, making it an ideal solution for any organization.
For I.T. operations
OpenShift Container Platform gives IT operations secure, enterprise-grade Kubernetes for policy based controls and automation for application management. Cluster services, scheduling, and orchestration provide load-balancing and auto-scaling capabilities. Security features prevent tenants from compromising other applications or the underlying host. And because OpenShift Container Platform can attach persistent storage directly to Linux containers, IT organizations can run both stateful and stateless applications on one platform.
Key features and benefits
Open source standards – Incorporates both Open Containers Initiative (OCI)/Docker-formatted containers and Kubernetes for container orchestration, in addition to other open source technologies. Users are not restricted to the technology or business roadmap of a specific vendor.
Self-service provisioning – Developers can quickly and easily create applications on demand from the tools they use most, while operations retains full control over the entire environment.
Persistent storage – By providing support for persistent storage, OpenShift Container Platform allows users to run both stateful applications and cloud-native stateless applications.
Polyglot, multilanguage support – Developers can use various languages, frameworks, and databases on the same platform with ease.
Automation – Streamlined and automated container and application builds, deployments, scaling, health management, and more are standard with OpenShift Container Platform.
User interfaces – Developers have direct access to a rich set of command-line tools, a multi device web console, and Eclipse-based integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Red Hat CodeReady Studio (aka JBoss ® Developer Studio) and container native CodeReady Workspaces.
Operational management – Red Hat Monitoring included in OpenShift Container Platform, gives users real-time visibility into their containerized application and infrastructure.
Scalability – Applications running on OpenShift Container Platform can easily scale to thousands of instances across hundreds of nodes in a matter of seconds.
Robust ecosystem – An ever-expanding ecosystem of partners provides a wide variety of integrations. Additional storage and network providers, IDEs and CI integrations, independent software vendor (ISV) solutions, and more are provided by these third-parties for use with OpenShift Container Platform.
Container portability – Built on a standardized Linux container model powered by Red Hat application programming interfaces (APIs), applications created on OpenShift Container Platform can easily run anywhere that supports Docker-formatted containers.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is available in 3 flavors
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Deploy and operate OpenShift in on premise or in public cloud on physical or virtual servers managed by you.
Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated
Develop and manage containerized applications with your own OpenShift cluster, managed and operated by Red Hat and deployed in Public Cloud.
Red Hat OpenShift Online
Quickly build, launch, and host applications in the public cloud, operated and supported by Red Hat. You can sign up at no cost, check out the great features, and start coding and running applications at openshift.com.
DevOps – addressing today’s digital business
Immediate access to information across multiple channels has resulted in an era of fast-paced, user- driven demand and the need for greater speed in delivering products and services. In tandem with this is the ability of software applications to respond in shorter, more frequent, and faster development and delivery cycles. Together, these things have led to the emergence of DevOps practices as a key way to accelerate digital business innovation.
DevOps is an approach to culture, automation, and a platform designed to increase the speed and flexibility with which new features and services are delivered. Modern application platforms based on container technology and microservices are critical to DevOps practices, helping deliver secure and innovative software services at the speed of digital business.
Implementing DevOps with Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat® OpenShift is an application container platform that helps development and IT operations teams modernize existing enterprise applications and deliver new applications by accelerating development and delivery processes. It is built on proven open source technologies including Linux® containers and Kubernetes. Linux containers allow the packaging and isolation of applications with their entire runtime environment. Because they help reduce conflicts between the development and operations teams by separating areas of responsibility, containers are an essential part of DevOps. Kubernetes, an open source project and part of Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is the industry standard for orchestrating Linux containers.
Red Hat OpenShift offers development and operations teams a common platform and set of tools as a foundation for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications on any infrastructure on-premise or in public, private, or hybrid clouds.
Build
Self-service
Developers can quickly and easily create applications on demand using their preferred tools without having to wait for IT operations to set up the deployment environment. At the same time, operations still maintains full control over the entire environment.
Automated builds
Streamlined and automated application builds allow developers to build containers automatically from application source code and binaries in a secure and repeatable manner.
Microservices
Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes offers a set of certified and supported microservices runtimes, including Spring Boot, WildFly Swarm, Vert.x, and Node.js on OpenShift for building cloud-native applications in addition to built-in support for service discovery, load balancing, single sign-on, and more.
Local development
Develop and deploy applications locally using the same tools that are used in test and production.
Test
Continuous integration (CI)
Built-in support for Jenkins CI server lets developers write, test, and integrate code automatically for every change.
Automated testing
On-demand deployments allow complex, automated testing scenarios by provisioning and testing applications with all their dependencies whenever needed.
Production-like environment
Red Hat OpenShift provides an identical technology stack from local development environment to production, which ensures applications are tested and verified on the exact same version of middleware, language runtime, and operating system.
Infrastructure as code
Every aspect of the application and environment is described in a declarative manner that can be versioned and controlled as code in a version control system.
Operate
Continuous delivery
Built-in support for pipelines with integration points to existing tools lets teams automate every step of application delivery while taking advantage of their existing process.
Zero-downtime deployment
Zero-downtime deployments using rolling updates, blue-green deployments, canary releases, and more allow teams to both remove downtime from deployments and deploy frequently in production during normal working hours.
A/B testing
Full control over application traffic allows teams to serve users multiple versions of their services simultaneously.
Vulnerability scanning
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform includes Red Hat CloudForms, which provides continuous vulnerability scanning for container images and prevents containers with malicious security issues from running on your infrastructure.
Deploy
Continuous security
Proactive security patches are provided for Red Hat-certified containers, which can automatically trigger rebuilding and deploying relevant application containers.
Capacity planning
Red Hat CloudForms tracks resource utilization trends to inform capacity and what-if scenario planning.
Auto-scaling
Scaling applications running on Red Hat OpenShift is automated through auto-scaling containers based on application load.
Cross-function collaboration
Granular access control capabilities allow collaboration between development, quality assurance, security, and operations teams by bringing visibility to production environments while operations teams keep control of the actions performed.
Monitor
Compliance and governance
Automatically enforces policy across all containers and environments with support from comprehensive insights and detailed logging.
Metrics
Container metrics provide full visibility into how applications resource usage changes over time.
Health checks and self-healing
Health probes allow automatic identification of application issues, allowing quick repair action.
Financial chargeback
Red Hat OpenShift collects container capacity and utilization data and generates financial reports to provide visibility into container usage across teams.
All of these features allow faster innovation by supporting many different aspects and practices pertaining to DevOps. Additionally, automated build and deployments, continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD), and build and container metrics in Red Hat OpenShift provide a rapid flow of information and continuous feedback from the build and deployment process back to the development teams. This lets developers detect and rectify anomalies immediately, which is far more effective than fixing them later in production where fixes impact cost and service delivery more critically.
10:46 AM, Apr 26
Author:
Principal Solutions Architect
Jarosław Stakun
Jaroslaw works as an Principal Solutions Architect at Red Hat and is responsible for delivery and solution selling based on Red Hat Openshift Container Platform and Red Hat Application Services in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.