How Ford Company uses Red Hat Openshift

What is Openshift?

OpenShift is a cloud development Platform as a Service (PaaS) developed by Red Hat. It is an open source development platform, which enables the developers to develop and deploy their applications on cloud infrastructure. It is very helpful in developing cloud-enabled services.

How does OpenShift work?

Moving from one environment to another Container is the technology used. This could be from a developer’s laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production, and perhaps from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.

Benefits of using Openshift

1. Innovate and go to market faster

Consider the case of a company specializing in the design and sale of integrated circuits. The cycle of innovation in this industry is relentless; as new technologies arise, chipmakers who can most effectively design chips for these new uses will be the ones who gain market share. For example, the rapid rise of the smart phone has been a boon to companies that have designed chips to power it.

2. Accelerate application development

Accelerated application development is valuable in enterprises where a company’s IT system must accommodate rapidly evolving functions. An example of this is the cybersecurity industry. Companies in this industry face an arms race against hackers, who are continually looking for software flaws to exploit. When an exploit is found, cybersecurity firms are expected to respond with fixes as rapidly as possible – often in days, if not hours.

3. Enterprise-grade, container-based platform with no vendor lock-in

Consider the case of a company with worldwide manufacturing facilities that implements a proprietary container platform tool. If the company shifts its production approach to a process that requires it to change to a new operating system – one that isn’t supported by its containerization platform – the company will face the expensive task of redoing its containerization orchestration on another platform.

With a vendor-agnostic open source platform, users can migrate their container processes to the new operating system quickly – while avoiding the extensive costs often involved in migrating from a proprietary operating framework.

4. Enable DevOps and department-wide collaboration

A company operating in this field, which requires constantly updated functionality to stay competitive, needs to empower its employees to design and test applications as rapidly and effectively as possible. By enabling developer and operations staff to collaborate efficiently, OpenShift allows web hosting and design companies to link developers and operations staff together to effectively design, test, and deploy applications.

5. Self-service provisioning

How this feature benefits users can be seen in companies where the development staff must be fluent in a variety of development tools and languages. For instance, a video game development company can benefit from this feature when they need to develop games that are compatible with a variety of operating systems. OpenShift enables the game developer’s programmers to use their favorite tools while developing games for different systems. This results in effective container usage, without forcing the company’s developers to use tools they aren’t familiar with.

FORD using OpenShift

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

• Improved productivity with 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

Applications

1. Ford Motor Company is a leader in creating reliable, technologically advanced vehicles worldwide. Its mission is 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.
2. After running tests and proofs of concept (POCs) of container technology, Ford began looking for an enterprise partner offering commercially supported open source solutions to help run containers in production and support innovative experimentation.
3. Ford has also adopted several open source technologies that Red Hat contributes to, from Open Data Hub—a data and artificial intelligence (AI) platform for hybrid cloud—to Dex, an OpenID-based identity authentication service.
4. Using OpenShift Container Platform, Ford has accelerated time to market by centralizing and standardizing its application development environment and compliance analysis for a consistent multicloud experience. For example, OpenShift’s automation capabilities help Ford deploy new clusters more rapidly
5. Ford standardized on Red Hat container images and registries using Red Hat Quay. OpenShift provides a unified management interface across Ford’s entire infrastructure, as well as built-in Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) capabilities

Ford company on OpenShift

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.”

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