What is OpenShift and why does automation matter?

What is OpenShift?

Red Hat OpenShift?is a hybrid cloud platform. It offers automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management throughout the container stack – the operating system,?Kubernetes?and cluster services, and applications – on any cloud.?OpenShift gives organizations the ability to build, deploy, and scale applications faster, all while supporting Kubernetes for cloud-native applications with enterprise security.

As organizations look to transform and modernize, OpenShift allows you to scale to grow your business through cloud-native development.?OpenShift and Kubernetes simplify access to underlying infrastructure and help manage the application lifecycle and development workflows.

OpenShift automation

OpenShift?is an amazing platform for building and shipping cloud-native applications. However, with dynamic containers running in?microservices, with increasingly frequent code pushes, and levels of abstraction away from the cloud infrastructure, how do you know how your applications are performing at any given time?

Automation has become a major trend this past year. The concept of automation has become part of organizations’ overall digital transformation strategy for cloud-native environments. Why is automation so important? Let’s take a deeper look into containers.

Containers can be challenging to monitor as they are always changing. As organizations shift from monolithic to microservices, the number of containers supporting these microservices explode, over time, to hundreds and thousands of nodes. With these dynamic environments, you need visibility into the cluster performance and application health. Container health is just one piece of the puzzle. Knowing the health of your container, while important, doesn’t give you the complete picture.?You need to know the health of the service that is running the container. If you’ve ever been in a war room, you’ll understand this importance!

Manually installing different agent types, or collecting and correlating metrics, is simply ineffective. That’s why automation is critical as it solves the challenge of making sense of dependencies, within the context of the entire technology stack to understand the impact on users and prevent business-impacting issues.

I’d like to note, not all automation is created equal. You may get a dashboard view but will fall short in dynamic environments.

When using OpenShift, you need automation monitoring of cloud-native workloads and microservices/containers to understand all relationships and dependencies across the cloud stack.

Understanding The Difference Between Kubernetes Vs. Openshift

What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes?is an open-source container-as-a-service (CaaS) framework created by Google developers more than a decade ago. At its core, Kubernetes is a portable, open-source containerization system that lets developers manage services and workloads. The system automates application deployment, scaling, and operations. Now part of the?Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes enables application developers to leverage capabilities like self-monitoring, process automation, container balancing, storage orchestration, and more.?

We will next understand Kubernetes vs. openshift differences after we learn what is openshift.

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a family of containerization software offerings created by open-source software provider Red Hat. According to the company, Kubernetes is the kernel of distributed systems, while OpenShift is the distribution. At its core, OpenShift is a cloud-based?Kubernetes container?platform that's considered both containerization software and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It’s also partly built on Docker, another popular containerization platform. OpenShift offers consistent security, built-in monitoring, centralized policy management, and compatibility with Kubernetes container workloads. It’s fast, enables self-service provisioning, and integrates with a variety of tools. In other words, there’s no vendor lock-in. Previously known as Origin, the open-source platform, OpenShift OKD lets developers create, test, and deploy applications on the cloud. It also supports several programming languages, including Go, Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java.

We will now look at the Kubernetes vs. openshift differences.

Kubernetes Vs. OpenShift

Both Kubernetes and OpenShift feature robust and scalable architecture that enables rapid and large-scale application development, deployment, and management. They both run on the Apache License 2.0. But that’s just about where the similarities end. Here are just a few of the many ways OpenShift and Kubernetes differ.

Deployment

Kubernetes offers more flexibility as an open-source framework and can be installed on almost any platform — like Microsoft Azure and AWS —?as well as any Linux distribution, including Ubuntu and Debian. OpenShift, on the other hand, requires Red Hat’s proprietary Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (RHELAH), Fedora, or CentOS. This narrows options for many businesses, especially if they're not already using these platforms.

Security

OpenShift has stricter security policies. For instance, it is forbidden to run a container as root. It also offers a secure-by-default option to enhance security. Kubernetes doesn’t come with built-in authentication or authorization capabilities, so developers must create bearer tokens and other authentication procedures manually.

Support

Kubernetes has a large active community of developers who continuously collaborate on refining the platform. It also offers support for multiple frameworks and languages. OpenShift has a much smaller support community that is limited primarily to Red Hat developers.

Releases and Updates

Kubernetes has an average of four releases each year, while OpenShift trails with around three. Similarly, Kubernetes supports several concurrent and simultaneous updates, while OpenShift DeploymentConfig does not.

Networking

Kubernetes lacks a networking solution but lets users employ third-party network plug-ins. OpenShift, on the other hand, has its out-of-the-box networking solution called?Open vSwitch, which comes with three native plug-ins.

Templates

Kubernetes offers Helm templates that are easy to use and provide a generous amount of flexibility. OpenShift templates are nowhere near as flexible or user-friendly.

Container Image Management

OpenShift lets developers use Image Streams to manage container images, while Kubernetes doesn’t offer container image management features.