Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

What do you like best?

OpenShift is the PaaS platform provided by Red Hat, also in the open source version OKD, which is the one I use. It is very well designed and can be easily integrated with different applications of the cloud native ecosystems. It is based on kubernetes and docker (even though new container engines specifically tailored to kubernetes are being deployed), which are leader container orchestration and engine systems, respectively. It allows to easily manage containerized applications, thus one can easily deal with non functional requirements such as scalability, reliability and so on.

What do you dislike?

I like almost all of OpenShift, however I feel some of its features could be improved. For example, every resource is described through a YAML file, but the built-in editor could better support syntax checking and autocompletion.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

OpenShift can be very intuitive if one has some basic concepts, so before starting to delve into it, I suggest reviewing the microservices architecture and also the YAML syntax.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

At my company we've been using OpenShift mainly for research purposes and to deploy complex applications made of several different software components. Based on such experience, I believe it is a very powerful platform as it allows you to easily build and deploy applications. It is also useful to deal with DevOps problems as it allows to create pipeline and to integrate with continous deployment software such as Jenkins. Overall, OpenShift can be your best choice if your company needs to work microservices architectures or in general if you wanna concentrate on your application code rather than on the infrastracture, which OpenShift takes care of.