Containers are highly efficient vehicles for developing and deploying apps. As container usage ramps up, the complexity of managing containers across the totality of your IT infrastructure rises exponentially – making a container management platform essential at the enterprise level. In this article, we’ll discuss Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform and its use cases.
While containers can be thought of as a next-generation approach to virtualization, they share one downside with virtual machines: container sprawl (rather than VM sprawl). Given that containers can be deployed in far higher numbers than virtual machines, managing provisioning, deployment, tracking, and repairs of multiple containers across your IT architecture can be extremely challenging.
Container platforms help you deal with this challenge by enabling you to efficiently provision, test, deploy, scale and run your containers across multiple hosts and operating environments, perform automatic health checks, and ensure high availability in expected workloads. Platforms like these, including Red Hat’s OpenShift, make container use viable for enterprise applications.
What is Openshift?
Red Hat OpenShift is an open-source container application platform primarily built on Docker containers and orchestrated using Kubernetes container cluster management. OpenShift supports a broad range of programming languages and services ranging from web frameworks, databases, or connectors to mobiles and external back ends. The OpenShift platform supports both cloud-native, stateless applications and traditional, stateful applications.
OpenShift is delivered in primarily two consumption models: OpenShift Container Platform, for enterprise customers that want to deploy and manage OpenShift in their own datacenter or at a public cloud provider, and a cloud-based service. OpenShift Online is a multitenant, cloud-based service targeted at individual developers, and OpenShift Dedicated is a single-tenant, cloud-based service for enterprise customers.
Why Openshift ?
- Accelerate application delivery with agile and DevOps methodologies:
OpenShift offers a common platform for development and operations teams to ensure consistency and standardization of application components, eliminate configuration errors, automate deployment and controlled rollout of new capabilities into production, and rollback in the event of a failure. For environments with a high degree of security and regulatory requirements, additional capabilities are provided to enforce policies and role-based access control.
- Modernize application architectures toward microservices:
OpenShift provides a common platform for cloud-native, microservices applications alongside the existing traditional and stateful applications. Broad choice of application frameworks, programming languages, and developer tools enables customers to prototype innovative applications more quickly. OpenShift also enables access to a broad range of Red Hat and third party–provided application and middleware services, API management, and storage services.
- Adopt a consistent application platform for hybrid cloud deployments:
IT organizations that want to decouple application dependencies from the underlying infrastructure are adopting container technology as a way to migrate and deploy applications across multiple cloud environments and data center footprints. OpenShift provides consistent application development and deployment platform, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, and provides operations teams with a scalable, secure, and enterprise-grade application platform and unified container and cloud management capabilities.
Some Use Cases
- Sabre
Travel technology giant Sabre is leveraging the OpenShift Container Platform as the foundation of its Next Generation Platform initiative. The new platform will enable the company to deliver more sophisticated, modern technology solutions for its various clients across all verticals within the travel and hospitality industry, including airlines, hospitality, and global businesses with high travel volumes. Vish Saoji, Sabre CTO says, “The Next Generation Platform is the cornerstone of Sabre’s long-term technology strategy … Red Hat has delivered the enterprise-hardened software environment we need to help drive our technology transformation, and this collaboration allows us to build upon that architecture and execute our plan.”
- BMW
As a world leader in automotive engineering for over a hundred years, BMW continues to innovate both their production processes and their end-products.BMW’s innovation featuring ConnectedDrive, the digital service powering features within BMW vehicles, was showcased at the RedHat Summit earlier this year.
Dr Alexander Lenk, Lead Architect of Connected Vehicle, Digital Backend, Big Data, and blockchain for the BMW group explains that digital services are important for the company and its customers. Therefore, these digital services will be added to new cars as well as their existing fleet.
While the ConnectedDrive system has been in service for 20 years, it required a more advanced delivery system to deliver these applications and updates to over 12 million vehicles and support close to a billion weekly IT service requests. In 2016, BMW began migrating their full application suite to OpenShift and support over 1,000 web-based apps for not only customers and vehicles, but also for factories, dealerships, and the full production and sales process.
Final thoughts
A major portion of the added efficiency of containerization at the enterprise level, perhaps as much as 50 per cent, comes from orchestrating container usage throughout your environment. OpenShift offers a platform for managing your containers across a variety of operating environments, significantly reducing the time necessary to build, deploy, and scale them. As an open-source next-generation virtualization tool, OpenShift provides you with all the functionality you need to optimize containerization usage with your existing IT resources.