Industry use cases of OpenShift

Introduction of 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. This tutorial will help you understand OpenShift and how it can be used in the existing infrastructure. All the examples and code snippets used in this tutorial are tested and working code, which can be simply used in any OpenShift setup by changing the current defined names and variables.

Advantages Of OpenShift

1) Innovate and go to market faster

OpenShift enables your development team to focus on doing what they do best — designing and testing applications. When they are freed from spending excessive time managing and deploying containers, they can speed up the development process and get products to market more rapidly.

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.

Orchestrating container usage via the OpenShift platform provides a marked efficiency advantage to chipmakers who utilize containers for the next-generation virtualization benefits they offer. Deploying an increased number of apps on existing system resources enables a chipmaker to provide its developers with an expanded toolset to increase their ability to innovate. In an industry where a chipmaker’s main products can become outdated — if not obsolete — within a year or less, the ability to innovate and bring a product to market rapidly is a significant competitive advantage.

2) Accelerate application development

Deploying and managing containers at scale is a complicated process. OpenShift enables efficient container orchestration, allowing rapid container provisioning, deploying, scaling, and management. The tool enhances the DevOps process by streamlining and automating the container management process. Cutting down on time that would otherwise be spent managing containers improves your company’s productivity and speeds up application development.

Accelerated application development is especially 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.

If the development team at such a firm is delayed by container management issues, it can mean missing out on developing a timely fix; if this happens often enough, it can erode a company’s competitive position vis-à-vis its rivals. By streamlining and automating the container automation process, OpenShift enables cybersecurity developers to focus on accelerating application development, updates, and product distribution.

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

A company’s IT needs can vary greatly from one period to the next. Selecting a proprietary container management platform subjects you to the possibility that your vendor won’t be able to provide an acceptable solution if your company’s IT focus changes. In such cases, the expense and time involved in moving from a proprietary vendor to a new platform can be considerable.

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

The DevOps process relies upon transparent communication between all involved parties. Containerization provides a convenient means of enabling your IT operations staff to test instances of a new app. OpenShift assists this process by making it easy to test apps throughout your IT architecture without being impeded by framework conflicts, deployment issues, or language discrepancies.

One industry that can benefit from OpenShift’s enablement of enhanced DevOps processes is the webhosting and development field. Companies competing in this industry are constantly racing to offer their customers enhanced functionality. For instance, as web commerce increases by leaps and bounds, companies and individuals progressively look to sell their products over the web. They can do this by adding web sales functionality to their own sites via widgets designed for this purpose, or by purchasing sites with built-in sales functionality.

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

Assembling the proper tools to create applications on your system architecture can be a challenge, especially at the enterprise level. OpenShift makes the process easy by allowing for the integration of the tools you use most across your entire operating environment.

This self-service provisioning helps improve developer productivity by allowing your development team to work with the tools they are most comfortable using — speeding up the development process by enabling faster creation and deployment of applications. At the same time, OpenShift allows your operations staff to retain control over the environment as a whole.

Examples of how this feature benefits user 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.

Why use Red Hat OpenShift

As container use increases in app development and production, services such as OpenShift offer ways to manage and automate a large amount of containers. Doing so frees up developers from the manual management of containers.

Also, OpenShift can help IT organizations bridge legacy servers supporting traditional applications and modern, microservices-based work. These features feed into a mobile-first approach for companies that want to produce smartphone and tablet apps quickly.

Finally, OpenShift’s options promote continuous app development and common tools for development and operations teams. This approach is a cornerstone of DevOps efforts.

Features of OpenShift

There are numerous features maintained by OpenShift. Few of them are: –

• Multiple Language Support
• Multiple Database Support
• Extensible Cartridge System
• Source Code Version Management
• One-Click Deployment
• Multi Environment Support
• Standardized Developers’ workflow
• Dependency and Build Management
• Automatic Application Scaling
• Responsive Web Console
• Rich Command-line Toolset
• Remote SSH Login to Applications
• Rest API Support
• Self-service On Demand Application Stack
• Built-in Database Services
• Continuous Integration and Release Management
• IDE Integration
• Remote Debugging of Applications

Benefits of OpenShift

Pods — Pods are one or more containers deployed together on one host. Each pod is allocated CPU, memory, disk, and network bandwidth. Use a single pod to create an entire web app, complete with a private database instance. Use multiple pods to create multiple apps.

Pod autoscaling — OpenShift enables cloud elasticity by providing automatic horizontal pod scaling as application load increases. This eliminates the need for Operations to manually increase the number of application instances.

High availability — OpenShift is architected with a control plane (Kubernetes masters), persistent storage of REST API objects (etcd), and application hosting infrastructure (Kubernetes nodes). Each piece of the platform can be configured with multiple redundancies for fail-over and load-balancing scenarios to eliminate the impact of hardware or infrastructure failure.

Choice of cloud infrastructure — OpenShift provides customers with the choice to run on top of physical or virtual, public or private cloud, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. This gives IT the freedom to deploy OpenShift in a way that best fits within your existing infrastructure.

Some use cases of RedHat openshift:

• Automotive IT service provider speeds development and delivery with container platform Porsche Informatik, IT service provider for the Volkswagen Group, needed to speed application development and delivery to stay competitive in a fast-paced global market. The organization used Red Hat OpenShift to create a private cloud container environment. Porsche Informatik’s developers can now take advantage of self-service capabilities, and teams across the organization can work together more effectively with a DevOps approach supporting continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows. As a result, Porsche Informatik has cut development time from weeks to hours and created a solid foundation to stay ahead of competition.
• Israeli bank creates path to faster delivery, hybrid cloud adoption Poalim Bank, Israel’s largest bank, is a country leader in innovative financial services. To provide valuable banking services to customers faster, the bank sought to establish a flexible, responsive IT foundation for current and future performance improvements. With Red Hat® OpenShift®, supported by Red Hat Consulting, Poalim has accelerated time to market for new digital services with self-service development, adoption of DevOps, and ongoing planning for continued success. Now, the bank has a stable platform to support its future adoption of hybrid cloud, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and other emerging technology to stay competitive.
• Axcelinno customers innovate with Red Hat partnership Global software company Axcelinno needed to provide enterprise-grade open source solutions to solve complex customer business challenges. Axcelinno aligned its services and mentoring model with the Red Hat portfolio, helping customers gain competitive advantage through Red Hat technologies.