🎇Industry Use Cases of RedHat OpenShift.🎇

Openshift :

An open shift is an open-source platform for container application development, deployment, and management. OpenShift enables developers to build and deploy Docker-formatted containers on an integrated development environment (IDE) and then manage them with the Kubernetes platform.

Infrastructure layer:

You can host your applications on physical servers, virtual servers, or even on the cloud (private/public).

Service layer:

The service layer is responsible for defining pods and access policy. The service layer provides a permanent IP address and hostname to the pods; connects applications; and allows simple internal load balancing, distributing tasks across application components.

There are mainly two types of nodes in an OpenShift cluster: primary nodes and worker nodes. Applications reside in the worker nodes. You can have multiple worker nodes in the cluster; the worker nodes are where all your coding adventures happen, and they can be virtual or physical.

Main node:

The Main node is responsible for managing the cluster, and it takes care of the worker nodes. It is responsible for four main tasks:

• API and authentication: Any administration request goes through the API; these requests are SSL-encrypted and authenticated to ensure the cluster's security.
• Data Store: Stores the state and information related to environment and application.
• Scheduler: Determines pod placements while considering current memory, CPU, and other environment utilization.
• Health/scaling: Monitors the health of pods and scales them based on CPU utilization. If a pod fails, the main node restarts it automatically. If it falls too often, it is marked as a lousy pod and is not restarted for a temporary time.

Worker nodes:

As shown in the following image, the worker node is made of pods. A pod is the smallest unit that can be defined, deployed, and managed, and it can contain one or more containers. These containers include your applications and their dependencies. For example, Alex saves the code for her e-commerce platform in containers for each of the databases, front-end, user system, search engine, and so on.

Keep in mind that containers are temporary, so saving data in containers risks the loss of data. To prevent that, you can use persistent storage to save the database.

All containers in one pod share the same IP Address and the same volume. In the same pod, you can also have a sidecar container, which can be a service mesh or for security analysis — it must be defined in the same pod sharing the same resources as other containers. Applications can be scaled horizontally, and they are wired together by services.

Registry:

The registry saves your images locally in the cluster. When a new image is pushed to the registry, it notifies OpenShift and passes image information.

Persistent storage:

Persistent storage is where all of your data is saved and connected to containers. It is important to have persistent storage because containers are ephemeral, which means when they are restarted or deleted, any saved data is lost. Therefore, persistent storage prevents any loss of data and allows the use of stateful applications.

Routing layer:

The last component is the routing layer. It provides external access to the applications in the cluster from any device. It also provides load balancing and auto-routing around unhealthy pods.

Features of Red Hat Openshift :

1. Responsive web console

2. Service Mesh

3. Serverless

4. Open source

5. CI/CD

6.OperatorHub

🔰 5 Benefits of Switching to OpenShift Container Platform :

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.

benefits of the Openshift container platform are :

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 smartphone has been a boon to companies that have designed chips to power it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Works

This is just a general picture of what OpenShift is. For other articles, if there is an opportunity to demonstrate how to use it.

INDUSTRY USE CASES OF OPEN SHIFT

AIRBUS

ANBIMA

axcelinno.io

FORD

POSCO ICT

PORSCHE INFORMATIK

SOFTBANK

VIZURI

HCA Healthcare

DEFENSE INNOVATION UNIT U.S. military

DTMB

The State of Michigan's Department of Technology, Management, and Budget (DTMB) support internal and citizen-facing services for 19 state agencies. The department sought to improve development, delivery, and reliability for agencies' digital services by migrating to a container-based infrastructure to keep pace with demand. With this new environment based on Red Hat OpenShift, DTMB has reduced application delivery times while creating a scalable, vendor-agnostic foundation for future cloud adoption.

Benefits

1)Reduced time to market for new digital data services

With a container-based environment for cloud-native development, DTMB can support innovative projects for the State of Michigan's government agencies at the speed of demand.

"The modular nature of Red Hat OpenShift helps us speed our time to market," said Harris. "We can now rapidly develop prototype applications and get digital services to citizens faster."

For example, Michigan's DHHS now uses its security-focused container environment to securely deliver healthcare applications and data to citizens, other agencies, and healthcare professionals, supporting more effective patient care.

2)Improved infrastructure security with consistent container images

DTMB ensures its container infrastructure meets regulatory and safety requirements by enhancing Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat Quay.

"We wanted to manage containers centrally, with built-in control, security, and visibility," said David Tremblay, Director of Technical Services, State of Michigan DTMB. "We spent a lot of time upfront figuring out permissions and making sure our containers follow best practices for success with Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat Quay provides a good security baseline to help us fix vulnerabilities before code goes into production."

3)Created a flexible foundation for future cloud adoption

By automating various infrastructure management workflows with the Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, DTMB has created an efficient, reliable foundation to support its plans to adopt cloud computing as part of its IT environment.

"Containerizing our applications helped us establish a vendor-agnostic view of our infrastructure and gives us the freedom to move into cloud environments in the future, where appropriate," said Harris.

4)Adopted collaborative work approach to improve efficiency

Working closely with Red Hat Consulting has helped shape DTMB's initial implementation of its new container technology and accelerated cultural change within the organization. Now, operations teams and developers can use a common foundation to collaborate on projects.

"With an approach that is different from the way we're used to working, we've been able to bring teams together to ask and answer difficult questions," said Tremblay. "In the past, we faced drawn-out deployment cycles due to isolation and ineffective communication. Working with Red Hat to deploy OpenShift, and maintaining that relationship, has helped us create a very collaborative process. Our developers feel invested in a platform they helped create."

AvivaSA

Turkish pension and life insurance provider AvivaSA sought to expand its IT Modernization Program to prepare government permission to use public cloud environments. To create a container- and microservices-based architecture, the company expanded its Red Hat environment with Red Hat OpenShift. Now, AvivaSA uses its responsive, reliable container platform to deliver services 95% faster while reducing costs by 23% — leading the way to a cloud-based future for Turkey's finance industry.

Benefits

1)Reduced OpEx by 23%

AvivaSA has used the self-healing and auto-scaling capabilities built into the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift to help reduce its operational expenses (OpEx) by 23% by reducing manual work time for maintenance and other routine tasks. For example, SabancıDX's team no longer needs to monitor and adjust the production environment to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) that ensure customer service availability.

"Previously, administrators had to react manually if a workload needed additional memory or CPU capacity, or if there was an error," said Aydınyüz. "Red Hat OpenShift automatically restarts any application that encounters an error, decreasing service interruptions."

More reliable operations mean SabanciDX can now offer a pay-as-you-go model that contributes to AvivaSA's financial savings.

"The computing capacity we are using today has increased, but our costs are still lower compared to our previous approach," said Aydınyüz. "We pay our third-party provider for our actual hourly use of computing resources, such as CPU and memory. This is a new approach in Turkey that's possible with the help of the metrics Red Hat OpenShift provides."

2)Cut environment build times by more than 95%

Previously, creating new development environments took AvivaSA 3–4 days. Now, with Red Hat OpenShift, that same provisioning work can be completed in just 3 hours. As a result, the company has improved its time to market for both updates and new features and services.

"Red Hat OpenShift lets us quickly set up a new environment or easily make changes to the applications running in production, with minimal disruption to our service availability," said Aydınyüz.

3)Achieved high reliability for the container environment

Dynamic management built into Red Hat OpenShift helps AvivaSA extend the reliability of its existing Red Hat architecture to its new, container-based environment.

"Any problems with the platform would bring the company to a halt. The total reliability Red Hat OpenShift delivers is essential to our business," said Karadeli. "We have had no major issues or errors with either capacity or performance since we adopted Red Hat technology years ago."

This reliability has helped AvivaSA extend its partnership with Akbank, which now operates some financial applications on Red Hat OpenShift on AvivaSA's behalf.

4)Created foundation for future cloud adoption

Migrating critical core applications to Red Hat OpenShift on-premise has helped AvivaSA be prepared if the Turkish government allows the use of cloud computing environments in the future.

"As a Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift ensures we are ready for public cloud when Turkish regulations allow," said Aydınyüz. "It will make it very easy for us to move to a public or hybrid cloud environment."

Ford

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

1)Significantly increased developer productivity

Using OpenShift Container Platform, Ford has accelerated time to market by centralizing and standardizing its application development environment and compliance analysis for a consistent multi-cloud experience. For example, OpenShift's automation capabilities help Ford deploy new clusters more rapidly.

These improvements are enhanced by the company's shift from a traditional, waterfall approach to iterative DevOps processes and a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflow.

Now, some of the same processes for stateful workloads take minutes instead of months, and developers no longer need to focus on underlying infrastructure with self-service provisioning. These improvements extend to Ford's IT hosting, where the company has seen a significant productivity improvement for CaaS support. Dealers and plant operators gain access to new features, fixes, and updates faster through Ford's multitenant OpenShift environment.

"With OpenShift, we have a common framework that can be reused for deploying applications or services within our datacenter or to any major cloud provider," said Presnell. "We can now deliver features in a more secure, reliable manner."

2)Enhanced security and compliance with enterprise container and monitoring technology

Companies in the automotive industry must comply with various security standards and regulations, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and personal data protection standards. When creating its new container platform, Ford sought to balance providing access to partners and developers with ensuring vulnerabilities and updates were addressed and working toward future adoption of a DevSecOps approach.

"In a container environment, moving applications and code continuously, security needs to be automated and built-in from when a container is created," said Payal Chakravarty, Vice President, Products, Sysdig. "Sysdig provides real-time vulnerability management in CI/CD pipelines. Security checks are in place to analyze code and identify issues before production."

To support this approach, Ford standardized Red Hat container images and registries using Red Hat Quay. OpenShift provides a unified management interface across Ford's entire infrastructure and built-in Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) capabilities.

Sysdig Secure and Sysdig Monitor help Ford enhance this protection with improved, data-based insight into container infrastructure to run OpenShift in a compliant way. "Sysdig can tell us about a container's network activity, can help us protect multiple containers running on a single host, and provide continuous monitoring and alerts," said Puranam.

3)Significantly reduced hardware costs

Shifting to a container-based approach requires less initial hardware investment — and ongoing savings as Ford continues to modernize and migrate its legacy applications. The company has improved the efficiency of its hardware footprint by running OpenShift on bare metal and using its existing hardware more effectively.

"We were able to initially run OpenShift on a fleet of hardware that had been pulled out of our datacenter to be scrapped. We put that hardware back and are successfully running production OpenShift on it today," said Puranam.

By establishing an approach for controlling costs and increasing profit margins, Ford can reallocate resources to higher-value projects to address new business opportunities faster.

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