OpenShift: Overview and Case-Study
Red Hat® OpenShift® is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multicloud, and edge deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation.
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.
Red Hat OpenShift includes an enterprise-grade Linux operating system, container runtime, networking, monitoring, registry, and authentication and authorization solutions. Automate life-cycle management to get increased security, tailored operations solutions, easy-to-manage cluster operations, and application portability.
At present more than 1000 companies uses OpenShift.
Timeline of OpenShift:
- OpenShift originally came from Red Hat’s acquisition of Makara.
- OpenShift was announced in May 2011. It was proprietary technology.
- In May 2012, OpenShift become open-source.
- Up until v3, the container technology and container orchestration technology used custom-developed technologies.
- From version v3, with Docker’s adoption as the container technology, and Kubernetes as the container orchestration technology.
- The v4 product has many other architectural changes, such as a prominent one being a shift to using CRI-O as the container runtime (and Podman for interacting with pods and containers), and Buildah as the container build tool, thus breaking the complete dependency on Docker.
Features of OpenShift:
There are multiple features supported by OpenShift. Some of the features are:
- Multiple Database Support
- Built-in Database Services
- Source Code Version Management
- One-Click Deployment
- Dependency and Build Management
- Multi Environment Support
- Remote SSH Login to Applications
- Continuous Integration and Release Management
- Automatic Application Scaling
- Standardized Developers’ workflow
- Responsive Web Console
- Rest API Support
- Remote Debugging of Applications and much more.
Benefits of using OpenShift:
- Flexible Capacity: With your app in the cloud, you can monitor, debug, and tune on the fly.
- Heavy duty: Powerful command-line client tools and a web management console to launch and manage your applications.
- open and extensible: Built on proven open-source technologies.
Case Study:
NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Founded in 1992 , NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. The company empowers customers to simplify and integrate data management across cloud and on-premise environments to accelerate digital transformation.
Challenges:
NetApp delivers data management solutions that help organizations use information to its full potential. The company has globally distributed corporate IT environment that includes 4 datacenters with 58PB of storage, using both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for production environment, more than 5,300 servers -75% of which are virtualized and 560 enterprise applications.
To Improve and survive in this fast moving world, NetApp’s continuously seeks to improve the efficiency of IT services and application delivery.
However, the organization faced significant challenges, such as the high level of time and effort required to manage infrastructure and delays in application delivery due to a lack of dynamic storage provisioning.
Similar to other IT organizations, NetApp was also hindered by repetitive, manual processes. For example, updating the network time protocol (NTP) clients of NetApp’s thousands of servers manually took about 5 minutes per machine or 25,000 total minutes. As a result, this simple maintenance task would require 415 employee hours, or 52 8-hour work days, with high risk of inconsistency. Manual provisioning of persistent storage also prevented NetApp from achieving its goal of delivering software using a container and microservices-based approach.
To overcome these challenges, NetApp needed a dynamic provisioning solution to support its in-house storage technologies, as well as a fully supported and integrated container platform. For this purpose, NetApp turned to RedHat Ansible and Red Hat OpenShift Platforms and NetApp achieved.
- Achieved more efficient and accurate IT infrastructure maintenance
- Reduced application delivery time from weeks to minutes
> AUTOMATING INFRASTRUCTURE AND PROCESSES
NetApp host and leads Trident, an open source project , with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a solution for advanced application creation and delivery automation across private, public, and hybrid infrastructures. Trident lets applications that are provisioned and managed using the Kubernetes container orchestration engine — included in OpenShift — use storage resources on demand.
> REDUCED DELIVERY TIME FROM WEEKS TO MINUTES
With the use of Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible, NetApp has Eliminate the bottleneck created by manual processes for persistent storage provisioning and It has helped NetApp dramatically accelerate application delivery. Now, It can deliver full-featured stacks in minutes or even seconds, instead of days or weeks.
“With Red Hat OpenShift, we can very quickly spin up compute resources for containerized applications, and we can do the same for storage with NetApp Trident. Using them together, we can deliver full-featured stacks in minutes or even seconds, instead of days or weeks.”
DAVID FOX SENIOR UNIX ENGINEER, NETAPP
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