What is OpenShift and its industry Use Cases?

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a commercialized containerization software product created from an open-source project initiated by the company Red Hat. Also known as Red Hat OpenShift, and previously known as Open Hat Origin, this software is part of a family of containerization software, with the OpenShift Container Platform leading the way as the flagship software.

Deeply explored, OpenShift is a cloud-based platform that operates as a PaaS (platform as a service). OpenShift excels at providing consistent security, centralized policy management, built-in monitoring, and added compatibility features. Developers use it to create, test, and deploy applications featured on the cloud.

OpenShift ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is Red Hat’s open-source operating system. This OS is the most popular enterprise Linux platform. It is also worth noting that OpenShift supports a host of programming languages such as Ruby, Java, PHP, Go, and Python.

What is the use of OpenShift?

• Helps developers deliver high-quality applications and functionalities in a faster way;
• Improves business and efficiency results satisfying the customers’ and users’ needs;
• The continuous application management needs less time;
• Reduces the applications’ developed costs associated with the infrastructure and platforms’ development.

Features of OpenShift are:

There are multiple features supported 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

Advantages Of OpenShift:

1. Innovate and go to market faster: OpenShift enables your development team to focus on what they do best. Now, developers are free from spending excessive time managing and deploying containers. This helps them to speed up the development process and get the product faster in the market.
2. Accelerate application development: Deploying and managing containers at a scale is a complicated process. It cut down the time of managing the container. This improves the companies productivity and speeds up application development.
3. Enterprise-grade, container-based platform with no vendor lock: Consider the case of a company with worldwide manufacturing facilities that implement a 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.

Case Study: Cisco

To keep pace with customer demand, Cisco, a leading provider of networking solutions, must quickly deliver new IT products and solutions. The challenge is to keep its IT team engaged and productive to fuel innovation. With help from Red Hat, Cisco built its Lightweight Application Environment (LAE), which runs on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat.

Cisco’s success depends on its ability to quickly deliver innovative IT products and solutions to customers. Delays can cost the company business. To encourage speed to market and improve satisfaction, Cisco needed to keep its 1,000+ developers fully engaged in designing and building applications and guard against high employee turnover, low productivity, and slow response times.

Solution: Build a 1-stop shopping catalog

Cisco turned to Red Hat to design and build its LAE, a PaaS deployment that supports hundreds of apps that power a variety of business functions. The solution gives developers a self-service portal they can use to order the IT resources they need to develop apps, eliminating manual provisioning. “It’s a 1-stop shopping catalog … making the ordering process seamless and easier for developers to use,” said Sudha Agrahara, IT manager at Cisco.

Conclusion

RedHat OpenShift is a leading enterprise container platform that provides a secure by default experience for container deployments.

In this article, we learned what is OpenShift and its uses. We also learned how big companies like Cisco get benefitted from OpenShift.