Multi-cloud and Hybrid have become the go-to infrastructure and technology operating models in enterprises. In these complex types of architectures, Kubernetes is a favorite choice due to its vendor-agnostic characteristics and advanced infrastructure capabilities. But there is another option: Red Hat OpenShift. Large organizations that have strict security and compliance requirements often prefer to adopt the OpenShift Container Platform. In this article, we’ll take a look at few benefits of Red Hat OpenShift you may not have been aware of. So, before that let’s discuss what is OpenShift.
OpenShift is an application platform product developed by Red Hat that enables software engineers to develop and deploy applications at scale. It is a popular option for on-premises or hybrid cloud container-based architectures because it provides a fully-fledged Kubernetes cluster with the support level required by large organizations. OpenShift offers several unique features on top of Kubernetes that enable a holistic software development experience.
CI/CD and Repositories
A good continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) process is a driver for a successful software development pipeline. OpenShift covers the need to implement end-to-end CI/CD pipelines quite well; offering developers tooling that enables them to code, test, and deploy their application into production, making it essential to the business value creation. To make the entire pipeline creation process easier and more efficient, Red Hat offers OpenShift Pipelines, a CI/CD solution. This provides tight integration and a unified experience with other OpenShift tooling, plus enables each step of the pipeline to run in its container and scale independently, making it more secure and robust.
OpenShift Monitoring and Logging
The ability to monitor an application workload and collect the logs in a central place is part of any system that follows the most basic best practices. Depending on the environment (cloud or on-premises) where your application is running, the way to implement these might vary. The challenge with OpenShift is that it can be deployed across multiple environments. To simplify the development process and harmonize the deployment and operation of the applications, OpenShift comes out of the box with monitoring and logging capabilities.
The Advantages of OpenShift Security
One of the key reasons corporate customers adopt Redhat Openshift instead of simply using Kubernetes is the enterprise-grade features it provides. That often also means that the expectations and requirements regarding security and compliance are naturally higher. The built-in Security Context Constraint (SSC) provides default execution policies such as preventing containers to be executed with root privileges and is extended to the Kubernetes Pod level, as Pod Security Policies (PSPs). Role-based access control (RBAC) in OpenShift enables different roles within the engineering team to have permissions according to the principle of least privilege. OpenShift comes with the Red Hat Container Catalog, which enables developers to leverage container images that were tested and certified by Red Hat and its partners. These images are monitored, updated, and regularly scanned for vulnerabilities and issues, increasing the security posture of the organization in comparison to pulling container images directly from internet repositories.