Industry usecase of Openshift

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.

Why Use OpenShift?

OpenShift provides a common platform for enterprise units to host their applications on cloud without worrying about the underlying operating system. This makes it very easy to use, develop, and deploy applications on cloud. One of the key features is, it provides managed hardware and network resources for all kinds of development and testing. With OpenShift, PaaS developer has the freedom to design their required environment with specifications.

Unlike most propriety options, open source platforms like OpenShift have advantageous developer/user communities that can typically assist in quicker bug fixes and increase functionality. OpenShift also combats many of the challenges that containerization can orchestrate, including:

• Difficulty deploying containers across various frameworks, languages, or databases
• Issues with ramping container resource usage up and down in response to container use
• Issues with tracking dependencies
• Difficulty tracking and monitoring container deployment on a systemic level to avoid bottlenecks and maximize productivity
• Excessive time required to manage overall container usage across your system architecture
• Difficulty and time involved in provisioning containers and performing health management checks
• Issues with scaling applications
• Inability to run both stateful applications and cloud-native stateless applications simultaneously
• Excessively complicated container provisioning procedures

OpenShift allows you to address the above issues by using an open-source architecture that enables you to run applications across physical, virtual, public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Any applications originating on OpenShift can run on any environment supporting Docker-formatted containers.

The platform features a robust set of command-line functionality tools as well as a multidevice web console, facilitating container orchestration across the entirety of your environment. Rapid scalability involving hundreds of instances across thousands of nodes — along with automated application builds and container health management — is also supported.

Features:

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
• Built-in Database Services
• Continuous Integration and Release Management
• IDE Integration
• Remote Debugging of Applications

Advantage 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.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. Self-service provisioning :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.

CASE STUDY :

Ford:

Ford Motor Company is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan. The company designs, manufactures, markets and services a full line of Ford cars, trucks, SUVs, electrified vehicles and Lincoln luxury vehicles, provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company and is pursuing leadership positions in electrification; mobility solutions, including self-driving services; and connected services. Ford employs approximately 190,000 people worldwide.

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.

LENOVO:

Lenovo, a multinational technology manufacturer, wanted to transform digitally to meet business demand and gain a competitive advantage. The company needed agile and cloud capabilities to launch applications more efficiently. Using a Red Hat® Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, Lenovo decreased system deployment time and improved productivity through greater automation and increased support for collaborative DevOps work.

Challenge: Accelerate change to transform digitally

Lenovo wanted to achieve a rapid digital transformation to improve its capabilities and meet businesses demands faster. However, this transformation required frequent updates and changes to the company’s entire IT environment, and some legacy systems could not keep up. As a result, the team faced major challenges in quickly developing and delivering resources. Lenovo needed a comprehensive solution that could support agile application delivery, increase productivity, and improve internal support for DevOps.

Solution: Move to cloud computing with a PaaS solution

To meet its requirements, Lenovo decided to implement cloud computing with a PaaS solution. “We chose PaaS as the preferred solution to gain efficient and agile support for our business team,” said Zhenyu Yao, executive director, Integrated Technology Service at Lenovo. Building on its strong relationship with Red Hat, Lenovo chose Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as its PaaS solution.

Results: Increase automation and DevOps collaboration for greater productivity

With its new solution, Lenovo has fully automated its development and production processes, helping developers become more efficient and productive. Its unified PaaS environment lets developers and operations staff collaborate, leading to faster deployment time and increased competitive advantage. IT staff can now build a new IT infrastructure in minutes instead of a week. “With a PaaS built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, along with our automated management tools, we can provide efficient and agile cloud services internally and externally,” said Yao.

CISCO:

Cisco is a leading IT industry best known for its networking products. Headquartered in California, Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, telecoms equipment, and other IT services and products. The company was founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner.

Challenge :

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. They guard against high employee turnover, low productivity, and slow response times.

Solution

To meet the demanding requirements, Cisco partnered with RedHat to build its Lightweight Application Environment(LAE). Running on the OpenShift Container platform, it supports 100+ applications that powered a variety of business functions and gave developers on-demand access to the infrastructure, operating system, middleware, and system functions to develop applications without any manual provisioning.

AIRBUS:

Airbus designs, manufactures, and delivers industry-leading commercial aircraft, helicopters, military transports, satellites, and launch vehicles, as well as providing data services, navigation, secure communications, urban mobility, and other solutions for customers on a global scale.

Challenge

Airbus is undergoing a transformation to offer services on any type of platform and provide on-demand access to software-defined infrastructure. The organization chose to create a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), using Red Hat OpenShift and other Red Hat technology but sought to improve in-house skills and internal integration for faster, more efficient development of cloud-native applications.

Path to innovation

To build a path to faster application delivery with DevOps practices, Airbus participated in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement. During the 6-week residency, Airbus’s teams worked closely with Red Hat consultants to learn about building cloud-native applications following DevOps practices. The project used Open Practice Library foundational approaches to collaborative, iterative strategy and development to envision, plan, and begin building an initial prototype platform. Weekly review meetings helped participants hone the project roadmap and stay informed of progress.

Business outcomes

• Built and demonstrated an initial unified PaaS and reusable components for supporting key business capabilities

• Gained hands-on skills and experience for in-house creation of cloud-native applications following DevOps and cloud-native design practices

• Established foundation for significantly faster delivery of new services and ongoing expansion of the platform