All About “Openshift”.

Openshift:-

OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family’s other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream (akin to the way that Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), OpenShift Online is the platform offered as software as a service, and Openshift Dedicated is the platform offered as a managed service.

The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator-oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor container resources and container health, manage users, work with operators, etc. Developer views are oriented around working with application resources within a namespace. OpenShift also provides a CLI that supports a superset of the actions that the Kubernetes CLI provides.

Architecture:-

The main difference between OpenShift and vanilla Kubernetes is the concept of build-related artifacts. In OpenShift, such artifacts are considered first-class Kubernetes resources upon which standard Kubernetes operations can apply. OpenShift’s client program, known as “oc”, offers a superset of the standard capabilities bundled in the mainline “kubectl” client program of Kubernetes.[11] Using this client, one can directly interact with the build-related resources using sub-commands (such as “new-build” or “start-build”). In addition to this, an OpenShift-native pod build technology called Source-to-Image (S2I) is available out of the box, though this is slowly being phased out in favor of Tekton — which is a cloud-native way of building and deploying to Kubernetes. For the OpenShift platform, this provides capabilities equivalent to what Jenkins can do.

Some other differences when OpenShift is compared to Kubernetes:

1. The v4 product line uses the CRI-O runtime — which means that docker daemons are not present on the master or worker nodes. This improves the security posture of the cluster.
2. The out-of-the-box install of OpenShift comes included with an image repository.
3. ImageStreams (a sequence of pointers to images which can be associated with deployments) and Templates (a packaging mechanism for application components) are unique to OpenShift and simplify application deployment and management.
4. The “new-app” command which can be used to initiate an application deployment automatically applies the app label (with the value of the label taken from the — name argument) to all resources created as a result of the deployment. This can simplify the management of application resources.
5. In terms of platforms, OpenShift used to be limited to Red Hat’s own offerings but now supports others like AWS, IBM Cloud and vSphere with OpenShift 4.[12]
6. OpenShift’s implementation of Deployment, called DeploymentConfig is logic-based in comparison to Kubernetes’ controller-based Deployment objects.[13] As of v4.5, OpenShift is steering more towards Deployments by changing the default behavior of its CLI.
7. An embedded OperatorHub. This is a web gui where can browse and install a library of Kubernetes Operators and that have been packaged for easy lifecycle management. These include Red Hat authored Operators, Red Hat Certified Operators and Community Operators[14]

Openshift also tightly controls the Operating Systems used. The Master components have to be running Red Hat CoreOS. This level of control enables the cluster to support upgrades and patches of the Master nodes with minimal effort. The Worker Nodes can be running other variants of Linux or even Windows.

OpenShift introduced the concept of routes — points of traffic ingress into the Kubernetes cluster. The Kubernetes ingress concept was modeled after this.[15]

OpenShift also provides value adds by bundling various software solutions — application runtimes as well as infrastructure components from the Kubernetes ecosystem. For example, for observability needs, Prometheus, Hawkular, and Istio (and their dependencies) are included out of the box. The Red Hat branding of Istio is called Red Hat Service Mesh and is based on an opensource project called Maistra, which aligns base Istio to the needs of opensource OpenShift.

Use-Case Overview:-

Various use cases show the strengths of Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud™ and IBM Cloud services when used together. These stories highlight several industries as well as types of workloads. Even though each use case is presented through the lens of a particular industry, these workloads are typical across various industries. You see workload themes, such as:

• AI and machine learning
• Data and storage
• DevOps
• Identity management

USE CASE STUDY( BARCLAYS):

Barclays adopts agile DevOps culture to stay competitive

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial servicesRegion: EMEALocation: London, United KingdomCompany size: 129,000 employees

We need to deliver products to market quicker than ever and be more responsive to market trends. We want to become the bank of the future.

SIMON CASHMORE, HEAD OF PaaS MIDDLEWARE ENGINEERING, Barclays

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Barclays, a global financial services provider based in London, faced increasing regulatory pressure and market demands — led by industry disruptors offering modern, digital services. Looking to increase innovation and productivity, Barclays set out to build an Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) as part of its cloud program. It used Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform and other Red Hat solutions to update its IT infrastructure and adopt an agile, DevOps approach to application development, giving its developers on-demand, self-service capabilities. As a result, the bank improved its efficiency and agility to innovate faster and stay competitive.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

Challenge: Keep pace with market demands

Facing industry and competitive pressure, Barclays needed to create a more responsive business. “We need to deliver products to market quicker than ever and be more responsive to market trends,” said Simon Cashmore, head of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) middleware engineering at Barclays. “We want to become the bank of the future.” Barclays sought to update both its IT environment and its culture, to take full advantage of the best tools and recruit the best banking talent. “We want to be more dynamic in the way we produce applications and make better use of our underlying hardware and software, as well as our staff.”

Solution: Modernize technology and culture

Barclays adopted a DevOps approach where technical and business teams work together to quickly meet customer and market demands through continuous development. As part of the bank’s cloud strategy, it chose to replace its traditional middleware for an on-premise aPaaS with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This solution provides its development teams with a more secure, consistent, and scalable platform for application development and hosting. The bank received on-site assistance from Red Hat to design and build the solution and train its teams. “We saw this project as a journey. Deploying the initial platform was as much about understanding how internal end-users apply the technology as it was choosing the technology,” said Cashmore.

Results: Support a cloud journey

With its new DevOps approach and aPaaS environment, Barclays’ developers can work more efficiently to quickly release updates and features. Self-service capabilities have cut provisioning times from weeks to hours and freed up IT staff to work on new, valuable projects instead of routine tasks. These improvements have helped the bank’s internal users — in London and worldwide — work more effectively. “Now, with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we’re more agile,” said Cashmore. “We can think of an idea, try it, fail, learn, and make adjustments. Culturally, that’s a big change.” Moving forward, the bank plans to move into public cloud computing and offer the same service across public and private clouds.