The new OpenShift version 4

Big Shift

The end of the road is nothing like nigh for Google's Kubernetes container orchestrator, reflected not least in sheer numbers: The May 2019 KubeCon saw 7,700 participants. Clearly, no manufacturer can ignore Kubernetes without being considered out of the loop.

A veteran like Red Hat certainly can't afford that perception, which is why they launched OpenShift at an early stage. OpenShift is an open source container application platform that, according to the manufacturer, is particularly easy to roll out and operate. Recently, Red Hat launched OpenShift 4. Of course, this version is bubbling with new features and far better than all its predecessors together – if you believe Red Hat's PR department.

However, does the product deliver what the manufacturer promises? How does OpenShift fit into Red Hat's cloud strategy? I look at precisely these questions in this article.

The Idea

Red Hat describes OpenShift as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), which in itself points toward a development that has been going on for years: the fragmentation of the individual layers of the IT landscape. Whereas customers used to obtain their complete environment from a single source, today they usually have to deal with several providers. The challenge is to enable the various providers to work together across standardized interfaces.

What sounds complicated in theory is far easier in practice. At the bottom of the stack are the platform providers, because even in times of serverless computing, someone has to run the servers that allow customers to do without their servers. Providers usually offer some form of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), often combined with a few as-a-service offerings like Database as a Service because – and the providers are aware of this – if you only want to run a web application, you will not want to worry about running a database.

Classic IaaS is now mostly

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