OpenShift by Red Hat continues to evolve

Live Cell Therapy

My last look at OpenShift [1] was mid-year 2017. The sobering results of a close inspection: The product, which Red Hat was pushing like a re-invention of the wheel, was actually no more than a commercial distribution of the Kubernetes container orchestration [2].

However, things have changed. In version 3.0, Red Hat shifted the product onto the new Kubernetes underpinnings and has since made continuous improvements in many parts of the software. What features will administrators running an OpenShift cloud benefit from most? What is the greatest benefit for users? From which innovations will developers reap the greatest benefits? I'll answer those questions in this article.

New Brooms

Since version 3.4, a noticeable change has been made in naming the individual products in the OpenShift series. OpenShift is a kind of umbrella term for several products of differing versions. OpenShift Origin refers to the original open source product on which the commercial variants of OpenShift are based. The open source version is of interest if you don't want to pay money to Red Hat. In return, you will not receive any support.

If you need support, you can choose between Red Hat's public OpenShift installation as a kind of public cloud – an OpenShift installation hosted by Red Hat on behalf of customers – and a private OpenShift installation in your own data center, previously called OpenShift Enterprise, but now renamed OpenShift Container Platform.

However, the manufacturer is in a hurry to clarify that nothing has changed except the name of the product. The motivation for the name change is thus likely to be that Red Hat wants to mesh OpenShift with other components in its portfolio in a more meaningful way, including improving integration with CloudForms, which I discuss later

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