Big Shift

Conclusion

Red Hat OpenShift is an up-to-date Kubernetes distribution. Kubernetes itself comes in version 1.13, which is not new anymore, but it's enough for everyday tasks. Much more important than Kubernetes are the lateral changes that make OpenShift 4.1 a good and functional product.

First, OpenShift 4 makes life much easier for admins, primarily because of the various components gleaned from CoreOS. Rolling out CoreOS on a Kubernetes node in the future will keep your maintenance effort as low as possible.

Kubernetes integration and the Quay container registry, also taken from CoreOS, contribute greatly to increased stability compared with the previous version. The Istio service mesh is so potent as a virtual interface manager that its advantages cannot be described with justice in the context of this article.

Although already included in Open Shift 3.11, the Operator Framework, which introduces comprehensive lifecycle management for virtual applications in containers, is only now really useful and cannot be found in other current Kubernetes distributions.

Red Hat is also active in the OpenStack market, so it seems a bit strange that Red Hat OpenShift 4.1 does not roll out on OpenStack clouds out of the box. After all, you would also be interested in using OpenStack platforms as efficiently as possible. Red Hat should look to solve the problem in one of the upcoming OpenShift versions.

Full integration into continuous integration and continuous delivery environments like Jenkins is still in place and works well, so OpenShift is explicitly keeping an eye on the well-being of developers.

Clearly, OpenShift 4 is a cool upgrade and warmly recommended to all previous OpenShift 3 users. If you are basically interested in Kubernetes distributions at the moment, the quality of OpenShift 4 certainly justifies keeping it in mind.