OpenShift Case Study

What is Openshift ?

Red Hat OpenShift is an open source container application platform based on the Kubernetes container orchestrator for enterprise application development and deployment.

What’s in it ?

1) Container host and runtime

Red Hat OpenShift ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS for the Kubernetes master, and supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux for worker nodes. Red Hat OpenShift supports standard Docker and CRI-O runtimes.

2) Enterprise Kubernetes

Red Hat OpenShift includes hundreds of fixes to defect, security, and performance issues for upstream Kubernetes in every release. It is tested with dozens of technologies and is a robust tightly-integrated platform supported over a 9-year lifecycle.

3) Validated integrations

Red Hat OpenShift includes software-defined networking and validates additional common networking solutions. Red Hat OpenShift also validates numerous storage and third-party plug-ins for every release.

4) Integrated container registry

Red Hat OpenShift ships with an integrated, private container registry (installed as part of the Kubernetes cluster or as standalone for greater flexibility). Teams with greater requirements can also use Red Hat Quay.

5) Developer workflows

Red Hat OpenShift includes streamlined workflows to help teams get to production faster, including built-in Jenkins pipelines and our source-to-image technology to go straight from application code to container. It is also extensible to new frameworks like Istio and Knative.

6) Easy access to services

Red Hat OpenShift helps administrators and support application teams, with service brokers (including direct access to AWS services), validated third-party solutions, and Kubernetes operators through the embedded OperatorHub.

Why OpenShift ?

OpenShift accelerates application development by including the tools that companies need to be agile and efficient. With OpenShift, your business can deploy applications quickly, become less siloed, be more interactive, and increase collaboration. You’ll be able to go from concept to production faster and ahead of your competition.

With OpenShift, developers have access to a self-service platform that allows them to create, modify, and deploy applications on demand with the click of a button. These new applications are packaged up in containers which makes them extremely lightweight and portable. Plus, applications on OpenShift can be created in virtually any language/framework/DB and best of all, run at that same operational cost.

This means that your next line-of-business application can get from concept to production faster. And do so in a much more systematic approach then what’s probably being done in your environment today.

Operations needs to be able to maintain the applications easily and have them run at the appropriate scale. OpenShift enables them to do that with little to no manual intervention.

Containers make sure that applications are packed up in their own space and are independent from the OS, this makes applications incredibly portable and hyper scalable.

Here are some case studies:

1) Ford

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.

Each of Ford’s business units hosts a robust, engaged development community that is focused on building products and services that take advantage of the latest technological innovations, from machine learning for crash analysis and autonomous driving to high-performance computing (HPC) for prototype creation and testing. But this engagement across hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of internal applications and sites created complexity that Ford’s traditional IT environment and development approaches could not accommodate. Even with hypervisors and virtual machines, the company struggled with inefficient resource use and high staffing costs to maintain this environment.

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.

Ford began looking for an enterprise partner offering commercially supported open source solutions to help run containers in production and support innovative experimentation and chose Openshift.

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.

Benefits

• Improved productivity with standardized development environment and self-service provisioning
• Enhanced security with enterprise technology from Red Hat and continuous monitoring provided by Sysdig
• Significantly reduced hardware costs by running OpenShift on bare metal

2) Ascend money

Ascend Money is part of the Ascend Group, with investors such as Ant Financial. Its TrueMoney offering is an award-winning regional payment platform for the underserved and digital consumers in Southeast Asia across Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Rapid growth through acquisitions meant that Ascend Money’s teams in each country had different approaches to developing and deploying digital applications, preventing efficient collaboration. The company sought a way to improve collaboration and delivery times for new products and features while also providing customized services for each local population. Each day, Ascend Money builds and releases around 100 applications — and this number is growing.

To improve the efficiency of its application processes, Ascend Money decided to migrate its legacy applications to a new, standardized platform based on Kubernetes container orchestration technology.

After design and implementation assistance from Red Hat Consulting, Ascend Money now runs both its legacy core applications and new cloud-native services on OpenShift Container Platform, including its customer-facing payment and transaction applications. Based on Kubernetes, the solution provides a single platform for IT and developers to collaborate on developing, deploying, and managing applications across cloud environments.

Benefits

• Established central platform for developer self service and collaboration
• Improved time to market and scalability with automation, speeding tasks from 1 week to 2 days
• Enhanced security and compliance with enterprise support and agile management capabilities