Industry Use cases of Openshift.

What is OpenShift?

OpenShift is a cloud development Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosted by Red Hat. It’s an open-source, cloud-based, user-friendly platform used to create, test, and run applications, and finally deploy them on the cloud.OpenShift helps organizations move their traditional application infrastructure and platform from physical, virtual mediums to the cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift helps enterprise organizations build a stable, secure platform on top of Kubernetes by extending its security and development workflow capabilities. However, these capabilities can make monitoring and understanding application performance more challenging. Datadog simplifies monitoring in OpenShift environments with a Red Hat-certified Operator that enables teams to deploy the Agent using a single Kubernetes manifest. That way, Datadog automatically scales with Kubernetes, so any team can monitor its applications regardless of the number of pods and nodes they are running

Reduce time to resolution with complete visibility into OpenShift

Organizations need visibility into every layer of their OpenShift environments in order to reduce troubleshooting time and confidently resolve performance issues. Datadog’s built-in OpenShift and Kubernetes integrations allow teams to monitor all of their application components side by side and easily pivot between critical application metrics, logs, and traces. Teams can use Datadog’s out-of-the-box Kubernetes dashboards to keep track of the nodes, deployments, and pods deployed to their OpenShift environment in one place.

And with more than 400 integrations, Datadog can easily support the other technologies that organizations rely on in their OpenShift environments. Datadog automatically applies tags to all telemetry data, so teams can slice and dice and correlate performance data from OpenShift with the rest of their infrastructure.

Open source technology gives us the ability to deliver what our internal and external customers need in a way that differentiates us from our competitors. Our development teams using Red Hat OpenShift have, on average, three or four times more product deployments, equating to more features launching to our end users faster.

How Openshift Works ?

OpenShift is a layered system wherein each layer is tightly bound with the other layer using Kubernetes and Docker cluster. The architecture of OpenShift is designed in such a way that it can support and manage Docker containers, which are hosted on top of all the layers using Kubernetes.

Unlike the earlier version of OpenShift V2, the new version of OpenShift V3 supports containerized infrastructure. In this model, Docker helps in creation of lightweight Linux-based containers and Kubernetes supports the task of orchestrating and managing containers on multiple hosts

Components of OpenShift

One of the key components of OpenShift architecture is to manage containerized infrastructure in Kubernetes. Kubernetes is responsible for Deployment and Management of infrastructure. In any Kubernetes cluster, we can have more than one master and multiple nodes, which ensures there is no point of failure in the setup.

Kubernetes Master Machine Components

Etcd −

It stores the configuration information, which can be used by each of the nodes in the cluster. It is a high availability key value store that can be distributed among multiple nodes. It should only be accessible by Kubernetes API server as it may have sensitive information. It is a distributed key value Store which is accessible to all.

API Server −

Kubernetes is an API server which provides all the operation on cluster using the API. API server implements an interface which means different tools and libraries can readily communicate with it. A kubeconfig is a package along with the server side tools that can be used for communication. It exposes Kubernetes API”.

Controller Manager −

This component is responsible for most of the collectors that regulate the state of the cluster and perform a task. It can be considered as a daemon which runs in a non-terminating loop and is responsible for collecting and sending information to API server. It works towards getting the shared state of the cluster and then make changes to bring the current status of the server to a desired state. The key controllers are replication controller, endpoint controller, namespace controller, and service account controller. The controller manager runs different kind of controllers to handle nodes, endpoint, etc.

Scheduler −

It is a key component of Kubernetes master. It is a service in master which is responsible for distributing the workload. It is responsible for tracking the utilization of working load on cluster nodes and then placing the workload on which resources are available and accepting the workload. In other words, this is the mechanism responsible for allocating pods to available nodes. The scheduler is responsible for workload utilization and allocating a pod to a new node.

Kubernetes Node Components

Following are the key components of the Node server, which are necessary to communicate with the Kubernetes master.

Docker − The first requirement of each node is Docker which helps in running the encapsulated application containers in a relatively isolated but lightweight operating environment.

Kubelet Service − This is a small service in each node, which is responsible for relaying information to and from the control plane service. It interacts with etcd store to read the configuration details and Wright values. This communicates with the master component to receive commands and work. The kubelet process then assumes responsibility for maintaining the state of work and the node server. It manages network rules, port forwarding, etc.

Kubernetes Proxy Service − This is a proxy service which runs on each node and helps in making the services available to the external host. It helps in forwarding the request to correct containers. Kubernetes Proxy Service is capable of carrying out primitive load balancing. It makes sure that the networking environment is predictable and accessible but at the same time it is isolated as well. It manages pods on node, volumes, secrets, creating new containers health checkup, etc.

Integrated OpenShift Container Registry

OpenShift container registry is an inbuilt storage unit of Red Hat, which is used for storing Docker images. With the latest integrated version of OpenShift, it has come up with a user interface to view images in OpenShift internal storage. These registries are capable of holding images with specified tags, which are later used to build containers out of it.

Why We Use Openshift ?

1. Speed.

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.

2. Organizational Consensus

OpenShift allows both Dev and Ops to work together without having to sacrifice their individual concerns. We’ve already gone over how developers can create, modify, and deploy applications on demand and use the languages they prefer, but Operations needs to be able to maintain those applications easily and have them run at the appropriate scale.OpenShift brings consensus to your IT organization. Meaning that your organization can be more strategic as well as nimble and can deliver applications to market while maintaining them over their lifecycle with the scalability and stability necessary to win.

3. Holistic Solution

IT organizations need a vendor that can enable them through the entire stack, not just one aspect of it. Having a PaaS environment that’s coupled together with supported IaaS services and middleware services, means better agility and interoperability. With our solution, you can incorporate OpenStack, JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Mobile, and others. All of which is backed and supported by Red Hat, whose products and solutions power 50% of the world’s trading volume.

4. Scale

Being able to deliver that next big idea is one thing, being able to run it at scale is another. OpenShift leverages the power of containers and a incredibly powerful orchestration engine to make that happen. 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.

5. Security

The data of your organization is one of your most valuable assets so why trust that with just anyone? In fact, 100% of U.S. government executive departments (DOD, DHS, DOT, etc.) use Red Hat solutions. We know how valuable data is and we understand the importance of protecting it from harm. OpenShift is built on those same principles and applications running on OpenShift have their own “container”allowing for the code and data to separated from each other by default.

Openshift CI/CD Pipeline

With Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, you can create a customized CI/CD solution to build,test, and deploy your application.

To create a full-fledged, self-serving CI/CD Pipeline for an application, you must perform the following tasks:

• Create custom Tasks, or install existing reusable Tasks.
• Create and define the delivery Pipeline for your application.
• Create a PersistentVolumeClaim attached to the Workspace to provide the volume or filesystem for Pipeline execution.
• Create a PipelineRun to instantiate and invoke the Pipeline.
• Add Triggers to capture any events in the source repository.

BMW Group Deploys Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to Deliver Digital Services

BMW Group, the world’s leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to support its delivery of business applications and services.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from Linux containers and the Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects. It is based on the leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat said the OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure, stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, allowing for mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

Almost all cars the BMW Group ships are delivered with BMW ConnectedDrive, the company’s digital product that connects the driver and vehicle with a range of services and apps that provide the driver with vehicle-related information, assistance and entertainment during journeys or allows them to remotely access the vehicle.

The BMW Group currently hosts more than 1,000 web-based apps, showing the growing demand for discoverable, easy-to-use application hubs. This growth highlights a major need for many enterprises: scaling existing applications and services dynamically to meet demand while bringing new innovations to market faster. Traditional enterprise architectures are often monolithic in nature, which can struggle to handle the dynamic needs of modern workloads.

This has led many global businesses to seek more flexible application infrastructure that embraces more agile development and IT operations methodology, including continuous delivery, continuous integration and extensive automation.

Thank you for reading. ;)