OpenShift vs. Kubernetes
- Posted by Adham Jan
- On March 2, 2020
If you’ve been considering transforming your applications into microservices architecture or creating cloud-native apps, chances are you’ve heard about OpenShift and Kubernetes. But like many things in IT the distinction may be confusing, and you might not fully understand what OpenShift is and how it can help your organization in the development of cloud-based applications. OpenShift can help your business become more agile because it streamlines application development, delivery and operations.
Let’s look at OpenShift and Kubernetes (since one is tied to the other), and see the definite distinctions between them, and how OpenShift can help build your organization’s cloud native applications and provide the business agility necessary to stay on top of your competitors.
What is OpenShift?
What’s the Difference Between OpenShift and Kubernetes?
The first part to understanding OpenShift is recognizing that it is a form of XaaS and it is open-sourced. Red Hat created OpenShift to be a hybrid cloud, application platform for enterprise Kubernetes. When you use OpenShift, you also have the underlying “kernel” that is Kubernetes, which sits on top of Enterprise Linux. The OpenShift Container Platform is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) which uses Docker containers.
These containers encapsulate the application with its own libraries, configuration files, and software, but still allow the container software to communicate with other containers. Kubernetes provides the means to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of those cloud apps.
So, OpenShift can be seen as a development and operations platform and Kubernetes can be seen as a workload distribution and orchestration platform. These two pieces are critical for developing cloud-based apps and for maintaining agility in a technological changing world. By creating containerized applications that can be interchanged quickly and easily, OpenShift provides you the agile development need to stay on top of the competition.
What Do You Get When You Choose OpenShift?
OpenShift is an open-source distribution, which gives your organization added agility when it comes to creating new software applications over microservices architecture. When you choose to implement OpenShift, you choose to use Red Hat Linux and Kubernetes, which underlies the OpenShift platform.
OpenShift has stricter security, very accessible services, a private container registry, validated third-party plug-ins, and other features that will aid developers. OpenShift also offers uniform, persistence services, which is crucial for cloud apps that reside in hybrid clouds.
You need a consistent set of services across all your cloud platforms, regardless of where you host your cloud services. If your apps are stretched across different cloud platforms, they need the flexibility to communicate and use the same services across your hybrid cloud platforms.
OpenShift provides a consistent set of services that will run wherever OpenShift runs, no matter what systems you run it on. There’s no need for modifications or changes to the software you write. This way, you have added flexibility of running applications that don’t need to be modified.
This is the power and agility of OpenShift. This gives your organization faster development and testing times, thus creating an agile platform that can be modified and scaled for your organization’s needs.
Another important area, OpenShift plays an essential role in IT operations and DevOps. It is designed to automate the process of deployment and containers management over Kubernetes. DevOps is more of a culture bringing developers and operations towards a common objective speeding-up the time-to-market of new features and releases. OpenShift provides the right tools to enable a DevOps culture across the organization from a single unified platform.
Benefits of OpenShift
- Open source software which provides cost savings due to not being tied to proprietary hardware.
- Runs on open source Red Hat Linux, thus no need to license expensive proprietary operating systems.
- Comes with the power of Kubernetes, thus giving you the best of both worlds.
- Users can build containers on any platform running OpenShift and they’ll work wherever they’re implemented.
- Best fit for software applications built over microservices architecture; which will give your business more agility.
