As a containerization tool, RedHat OpenShift helps businesses become agile, scalable, and more effective. The word containerization indicates that it is a single software package and contains the application code. It also includes the dependencies, configuration files, and libraries necessary for running the application code. Such convenient bundling or containerization enables the software to be portable and run on any system platform and cloud without any problems.

Another benefit of containerization is that you will not encounter the errors and bugs that often arise during the transfer of code between different computing environments. Additionally, containerization allows software developers to deploy software applications faster to their customer base and improve customer satisfaction.

What is RedHat OpenShift?

The RedHat software company introduced RedHat OpenShift as an open source containerization software product. It can run on both the Enterprise Linux operating system by RedHat and the standalone Kubernetes containerization service. As a cloud-based platform, RedHat OpenShift can operate on public and private clouds as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). You can also deploy it on premises and on hybrid clouds and multiple clouds. It is available as a managed service as well as a self-managed option. You can select various services for your enterprise business with OpenShift. These include many exclusive enterprise features, Docker container images, and the Kubernetes platform.

Developers find it convenient to use RedHat OpenShift as the cloud platform enables them to be innovative with their software creation and deliver the software applications faster to customers. Since it facilitates cluster operations and software life-cycle management automation across architectures and frameworks, working with RedHat OpenShif enables improved operational consistency and efficiency.

What are the three surprising benefits of RedHat OpenShift?

The wide adoption of RedHat OpenShift is due to its advanced infrastructure capabilities and its ability to meet the strict security and compliance requirements that most big organizations consider essential. Here are three benefits of RedHat OpenShift that you can expect for your business:

1. Efficient CI/CD process

For a successful software development lifecycle, it is necessary to have continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes. The tools available with RedHat OpenShift enable software developers to carry out the coding, testing, and deployment of the software applications from the initial phases into production.

They can use the open source and multi-environment compatible Tekton framework to develop cloud-based CI/CD pipelines. Tekton defines and runs necessary tasks with Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and the Kubernetes control plane. The pipelines it creates can also work with Knative, Jenkins, and other tools.

RedHat OpenShift also offers the Tekton-based OpenShift Pipelines feature that is native to Kubernetes for more efficient CI/CD. With OpenShift Pipelines, you can have a separate container for each step in the pipeline. That can allow for independent scaling and better security.

2. Improved monitoring and logging

OpenShift comes with pre-configured and pre-installed application workload monitoring and logging capabilities. Based on the Prometheus open source project, the monitoring stack is self-updating and has Grafana dashboards. It monitors OpenShift Container Platform clusters and sends alert notifications to cluster administrators if there are any problems. OpenShift bases its cluster logging components on Kibana, Fluentd, and Elasticsearch. Fluentd gathers and formats node and container logs, and Elasticsearch stores them in the logStore. With the centralized IU, Kibana, you can view charts, logs, graphs, and other visualized information.

These monitoring and logging capabilities of OpenShift can help simplify the software development process and facilitate the application deployment and operation. Even when deploying the OpenShift platform across multiple environments, the entire system operations workflow can remain consistent and efficient.

3. Regular security fixes

One of the reasons that many businesses choose to use RedHat OpenShift is its strict security policies. It comes with a built-in Security Context Constraint (SSC). The baseline default execution policies of the SSC include not allowing containers to run with root privileges and securing the Kubernetes cluster with pod security policies. You also get the role-based access control (RBAC) feature that offers full-access or restricted access to the cluster based on your role in the software development team. Additionally, OpenShift has the Red Hat Container Catalog with container images that have been thoroughly vetted for issues and vulnerabilities and come with the RedHat company certification.