INDUSTRY USE CASES OF OPENSHIFT
QUICK OVERVIEW: 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 can manage applications written in different languages, such as Ruby, Node.js, Java, Perl, and Python. One of the key features of OpenShift is extensible, which helps the users support the application written in other languages.
📌 OpenShift helps organizations move their traditional application infrastructure and platform from physical, virtual mediums to the cloud.
📌 OpenShift supports a huge variety of applications, quickly developed and deployed on the OpenShift cloud platform. OpenShift supports three kinds of platforms for developers and users.
Features of OpenShift
📌Self-service, on-demand application stacks
Develop your apps with the language and tools you want. Red Hat OpenShift includes pre-created quick start application templates that allow you to build and deploy your favorite application languages, frameworks, and databases with one click — Java, Node.js, .NET, Ruby, Python, PHP and more.
Red Hat OpenShift 4 offers even more advantages for developers, including:
📌Docker container and runtime packaging
Built around a standardized container model powered by Red Hat application programming interfaces (APIs) for the Docker format, applications created on Red Hat OpenShift can easily run anywhere that supports Docker-formatted containers.
📌Code and push
Develop container-based applications in the cloud or locally using the Red Hat CodeReady Containers, or OpenShift command line tools to create a fully-functioning OpenShift instance on your local machine. Then, deploy your work to any OpenShift cluster.
Deploying to OpenShift is as easy as clicking a button or entering a git push command. OpenShift is designed to reduce or eliminate many of the systems administration headaches related to building and deploying containerized applications. OpenShift also allows you to fully control the deployment lifecycle.
📌Streamline the delivery process
Standardizing workflows, supporting multiple environments, enabling continuous integration, and managing builds — OpenShift gives you tools for the complete development lifecycle.
📌Standardized developer workflows
With OpenShift as the cloud application platform, the application development organization can standardize the developer workflow and create repeatable processes for application delivery to streamline the entire process.
📌Multiple environment support (dev/test/prod)
With the OpenShift platform’s ability to support multiple Application Development Lifecycle stage environments (such as Dev, QA, Pre-Prod, and Prod), the Enterprise can adopt and implement the OpenShift platform without changing their current methodologies or processes.
📌Continuous integration and release management
OpenShift includes Jenkins for continuous integration and release management. Jenkins can perform tests at code check-in, orchestrate the build process, and automatically promote or cancel an application release based on the results. This automated release management becomes a critical part of streamlining the application development. Plus, you can easily tie into your existing Jenkins-based workflows with the Jenkins Pipeline plugin.
📌Managing builds and deployment
OpenShift is designed for building and deploying applications. Depending on how much you want to involve OpenShift in your development process, you can choose to focus your development within an OpenShift project by using it to build an application from scratch, or bring an application (binary, container image, source code) you have already developed in a separate environment and deploy it to OpenShift.
Architecture
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 to 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 create lightweight Linux-based containers, and Kubernetes supports the task of orchestrating and managing containers on multiple hosts.
The main difference between OpenShift and Kubernetes is the concept of build-related artifacts.
In OpenShift, such artifacts are considered first-class Kubernetes resources upon which standard Kubernetes operations can apply. OpenShift’s client program, known as oc, offers a superset of the standard capabilities bundled in the mainline kubectl client program of Kubernetes. Using this client, one can directly interact with the build-related resources using sub-commands.
In addition to this, an OpenShift-native pod build technology called Source-to-Image (S2I) is available out of the box.
Why Use OpenShift?
📌 OpenShift provides a common platform for enterprise units to host their applications on the cloud without worrying about the underlying operating system. This makes it very easy to use, develop, and deploy applications on the cloud.
One of the key features is that it provides managed hardware and network resources for development and testing. With OpenShift, PaaS developer has the freedom to design their required environment with specifications.
OpenShift provides a different kind of service level agreement when it comes to service plans.
- Free: This plan is limited to three years with 1GB space for each.
- Bronze: This plan includes 3 years and expands up to 16 years with 1GB space per year.
- Silver: This is a 16-year plan of bronze; however, it has a storage capacity of 6GB with no additional cost.
Other than the above features, OpenShift also offers an on-premises version known as OpenShift Enterprise.
In OpenShift, developers have the leverage to design scalable and non-scalable applications, and these designs are implemented using HAproxy servers.
OpenShift case study: AIRBUS
Airbus designs, manufactures, and delivers industry-leading commercial aircraft, helicopters, military transports, satellites, and launch vehicles, as well as providing data services, navigation, secure communications, urban mobility, and other solutions for customers on a global scale.
📌 Challenge
Airbus is undergoing a transformation to offer services on any type of platform and provide on-demand access to software-defined infrastructure. The organization chose to create a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), using Red Hat OpenShift and other Red Hat technology but sought to improve in-house skills and internal integration for faster, more efficient development of cloud-native applications.
📌 Path to innovation
To build a path to faster application delivery with DevOps practices, Airbus participated in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement. During the 6-week residency, Airbus’s teams worked closely with Red Hat consultants to learn about building cloud-native applications following DevOps practices. The project used Open Practice Library foundational approaches to collaborative, iterative strategy and development to envision, plan, and begin building an initial prototype platform. Weekly review meetings helped participants hone the project roadmap and stay informed of progress.
📌 Business outcomes
• Built and demonstrated an initial unified PaaS and reusable components for supporting key business capabilities
• Gained hands-on skills and experience for in-house creation of cloud-native applications following DevOps and cloud-native design practices .
• Established foundation for significantly faster delivery of new services and ongoing expansion of the platform
“I highly recommend the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs experience. It has really helped our teams make the change we sought: adopting OpenShift, DevOps, and new ways of working based on lean and open practices.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Saul Davies
Head Of Product Portfolio, Intelligence, UK, Airbus
OpenShift case study: SIA
📌 SIA builds scalable, efficient payment platform with Red Hat
“With OpenShift Container Platform, we have the right technology to deliver our payment platform and to continue improving our services. No other solution provider in Italy can offer the same capabilities that we can.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -Stefano Menotti
Head of Digital & Data Driven Solution, SIA
📌Building reliable, scalable payment infrastructure
With annual revenues of more than €600 million, Italian-based technology company SIA is one of Europe’s leading providers of technology infrastructure and services to the financial sector. SIA’s offerings simplify sending and processing payments for banks, other financial service providers, and national tax authorities. It processes and clears more than 13 billion transactions per year across a complex banking ecosystem that includes ATMs, digital and mobile payments, credit cards, point-ofsale solutions, and real-time gross settlement.
One of SIA’s recent projects focused on creating a centralized payment platform for a European country’s government. All of the country’s credit institutions and payment service providers are registered in the platform and linked to the country’s central payment hub. SIA implemented this standard in its payment platform solution, a unique offering that provides a simpler, more secure way for citizens to complete financial transactions with government entities.
Originally built as a monolithic JavaTM application running on Microsoft Windows, the platform was unable to respond to peak demand in payment processing requests — for example, before quarterly tax deadlines. To meet strict scalability and reliability requirements set by the customer, SIA decided to shift to a microservices- and container-based approach. This approach would also help SIA add new features and integrate payment types already supported by the customer’s payment platform, such as PayPal, without affecting other areas of the application.
However, SIA needed a platform that could effectively support this new approach and accommodate changing demand more efficiently.
“Over the last six years, transaction demands have grown substantially, so we decided to move to microservices and containers,” said Matteo Combi, Solution Architect at SIA. “We needed to guarantee high performance and availability, and we could not afford to interrupt services with any downtime for maintenance.”
📌Adopting a microservices architecture on a new platform
SIA worked with an external consultancy to assess its needs and provide recommendations for its new platform. Based on the firm’s advice, the service provider decided to build a solution using the Akka open source toolkit and runtime and the Scala programming language to build a microservicesbased architecture running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
“We had already used Red Hat solutions for other projects and were very satisfied with them,” said Stefano Menotti, Head of Digital & Data Driven Solution at SIA. “We wanted to partner with a company like Red Hat because we know we can rely on them. We chose OpenShift Container Platform because it was the best container orchestration solution to manage the peaks in demand we’re facing.”
With help from Red Hat Consulting to set up its infrastructure, SIA now runs its payment application on the platform in its datacenter, comprised of HPE BladeSystem servers. After its initial deployment, the service provider is currently developing new, cloud-native applications on OpenShift Container Platform.
📌Meeting demand with flexible, responsive technology
🔰 Gained scalability to handle growing, changing demand
SIA’s new OpenShift-based platform helps the service provider better support rapid growth in payment transaction volume with fewer resources. Its microservices- and container-based architecture scales to easily handle peaks in demand by adding and reallocating resources without delays or complex provisioning processes.
“Last year, we had 12 million transactions, but in just the first three months of this year, we had 13 million transactions. We recently reached six million transactions in a single month. Our target for the year is 40 million transactions,” said Menotti. “We were worried about that kind of volume on the previous system, but we feel that the new platform is much more stable and won’t limit our growth.”
🔰 Improved operational efficiency with DevOps and automation
Launch of its new platform was the first large project that SIA successfully completed using a DevOps approach. With guidance from Red Hat Consulting, SIA adopted this more flexible, collaborative approach to improve efficiency and enhance its adoption of open source technology with a parallel work process.
“There are no more hard boundaries between the project’s developers and our operations teams,” said Combi. “We’ve seen the success of a more cooperative way of working. Even in a very structured company like SIA, approaches like DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery [CI/ CD] are being used to make development easier and more efficient.”
Additionally, OpenShift Container Platform automates management of many processes and features, requiring less manual intervention by operations teams to ensure stable, businessscale performance.
“Before, our operations staff were working at 150% of their contracted time,” said Combi. “Now, with a simpler environment, we have the same number of staff managing a much higher number of transactions within their planned work schedules.”
🔰 Eliminated planned downtime
SIA makes minor changes to its application to correct minor issues with a payment function or respond to a change request. Previously, these changes would require system downtime, typically an hour or more each month.
With its new platform based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, SIA can make changes in real time, eliminating planned downtime to improve service availability for its customers. Greater flexibility to make changes without interrupting its systems also helps the company’s IT teams be more responsive to requests from the business for new features or changes.
“The design of our services is always changing,” said Combi. “With our new, more streamlined platform management capabilities, we have increased availability and improved our SLAs [service level agreements] for responding to these change requests.”
📌Expanding integration to continue improving development
SIA plans to extend its continuous integration approach to add continuous testing capabilities that will further improve its development efficiency and launch rate of new features.
“With Openshift Container Platform, we have the right technology to deliver our payment platform and to continue improving our services,” said Menotti. “No other solution provider in Italy can offer the same capabilities that we can.”
“We chose Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform because it was the best container orchestration solution to manage the peaks in demand we’re facing.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Matteo Combi
Solution Architect, SIA
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