Ding ding… Native Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift… who wins the orchestration battle?

I try to stay away from discussing or promoting specific technologies but have been asked this a few times recently so thought it would be a relevant topic to discuss… which container orchestration service wins the battle… Native Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift?

The short answer is OpenShift if you want to quickly deploy your containers based application or Kubernetes if you want to have a far deeper understanding and control of your environment.

And the why…. Kubernetes is an excellent container orchestration tool and does what it says on the tin but it takes a lot of time to get to know it well. This is due to the large amount of configurable features that you need to be aware of and understand before you can set up your environment and your application… hence the additional time and effort needed. As it is open source, it does not come with support unless you opt for a managed version of it such as AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) or GCPs GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine).

OpenShift on the other hand takes an opinionated stance on what is needed for your environment. You still have full access to the environment config e.g. via the YAML config files, but do not have to configure everything upfront thereby saving yourself time and effort. It is also a supported service.

The additional benefit of OpenShift is it comes with multiple additional and integrated services including:

• Cluster services

• Application services

• Service mesh

• Developer services

It also has built-in networking, ingress, load balancing, storage, monitoring, logging, authentication and authorization, secrets management, auditing, logging, and container registry for granular, centralized control. An additional benefit is the extensive ecosystem of certified integrations & solutions and let’s not forget about its highly automatable capabilities. These of course come at an additional cost which would need to be considered when deciding which option to go with.

So to summarise… Kubernetes will allow you to deploy and manage your containers based environment but takes a lot of time and effort to get familiar with. OpenShift takes an opinionated view of your deployment needs and as such provides a quicker route to deploying your environment plus comes with a load of additional services and readily available features you would have to manually integrate with a Kubernetes only environment.

This is a very high level view of the Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift but I hope it gives a good starting point for deciding which avenue to go down.

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p.s. I do not intend this to be a sales pitch for one or other option but knowledge is king when making a decision.