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Blog post

Why Red Hat OpenShift over vanilla Kubernetes?

Take advantage of the benefits of Red Hat OpenShift

By Brad Topol

While Kubernetes is a robust open source container orchestration platform, Red Hat OpenShift is a managed enterprise application platform that provides great benefits beyond vanilla Kubernetes deployments.

Watch this video to learn about the benefits that Red Hat OpenShift provides for both developers and IT Operations teams.


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Benefits of OpenShift for developers

The two key benefits for developers are:

  • Increased speed of developing cloud-native apps with containers using the Source2Image (S2I) feature of Red Hat OpenShift. Developers can use OpenShift S2I to build a Docker image from a Dockerfile hosted in GitHub and deploy a container pod by using the image.

  • Simplified networking by using routes, with an easy to read URL for the deployed app. These routes expose the service for your app so that any external device can access it. Read more in these tutorials:

You can learn more about how Red Hat OpenShift helps developers develop apps more quickly and deploy apps more simply by watching JJ Asghar demonstrate at a Conf42 JavaScript 2022 event how to deploy a simple Python app to Red Hat OpenShift. Also, try your hand in this tutorial at using Red Hat OpenShift Source-to-Image (S2I) to deploy apps from Dockerfiles.

Benefits of OpenShift for IT operations teams

The two key benefits for IT operations teams are:

  • Automating Day 2 operations, such as platform and operating system updates, cluster sizing or scaling, and multicloud management.
  • A vastly simplified security approach, using security context constraints (SCCs) and security profiles. Essentially, you can pick a security profile and Red Hat OpenShift sets all the security settings for you.

You can explore all the details about how Red Hat OpenShift helps to automate day 2 operations in my book, Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes. And, you can learn more about the simplified security approach in Red Hat OpenShift in this learning path, "Get started with security context constraints on Red Hat OpenShift."

Summary

The benefits that Red Hat OpenShift provides for speeding up development, automating Day 2 operations, and providing enhanced security clearly show why it goes above and beyond what vanilla Kubernetes provides.

If you're ready to take advantage of these benefits, you can use these articles to help you migrate your Kubernetes images to Red Hat OpenShift: