Modernizing with OpenShift on AWS Using ROSA

Red Hat and AWS partnership has resulted in the creation of a fully-managed Application Platform AWS Native Service called Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA). ROSA provides a validated stack of CNCF choices and integrations, enabling users to launch add-ons and workloads with ease.

For teams that don't have the time or personnel to manage their Kubernetes instances with fine-grain controls, ROSA can handle those duties while reducing waste through better configuration that comes directly from the experts.

What led to the development of ROSA?

ROSA addresses the pain points of customers in regard to different billing mechanisms, managing underlying Infrastructure and not to forget lifecycle management of the entire platform.

Roland Barcia describes ROSA as Batteries included but Swappable.

ROSA is a fully managed Application platform, which provides a validated stack of CNCF choices that work well together including everything from a service mesh powered by Istio (upstream project) to OpenShift GitOps based on Argo (upstream project).

The workflow is simple and integrations are built-in enabling users to add different worker nodes, launch add-ons and workloads with ease.

It offers storage options such as EBS and EFS along with multiple architecture options such as Single and Multi AZ public clusters, PrivateLink cluster plus Egress and AWS Local Zones.

ROSA supports integration with native AWS services and customers can take advantage of spot instances for cost savings. AWS IRSA which integrates with AWS STS to create a ROSA cluster, and can be extended to use other AWS resources such as S3, RDS and DynamoDB.

ROSA follows a unified billing model, meaning you get a bill from AWS for both OpenShift and AWS consumption. Also giving you the option to leverage your existing AWS committed spend to OpenShift.

ROSA is extensible, meaning it provides Integrations with popular logging, monitoring and observability such as AWS CloudWatch, managed Grafana and managed Prometheus, along with 3rd party tools like Splunk.

Konveyor, an open source community has a number of tools under its umbrella that can be used to migrate to ROSA.

One popular migration scenario is migrating from legacy OpenShift 3.11 to ROSA, which can be done using Migration toolkit for containers (MTC).

AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) another source project built by AWS, which lets you define and use AWS service resources such as Route 53, ELB, Event bridge, API gateway directly from ROSA. This allows users to provision YAML and create AWS native services using tools like OpenShift GitOps. This is available on operator hub and can be used to provision resources in different clusters and different clouds.

• Resources:
  Migrating from OCP 3.11 to ROSA
  ROSA Workshop
  Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)
  AWS Partner Catalog
  ROSA Pricing
  Konveyor