How to choose the right Red Hat OpenShift edition for your business

Red Hat® OpenShift® is a unified, enterprise-ready hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. The platform offers a stable foundation to support hybrid cloud operations, including modernizing, deploying, managing, and scaling applications, providing a consistent experience across hybrid cloud environments. 

Red Hat OpenShift can be delivered in a range of deployment and usage options, with varying levels of management. This gives you the flexibility to choose what works best for your business and its needs, including how and where it is deployed.

Red Hat OpenShift comes equipped with a complete set of services for bringing applications to market on your choice of infrastructure and with support for a variety of deployment patterns and environments. This gives you unfettered flexibility in where you deploy it—whether on-premise, in a cloud, or at the edge of a network or device—and how you use it.

The 2 distinct deployment options for Red Hat OpenShift are: 

• Red Hat OpenShift cloud services. This is a fully managed application platform, delivered as a joint offering and in partnership with your choice of cloud provider: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or IBM Cloud.

• Self-managed Red Hat OpenShift. This is an application platform that can be deployed on any infrastructure, including on-premise, public cloud, private cloud, or at the network edge, to provide a consistent user experience, management, and security. This option includes Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine.

There are benefits and due considerations with each offering and you may have different needs as you go along in your application development. It is important that you evaluate your organization’s needs before you choose the flavor of Red Hat OpenShift that is right for you. That could mean fully managed in a public cloud; self-managed on-premise, in a cloud, or at the edge; or a combination of both. 

Red Hat OpenShift cloud services. Red Hat OpenShift cloud services allow you to get started in a short amount of time and focus on building applications at scale, without the responsibility of managing an application platform. They are each supported by Red Hat—and the cloud partner where applicable—with a consistent user experience, no matter where the platform is deployed. 

Red Hat OpenShift cloud services are delivered as fully managed, turnkey, and first-party solutions and include:

1. Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS—a joint offering by Red Hat and AWS that is deployed on AWS infrastructure.
2. Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift—a joint offering by Red Hat and Microsoft that is deployed on Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
3. Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud—a joint offering by Red Hat and IBM that is deployed on IBM Cloud infrastructure.
4. Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated—a managed and supported offering by Red Hat that can be hosted on AWS or Google Cloud infrastructure.

Each of these cloud services offerings are supported by Red Hat site reliability engineers (SREs)—a team of Red Hat OpenShift experts who handle the ongoing management of the security, observability, performance, scalability, and cost optimization of your IT systems, including your application platform. SREs also provide automated insights, improve workload performance, and teach best practices for cloud-native development.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift cloud services. 

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus. If you are looking for an application platform that lets you scale across a hybrid cloud consistently, in a trusted manner, and with complete control, OpenShift Platform Plus is a suitable option for your business. OpenShift Platform Plus includes solutions for multicluster management, security, compliance, application, and data management that work across infrastructures, providing consistency throughout the software supply chain.

With complete control of the platform, you can customize it to fit your business needs and deploy it where it best suits you, including on-premise, in a public or private cloud, or at the edge of a network. This provides the possibility for significant scale while ensuring a consistent management experience for clusters and applications across all environments.

Learn more about OpenShift Platform Plus.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. If you are new to containers and Kubernetes, or looking for solutions designed for a small project or a single team, OpenShift Container Platform could be the best option for you. It delivers a self-managed, application platform experience across hybrid cloud environments, an expedited installation process, and production-ready tools and features for developing, modernizing, deploying, managing, and scaling high-quality applications.

Take advantage of an OpenShift Container Platform trial at no cost. 

While it can be a tough decision to make, determining the best Red Hat OpenShift option for your business starts with these 3 considerations:

1. Where do you want to run the platform?

Self-managed OpenShift Platform Plus is tailored to provide you with the flexibility to deploy the application platform anywhere across a hybrid cloud.

It includes Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes to help you scale consistently, with a focus on security, across the hybrid cloud. Consider a no-cost trial for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security to see if these additional solutions fit your business needs.

If you are already using AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, or Google Cloud and want a fully managed, turnkey application platform on that public cloud, Red Hat OpenShift cloud services is the optimal choice. This group of offerings also provides the option to purchase with existing public cloud spend, including AWS committed spend, Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, Google Cloud committed spend, and IBM Cloud Enterprise Savings Plan.

2. Can you or do you need to manage the platform yourself?

A major consideration is if you have the resources to manage the application platform yourself, or even have a need to manage it yourself. This can be a major undertaking that requires significant staff and resources to manage, and if your organization does not have the resources or have a desire to expend the necessary resources, fully managed Red Hat OpenShift cloud services could be the perfect fit for you.

However, if you want to retain complete control over the infrastructure, or have particular compliance or security needs due to highly sensitive data or industry requirements, self-managed Red Hat OpenShift could be a great option for your business.

3. How much deployment and support flexibility do you need?

Many organizations are deploying applications across multiple environments—including public cloud, on-premise, and the network edge—and those applications sometimes have different needs, so some choose to adopt a combination of different Red Hat OpenShift cloud services, or a combination of a Red Hat OpenShift cloud service and a self-managed OpenShift offering. The deployment options for Red Hat OpenShift cater to the level of flexibility your business needs. 

Whether you choose a managed offering or a self-managed experience, all Red Hat OpenShift options offer a consistent experience for building, deploying, managing, and scaling applications, allowing you to focus on innovation, building value, and delivering the best services to your customers.

Try a demo of OpenShift Service on AWS or OpenShift Platform Plus, or talk to Red Hat today to get started with Red Hat OpenShift.