Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

June 23, 2025•
Resource type: Datasheet

Product overview

Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform is the industry-leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by containers and Kubernetes. Using OpenShift Container Platform simplifies and accelerates the development, delivery, and lifecycle management of a hybrid mix of applications, consistently anywhere across on-premise, public clouds, and edge. Whether modernizing existing applications, developing new cloud-native applications, integrating data analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities to achieve data driven insights, or integrating software from independent software vendors (ISVs) and cloud providers, OpenShift Container Platform is designed to deliver continuous innovation and speed at any scale, helping organizations to be ready for today and build for the future. 

OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift Container Platform is self-managed and includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux® CoreOS, over-the-air updates, container runtime, networking, ingress, monitoring, logging, container registry, authentication, and authorization solutions. These components are tested together for unified operations on a complete Kubernetes platform spanning every cloud environment.

Red Hat OpenShift portfolio: A choice of container solutions

Red Hat OpenShift is the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, trusted by organizations across industries and the globe for application innovation. 

  • Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine (formerly Red Hat OpenShift Container Engine) delivers the foundational, security-focused capabilities of enterprise Kubernetes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS to run containers in hybrid cloud environments.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform adds a full set of operations and developer services and tools, including Serverless, Service Mesh, and Pipelines. With OpenShift Container Platform, organizations can adopt a hybrid cloud strategy and start building cloud-native applications. The proven platform includes a complete set of services that empower developers to code with speed and agility for applications while providing more flexibility and efficiency for IT operations teams.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus builds on the capabilities of OpenShift Container Platform with advanced multicluster security features, Day 2 management capabilities, integrated data management, and a global container registry. With OpenShift Platform Plus, organizations can more consistently protect and manage applications with increased security across open hybrid cloud environments and application lifecycles. 

Key benefits:

  • Integrated platform includes container host, Kubernetes, and application lifecycle management using your choice of infrastructure.
  • Operators provide an agile DevOps workflow.
  • Security-focused, validated container content and services from a wide partner ecosystem.
  • Rapid application development cycles and more frequent software deployments.
  • Simple installation and upgrades, even in air-gapped environments.
  • Application portability with lower operational cost across hybrid cloud, multicloud, and edge footprints.
  • Consistent development experience across the application lifecycle. 
OpenShift Editions Comp chart

Figure 1. OpenShift Container Platform capabilities and complementary Red Hat products

Discover more about other Red Hat OpenShift offerings. 

Advanced capabilities

OpenShift Container Platform supports multiple advanced capabilities.

  • Automated Day 1 and Day 2 operations
    • Operators provide automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management for applications, ensuring applications are running correctly and making necessary changes to comply with the desired configuration.
    • Helm brings a Kubernetes-native package manager that developers can use to package their applications and define how to package, deploy, and configure them. It can also automate Day 1 tasks and a limited number of Day 2 operations.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh provides a uniform way to manage, connect, and observe applications as managing and security between services become more challenging.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Serverless allows an application to use compute resources and automatically scale up or down based on use, driven on demand from some event sources.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines brings a Kubernetes-native continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) solution on Tekton that provides a streamlined user experience through the OpenShift console.
  • Red Hat OpenShift GitOps is built from the open source Argo CD project and lets IT teams implement GitOps workflows for cluster configuration and application delivery for more speed, security, and scalability software development.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization brings virtual machines to Red Hat OpenShift to modernize existing applications or run them alongside containers, and serverless, in a Kubernetes-native architecture.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is a generative AI-based virtual assistant integrated directly within the OpenShift console. It increases platform and application owner efficiency by quickly giving immediate, context-aware answers and guidance on OpenShift-related tasks.
  • Edge computing includes 3-node clusters, remote worker nodes, and single nodes to provide organizations full Kubernetes capabilities in a smaller footprint.
  • Support for diverse workloads with consistency across applications with a common platform to accelerate the deployment of intelligent applications across a hybrid cloud environment.
  • Message broker services. 

For more information about Red Hat OpenShift, visit Try Red Hat OpenShift.

Features and benefits

FeaturesBenefits
ScalabilityApplications running on OpenShift Container Platform can scale to thousands of instances across hundreds of nodes in seconds.
Multicluster managementConsolidated views of clusters and the use of Kubernetes technologies offer a consistent management layer both on-site and in public clouds.

Persistent storage

OpenShift Container Platform supports a broad spectrum of enterprise storage solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and our ecosystem (e.g., DellEMC, Portworx, NetApp) for running both stateful and stateless applications.

Open source standards

OpenShift Container Platform incorporates Open Containers Initiative (OCI), docker-formatted containers, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-certified Kubernetes for container orchestration, plus other open source technologies. 

Container portability

Container images built on the industry-standard OCI to ensure portability between developer workstations and production OpenShift Container Platform environments.

3-node clusters

Access all of the capabilities of a complete Kubernetes platform with a highly available, smaller footprint for edge architectures comprising both supervisor and worker nodes. 

Remote worker nodes

Place single worker nodes in remote locations where centralized supervisor nodes manage them from a larger site, such as a core or regional datacenter—especially important for remote edge locations that have space-constrained environments and limited power or cooling capabilities. 

Single nodes

Combines control and worker capabilities to address edge use cases with small physical environments, low bandwidth, or disconnected sites. 

Multi-architecture support

Whether Arm, x86, IBM Z, or IBM Power, Red Hat OpenShift runs on the hardware that is best suited for your application.

Automated installation and upgrades

Automated installation and over-the-air platform upgrades are supported in cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and on-premise using VMware and vSphere, Nutanix, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform, IBM Power Systems, IBM Z, LinuxONE, or bare metal. Services used from the OperatorHub can be deployed fully configured and upgradable with a single operation.

Pre-installed Red Hat OpenShift hardware

Speed up and simplify edge deployments powered by clusters that arrive with Red Hat OpenShift preinstalled directly from our original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners, reducing the resources and time to operationalize new hardware—placing your applications adjacent to data sources.

Automation

Streamlined and automated container and application builds, deployments, scaling, health management, and more are standard.

Robust ecosystem

An expanding ecosystem of partners provides a wide variety of integrations. Third parties deliver additional storage and network providers, integrated development environment (IDE), CI, and integrations, ISV solutions, and more. 

Self-service provisioning

Developers more quickly and more efficiently create applications on demand from the tools they use most, while operations retain full control over the entire environment. 

Multilanguage support 

Developers can use various languages, frameworks, and databases on the same platform. 

Integrated CI/CD pipelines

Developers reduce manual deployment work to deploy higher-quality software for CI and automated tests.

MLOps

Take advantage of model development, training, serving and monitoring not only in a cloud environment, but also on-premise and to the edge.

User interfaces

Admins and developers have direct access to a rich set of command-line tools, an extensible web console, and Eclipse-based IDEs. 

Source-to-image deployment

OpenShift Container Platform provides a toolkit and workflow for producing ready-to-run images by injecting source code into a container and letting the container prepare that source code for execution.

Tags:Cloud services, Hybrid cloud