Kubernetes how you want it: How enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated can lower barriers to container adoption in the public cloud

There’s no shortage of data pointing to the growth of Linux container and cloud-native applications. According to a recent survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), many of the Kubernetes deployments underpinning these workloads are taking place in public clouds. While Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform for on-premise and hybrid cloud containerized workloads, we also enable organizations to consume OpenShift-as-a-service with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated.

Today, we’re adding enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, from instance types to updated pricing and new models allowing for OpenShift Dedicated to be deployed on customer's cloud subscriptions. This is designed to provide more flexibility to customers and help make it easier for them to deploy containerized applications on enterprise Kubernetes in the public cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and delivered as a fully managed service directly by Red Hat on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud providers. This enables customers to consume Red Hat’s powerful container and Kubernetes platform just like other cloud services to gain greater agility, flexibility and focus on building applications.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on AWS now supports the ability for customers to bring their own cloud accounts. This new option allows customers to use their AWS contracts and pricing as well as their existing security profiles that have been validated by their corporate security teams, helping to further reduce friction in adopting Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on AWS.

New features provided by Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated include:

• Multi-AZ stretched clusters which allow for cluster deployment across multiple availability zones (AZ). This helps to maximize service availability for product systems and applications.

• Expanded EC2 instance types including memory-optimized, compute-optimized or general purpose, which can be sized to meet specific needs.

Additional enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated include:

• Encrypted persistent volumes

• Cluster console for more admin-level cluster status, node visibility, access control management and a cluster-wide event stream

• Improvements to the dedicated-admin role, such as the ability to modify the default project template

Another key facet of public cloud computing is cost-effectiveness, and updates to Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated pricing on AWS helps to make these decisions more straightforward for IT leaders. Starting on Dec. 12, 2018, the cost of an OpenShift Dedicated Cluster is reduced by 25 percent and the cost of additional nodes have been cut by 50 percent. This helps reduce the overhead costs of running enterprise Kubernetes in AWS while providing a flexible, supported and fully open platform for production deployments.

As with all Red Hat technologies, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is backed by Red Hat’s extensive expertise and award-winning support 24x7. We feel that these pricing updates combined with the enhanced features make Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated an even more effective platform for building new cloud-native workloads and bridging existing workloads to public cloud instances.

At Red Hat Summit 2018, we announced a Red Hat OpenShift solution jointly engineered with Microsoft: Red Hat OpenShift on Azure. As we approach general availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Azure in 2019, the first batch of customers have been on-boarded to a private preview of the offering. If you would like to join private preview, please let your Red Hat Account Executive know about your interest.

To learn more about the new pricing and features in Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, please visit https://www.openshift.com/products/dedicated/.

Sathish Balakrishnan is senior director of product management for OpenShift Online at Red Hat.