Why choose Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS?

You know you need to move to the cloud, but do you know why you need to move to the cloud? 

You might (rightly) feel some skepticism about moving to a new platform just because it's grabbed the attention of the tech world, and it doesn't help that there are so many platforms to choose from. You should question a move to the cloud. That's not only the sensible thing to do, it's the responsible thing to do. 

Migrating to the cloud isn't about doing what your current sites already do, it's about what they don't do yet. Here are five signs that your infrastructure is primed for a move to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).

1. Scale

While it's true that the cloud is big, it's what's in the cloud that counts. Linux containers and their orchestrators let you run as many instances of your applications as are in demand at any given moment, allowing you to scale your workload more easily. Containers decouple supply and demand; when demand rises, so does your virtual supply. You can offer services limited only by the resources of the cloud, and the AWS cloud is, of course, very powerful.

Bottom line: If your users or customers aren't able to access your services when they're needed the most, then you need the scalability of the cloud. With Red Hat OpenShift, your applications and services are deployed in pods, and pods can be created or destroyed in response to user demand.

2. Developers

When a company starts its migration to the cloud, momentum often drops once developers are asked to get involved. It's not the developers' fault, though. When planning a migration, it's easy to forget the basic requirements of developer teams. Luckily, ROSA has some unique ways to solve this problem for your developers.

When you adopt OpenShift, you can adopt cloud-native development in earnest. Tools like Quarkus and Buildah make it easier to build applications for the cloud on the cloud, and OpenShift's internal registry makes it easy to deploy them. ArgoCD and Jenkins can run in pods, providing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

Bottom line: Using ROSA helps avoid a dip in productivity for your developers and instead gives them a boost to not only maintain but also improve their workflow.

3. Portable legacy software

Admit it. Your organization runs one legacy application that you just can't shake. It's essential, there's no modern replacement, and somebody in your organization needs it for their job.

Believe it or not, that legacy application may have a place in the cloud. In fact, the cloud might be the ideal place for it. By running a legacy application in a container, you're functionally taking a "snapshot" of the application and, more importantly, its runtime environment. A container never has to know how much the world around it has advanced. With all the libraries and runtimes it requires to run placed into the same sandbox as the application, OpenShift can help run your legacy application for as long as you choose to run it.

Bottom line: Containers can't do the impossible, but they're controlled environments that can help you preserve vital compute states.

4. Time to market

Development time notwithstanding, spinning up a pod in OpenShift and deploying on ROSA can often be done in mere seconds. Even without a CI/CD system in place, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS ensures that your team already knows the platform your application is going to run on. There are no more variables around which web server will be serving the application, which load balancer will manage traffic, or which version of a vital library is installed.

Bottom line: With OpenShift, the platform your developers work in is the same platform the application runs on.

5. Commodity software

A "cloud" is basically a multi-node supercomputer. It's the utterly impossible laptop you can't afford to take home, so you rent time on it instead. But for all their power, the way you interface with your cloud can vary depending on which cloud you choose.

ROSA leverages OpenShift, and OpenShift is built for the cloud. OpenShift is an operating environment for ROSA, but it's also available on other major cloud providers. That means when you and your teams learn OpenShift, you've learned a lot more than just ROSA. You've learned cloud computing.

Bottom line: Learning OpenShift unlocks not only ROSA, but most other major cloud providers, for your organization.

Try ROSA

You know you need to move to the cloud, but you're not sure which cloud provider is right for your organization. Thanks to OpenShift, you have the freedom to choose from several great providers, and with OpenShift on AWS you get one of the most powerful available. You can start working with ROSA today on https://console.redhat.com, and learn what you can do with it on the ROSA learning hub.