Our final post on Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes offers a look at the key benefits of using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Enterprise Kubernetes, understanding them further, and knowing their strengths when used together.
Kubernetes is an open source project (or even a framework), while OpenShift is a product that comes in many variants. Think of Kubernetes as the engine that drives OpenShift, and OpenShift as the complete car (hence platform) that will get you where you want to go.
Containers are changing the way modern applications are built. Shifting from VMs to containers can seem daunting, but the benefits are real. Here is why now is the perfect time to begin your containerized future.
Key benefits:
- Integrated platform including container host, Kubernetes, and application life-cycle management using your choice of infrastructure
- Greater value from operations and development teams throughout the application life cycle
- More secure, validated container content and services from a wide partner ecosystem
- Faster application development cycles and more frequent software deployments with simpler installations and upgrades, even in air-gapped environments
- Lower IT operations costs and application portability across hybrid cloud and multicloud footprints
Kubernetes and OpenShift are independent container technologies that are related to each other in many ways and complement each other. Kubernetes can deploy Docker images and orchestrate. Similarly, OpenShift seamlessly manages the Kubernetes cluster. With Kubernetes, one can manage hundreds of containers.
Kubernetes allows auto-scaling, load balancing and storage management features to containers. Plus, Kubernetes has extremely powerful community support. OpenShift powered with Kubernetes takes Kubernetes further and enables more simplicity in the management of workloads along with different types of tools.
For businesses, containers help produce:
- Faster time to market as developers spend less time debugging environments and more time writing code.
- Lower server costs because more containers drive greater resource utilization.
- Increased deployment infrastructure options because containers can run anywhere.
Until OpenShift 3, Kubernetes was not a part of this product. So, OpenShift is not really about using Kubernetes. It’s about giving users a professional and efficient way of deploying and managing containerized applications. However, Kubernetes seems to be one of the most powerful toolboxes to achieve that goal. That’s why it was adopted by Red Hat as the core component of OpenShift. They began to customize it and built what ended up being the OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution (OKD).
If you’re ready to start your journey with containers, Kubernetes applications with OpenShift will provide you open source container technology and create the essential tools required for securing, simplifying, and automatically updating your container infrastructure.
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