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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Platform As A Service
  5. Kubernetes vs OpenShift

Kubernetes vs OpenShift

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.4K
Votes517
GitHub Stars885
Forks510
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Stacks61.2K
Followers52.8K
Votes685

Kubernetes vs OpenShift: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the realm of container orchestration, Kubernetes and OpenShift are two popular solutions that aid in managing containerized applications efficiently. However, they exhibit some key differences that set them apart in terms of features and capabilities.

  1. Architecture: The fundamental difference lies in their architecture. Kubernetes is an open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. On the other hand, OpenShift is a more comprehensive enterprise-ready platform built on top of Kubernetes, offering additional features such as a web console, developer tools, and enhanced security controls.

  2. Support and Maintenance: When it comes to support and maintenance, OpenShift offers commercial support options from Red Hat, the company behind OpenShift, ensuring enterprise-grade support for production environments. In contrast, Kubernetes relies heavily on its vibrant community for support, although commercial support options are also available through third-party vendors.

  3. User Interface: Another notable difference is in the user interface. Kubernetes primarily relies on command-line tools for interacting with the cluster, whereas OpenShift provides a web-based console that simplifies cluster management, monitoring, and deployment tasks, making it more user-friendly for administrators and developers.

  4. Security Features: OpenShift places a strong emphasis on security features, offering additional layers of security controls such as role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and container image scanning out-of-the-box. While Kubernetes also provides security features, OpenShift's integrated security mechanisms make it a preferred choice for organizations with stringent security requirements.

  5. Developer Experience: OpenShift distinguishes itself by providing a more streamlined developer experience through its developer tools and workflows. It simplifies the process of building, deploying, and scaling applications, offering features such as source-to-image (S2I) build process and built-in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, which Kubernetes lacks out of the box.

  6. Cost Considerations: While both Kubernetes and OpenShift are open-source platforms, the cost considerations come into play when looking at the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). OpenShift's enterprise features, support, and proprietary tools may result in higher operational costs compared to using vanilla Kubernetes, making it essential for organizations to evaluate their specific needs and budget constraints.

In Summary, Kubernetes and OpenShift differ in architecture, support, user interface, security features, developer experience, and cost considerations, catering to various requirements and preferences in the realm of container orchestration.

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Advice on Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes

Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

DecidedonGitHubGitHubGitHub PagesGitHub PagesMarkdownMarkdown

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • @{GitHub}|tool:27| (incl. @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683|/@{Markdown}|tool:1147| for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively @{Git}|tool:1046| as revision control system
  • @{SourceTree}|tool:1599| as @{Git}|tool:1046| GUI
  • @{Visual Studio Code}|tool:4202| as IDE
  • @{CircleCI}|tool:190| for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • @{Prettier}|tool:7035| / @{TSLint}|tool:5561| / @{ESLint}|tool:3337| as code linter
  • @{SonarQube}|tool:2638| as quality gate
  • @{Docker}|tool:586| as container management (incl. @{Docker Compose}|tool:3136| for multi-container application management)
  • @{VirtualBox}|tool:774| for operating system simulation tests
  • @{Kubernetes}|tool:1885| as cluster management for docker containers
  • @{Heroku}|tool:133| for deploying in test environments
  • @{nginx}|tool:1052| as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • @{SSLMate}|tool:2752| (using @{OpenSSL}|tool:3091|) for certificate management
  • @{Amazon EC2}|tool:18| (incl. @{Amazon S3}|tool:25|) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • @{PostgreSQL}|tool:1028| as preferred database system
  • @{Redis}|tool:1031| as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
12.8M views12.8M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Kubernetes
Kubernetes

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java (the standard in today's Enterprise);OpenShift is extensible with a customizable cartridge functionality that allows developers to add any other language they wish. We've seen everything from Clojure to Cobol running on OpenShift;OpenShift supports frameworks ranging from Spring, to Rails, to Play;Autoscaling- OpenShift can scale your application by adding additional instances of your application and enabling clustering. Alternatively, you can manually scale the amount of resources with which your application is deployed when needed;OpenShift by Red Hat is built on open-source technologies (Red Hat Enterprise Linux- RHEL);One Click Deployment- Deploying to the OpenShift platform is as easy a clicking a button or entering a "Git push" command
Lightweight, simple and accessible;Built for a multi-cloud world, public, private or hybrid;Highly modular, designed so that all of its components are easily swappable
Statistics
GitHub Stars
885
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
510
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.6K
Stacks
61.2K
Followers
1.4K
Followers
52.8K
Votes
517
Votes
685
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 99
    Good free plan
  • 63
    Open Source
  • 47
    Easy setup
  • 43
    Nodejs support
  • 42
    Well documented
Cons
  • 2
    Decisions are made for you, limiting your options
  • 2
    License cost
  • 1
    Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams
Pros
  • 166
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 130
    Simple and powerful
  • 108
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
Cons
  • 16
    Steep learning curve
  • 15
    Poor workflow for development
  • 8
    Orchestrates only infrastructure
  • 4
    High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
  • 2
    Too heavy for simple systems
Integrations
No integrations available
Vagrant
Vagrant
Docker
Docker
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Ansible
Ansible
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Rancher

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

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