OpenShift Room for Improvement

JK
OpenShift consultant at HCS Company

The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations. 

What we see now is a move from traditional DevOps to GitOps. We use Argo CD for that, which provides a little more integration. It would be nice to have the same UI experience in the OpenShift console without having to log in on a third console.

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AS
Technical Marketing Engineer - Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

One area for improvement is the documentation. They need to make it a little bit more user-friendly. 

Also, if you compare certain features and the installation process with Rancher,  Rancher is simpler.

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MB
Senior Kubernetes Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution needs to support the new features in Kubernetes more quickly. For example, there are some Kubernetes features that we rely on that are not yet integrated into OpenShift, even though they have been available for six months. Another aspect that needs improvement is the console and the user interaction with the console itself.

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Buyer's Guide
OpenShift
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpenShift. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SP
VP at United Overseas Bank Limited (UOB)

My team has found some bugs in OpenShift due to continuous integration, and this is an area for improvement in the platform. RedHat should fix the bugs.

Another area for improvement in OpenShift is that upgrading clusters can be challenging, resulting in downtime.

Application support also needs improvement in OpenShift because the platform doesn't support all applications in the cloud.

I'd like upgraded storage in the next release of OpenShift, especially when I need to do a DR exercise. It would also be good if the platform allows mirroring with another cluster, or more portability in terms of moving applications to another cluster.

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Vikram Casula - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Infrastructure & Cloud ops at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

One of the features that I've observed in Tanzu Mission Control is that I can manage multiple Kubernetes environments. For instance, one of my lines of business is using OpenShift OKD; another one wants to use Google Anthos, and somebody else wants to use VMware Tanzu. If I have to manage all these, Tanzu Mission Control is giving me the opportunity to completely manage all of my Kubernetes clusters, whereas, with OpenShift, I can only manage a particular area. I can't manage other Kubernetes clusters. I would like to have the option to manage all Kubernetes clusters with OpenShift.

I would like to have self-service capability. A lot of developers want to become independent today, and they don't want to depend on the Infra teams for managing, provisioning, etc. If we can give a self-service capability, in terms of building a particular Kubernetes cluster end-to-end, to developers, that would be a plus. That's the ask of the hour.

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Mustafa Kavcioglu - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at Halkbank

We need some kind of a multi-cluster management solution from the Red Hat site. With that, we have got some problems; however, right now, we can manage to run the solution without any problems.

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Balaji K R - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We want to see better alerting, especially in critical situations requiring immediate intervention. Until we go to the dashboard, it can be challenging to quickly recognize that there's an issue for us to deal with. Therefore, a popup of the event or a tweaked GUI to catch our attention when it's alerting would be a welcome change. Everything else is good. We don't need any additional features. From the operations perspective, as an administrator, there is nothing concerning.

Red Hat has to improve its support. They should provide quicker and better support for issues with lower severity.

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Johann B. - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

There is room for improvement regarding the secret management and the integrated vault. I want easier node management and more user-friendly scripts for installing master and worker nodes.

In addition, the configuration for addons onto OpenShift could be more straightforward; for example, if I want to integrate with a general monitoring solution. 

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JS
PaaS Support Engineer at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

The software-defined networking part of it caused us quite a bit of heartburn. We ran into a lot of problems with the difference between on-prem and cloud, where we had to make quite a number of modifications. That heartburn meant millions of dollars for us. That was a year ago and the product has matured since then. They've since resolved it, so it's not really an issue anymore.

The storage part of it was also problematic. There were quite a few things that really hampered us. But it's much better now.

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ES
DevOps Engineer at Nudtteo

An enhancement to consider for the future might involve incorporating a comprehensive solution for CI/CD tailored specifically for OpenShift.

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Wesley Lee - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The monitoring part could be better to monitor the performance. The automation part could also be better because we had a hard time integrating our application with OCP.

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Markos Sellis - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

One thing that can be improved but is surely difficult to improve is the cost. We have a lot of customers who would prefer a Vanilla Kubernetes solution or another solution that combines Kubernetes with some cloud provider, especially if they are already using a specific cloud provider. When we try to work with them, some customers complain about it.

Another thing is that the installation and setup process is a little bit complex, but I must admit that it has improved a lot as compared to the older version. 

Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications.

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EdisonMacabebe - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Section6

OpenShift could be improved if it were more accessible for smaller budgets. I currently mostly use Raspberry Pi, which will be over to use Kubernetes. As a platform, I am using Raspberry Pi rather than using a very large configuration computer. 

The solution requires eight or more cores of CPUs, multiplied over the number of nodes needed to make OpenShift reliable, making it susceptible to failures.

In the future, I would like to see a roadmap to have Wasm supported. If you have WebAssembly as an alternative to Docker, it would be great.

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JA
Senior System Engineer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required.

OpenShift's scalability has scope for improvement.

OpenShift's technical support team needs to improve the support they provide to my company since the support we currently receive depends on the support package we have from the ones that OpenShift offers, like platinum, gold, or silver. OpenShift's technical support team is good, but it takes time for them to find the root cause of a particular issue. One of the clients of my company doesn't face many issues with the product, so we don't use much of the technical support. I can say that OpenShift's technical support team is okay in general.

I have experience with the product, but I don't possess a large amount of technical knowledge to comment on what functionalities need to be added to the product.

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Arun Sahani - PeerSpot reviewer
Kubernetes/Openshift Security Consultant at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

Some things need to be improved in the solution. Some of the storage services and integrations with third-party tools should be made possible.

I think some more things will come in, like the projects of CNCFs. I think that verified CNCF projects will be integrated into OpenShift.

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Yossi Shmulevitch - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at SoftContact

The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes

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SP
Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution.

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Ronald Hariyanto - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Department Digital Center of Excellence at Pegadaian

OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network.

In a new release of OpenShift, they should add Kibana, Grafana, and Elasticsearch.

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AK
Executive Head of Department - M-PESA Tech at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management.

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CB
Senior Manager - Cloud at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. 

These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic. They shouldn't be linked together so that when you upgrade one, you must also upgrade the other. It doesn't make sense if they aren't related as operators.

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KA
Head of Architecture at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We experienced issues around desktop security, which stopped us from implementing a new feature that had been developed. This needs to be improved in order to expand the usage of the product.

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AD
Solution Architect at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

The product’s integration with Windows containers and other third-party products needs improvement.

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Timothius Tirtawan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The flexibility is nice, yet comes with great sacrifice. It's much more complicated in general. We'd like the flexibility on offer to be simplified a bit so that we don't have to do so many workarounds. 

The interface could be simplified a bit more. 

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AANKITGUPTAA - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift, but we do in Kubernetes. So, it'll be great to get an orchestration platform like Rancher or Kubernetes.

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SR
Lead Enterprise Architect at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses.

They should partner with Jenkins. It goes without saying that I need Jenkins for my CICD. If Jenkins comes with support, that's good. But if there is a licensed product, I need to secure that license and then I will get support. 

Although the bundling with OCP is better than that offered by others, they can work more on it.

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PR
Software engineer at ACI Worldwide

The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement. There are vast metrics and if OpenShift can provide the geometric thread that would be helpful.

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YK
Assistant to Vice President at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide. 

Making use of features, such as serverless technology we easily integrate these services with OpenShift. It would be a win-win, because then you can choose the best of all the worlds, and then build your solution.

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it_user683466 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior (Consultant) Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

They could provide a template for application deployment and building services and routes so it can all be promoted as a bundle if needed.

This would allow the promotion of the application (which includes the Spring Boot jar, the Kubernetes Service, the Kubernetes Route, dependencies such as properties or secrets) from development through the production environment.

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SK
Tech Lead at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The latest 4.0 version of OpenShift disabled a few of the features we previously made use of, although this wasn't a huge deal. 

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SB
Works with 10,001+ employees

Most of the configurations are command based. If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great.

You need to have in-depth technical knowledge of the platform to do any kind of application setup due to the complexity of configurations related to infrastructure, security, etc.

Maybe in the future, we can get multi-cloud options such as GCP, Azure, etc.

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Gustavo Magni - PeerSpot reviewer
lead architect at Sys Manager

The solution encounters lengthier downtime issues for virtual upgrades. In this case, we have to opt for alternative upgrade strategies. This area needs improvement. Also, they should release its serverless version.

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GR
QA Lead at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are challenges related to additional security layers, connectivity compliance for endpoints, and integration. Additionally, it needs a little training to understand the process.

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it_user685341 - PeerSpot reviewer
Red Hat Certified Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The following issues need some attention:

  • Documentation: this is a very complex product and several areas are lacking proper documentation.
  • Templates: it takes a lot of effort to write satisfying templates for projects. More real-world examples and specialized editors would be valuable.
  • Day 2 tasks: how do I make sure my cluster works in the long term? This includes all tasks that go beyond the installation, i.e. what you’re facing the day after the installation.

I would personally give a list of topics to the OpenShift administrator for reference after the initial installation has been performed, such as:

  • What should you monitor?
  • What to backup and how often?
  • What should you look for when a node seems slow?
  • How to clean up Docker caches on various components?

I would even go further and give a maintenance schedule, as with a car (this is just an example) such as:

  • Every week: watch for errors in the logs, check disk space on nodes.
  • Every month: check for critical updates on nodes, delete unused projects.
  • Every second month: update OpenShift version.
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TB
Director and Head of IT at a non-tech company

The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications. I believe OpenShift/Kubernetes will play an even more important role in the future, where it will eliminate a lot of the need for virtualization solutions. Such solutions are the proper building blocks for DevOps needs.

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SD
TechOps Engineer - Middleware & Containers specialist at EBRC -European Business Reliance Centre

We submitted over 25 requests for enhancement to Red Hat from the beginning of the OpenShift version 3.1, and they were implemented in the last version of the product 3.11.

The main drawback was the upgrade from Openshift Enterprise 3.11 to Openshift Enterprise 4 up to now.

But the new release Openshift Enterprise 4.2 add a way to migrate from old cluster to the new one easily based on Appranix solution. Namespaces with all data-protection mechanism is taken into account.


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it_user704028 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Data and Systems Architect at a tech services company

Possibly, the most complicated part is the configuration for an application. Other solutions do have easier ways to configure an application deployment, but they also come with greater restrictions.

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EA
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

OpenShift's storage management could be better. In the next release, OpenShift should include a console for running scripts.

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DM
System Installation Solution Department Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated. This scares newbies from learning it. I hope that the OpenShift developers will improve this "dark side" of OpenShift.

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it_user674052 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application architect, Senior UNIX system administrator, Middleware specialist at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I think that container development needs to be improved. The source 2 image is very comfortable, but it is not documented. There are no precise guidelines from RH. The source 2 image is the biggest addition that Red Hat gives to Kubernetes, but you cannot depend on Red Hat for every customization.

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RW
Team Leader at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

I don't really see any improvements that need to be done.

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it_user712179 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Operations Officer at a tech services company
  • Build
  • Deployment
  • Product delivery

These areas would save time for the entire team.

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it_user685308 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

For some reason there have been some DNS issues. At this time I am not convinced it is OpenShift though. I will have to circle back to this one.

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it_user850422 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

It could use auto-scaling based on criteria such as transaction volume, queue backlog, etc. Currently, it is limited to CPU and memory. 

Credential not hidden, so people on the same group can view it.

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AR
Senior Software Engineer at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees

It would be great if it supported Bitbucket repositories too.

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it_user683448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The security model is hard to understand and use. Debugging errors can be hard as well.

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it_user850419 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Needs work on volume handling (although this is already better with GlusterFS). Security (SSSD) would also be an improvement.

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PV
Research And Development Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Some of the features are platform-specific, so if it is ported to other cloud solutions it requires a lot of changes.

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it_user685308 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

There have been some issues with security, in particular, that we had to address. At times they make it “clunky." I am quite confident these parameters will appear in the next releases. They have been reported as bugs and are actually in process. Despite this, the competition is rapidly losing ground.

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it_user701412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scaling has a few defects, such as not scaling up at threshold values. This needs improvement. Also, require little more integration perspective, such as Service Desk integration and Source Code/CI integration.

I rated the solution as an eight out of 10 for two reasons:

  1. Autoscaling issues. It does not increase in a seamless manner. Sometimes, CPU utilization/Memory utilization exceeds and the application just hangs or gets into HeapSpace or OutOfMemory error.
  2. Sizing. Maintaining the number of pods at scale.
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HH
Infrastructure Architect at a government with 501-1,000 employees

I'd like to see support for more than one server, a mobile user registry. With that, you could divide it more granulary for development and render for testing and using different IDs.

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it_user849108 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Installation and setup are a bit tedious, especially in a proxy environment.

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Buyer's Guide
OpenShift
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpenShift. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.