Industry Use Cases and Case Studies of OpenShift

What is OpenShift

Red Hat® OpenShift® is a hybrid cloud, enterprise Kubernetes
application platform, trusted by 2,000+ organizations.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform service is deployed on infrastructure elements consisting of a single bastion instance, three master instances, and six node instances (consisting of 3 infrastructure nodes and 3 application nodes), as depicted in the following diagram.

WHAT’S INCLUDED

Container host and runtime

Red Hat OpenShift ships with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® CoreOS for the Kubernetes master, and supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux for worker nodes. Red Hat OpenShift supports standard Docker and CRI-O runtimes.

Enterprise Kubernetes

Red Hat OpenShift includes hundreds of fixes to defect, security, and performance issues for upstream Kubernetes in every release. It is tested with dozens of technologies and is a robust tightly-integrated platform supported over a 9-year lifecycle.

Validated integrations

Red Hat OpenShift includes software-defined networking and validates additional common networking solutions. Red Hat OpenShift also validates numerous storage and third-party plug-ins for every release.

Integrated container registry

Red Hat OpenShift ships with an integrated, private container registry (installed as part of the Kubernetes cluster or as standalone for greater flexibility). Teams with greater requirements can also use

Developer workflows

Red Hat OpenShift includes streamlined workflows to help teams get to production faster, including built-in Jenkins pipelines and our source-to-image technology to go straight from application code to container. It is also extensible to new frameworks like Istio and Knative.

Easy access to services

Red Hat OpenShift helps administrators and support application teams, with service brokers (including direct access to AWS services), validated third-party solutions, and Kubernetes operators through the embedded OperatorHub.

5 Benefits of Switching to OpenShift Container Platform

>Innovate and go to market faster

>Accelerate application development

>Enterprise-grade, container-based platform with no vendor lock-in

>Enable DevOps and department-wide collaboration

>Self-service provisioning

Use Cases

• Ensure that the hardware platform is well-designed for your container ecosystem needs — Select the right hardware infrastructure to enable all use-case workloads to be run at the right level of return on investment. The economics of platform infrastructure design are intensified in the container ecosystem because of the large number of active infrastructure software components, their resource overheads, and the trade-off between node cost (CapEx) and operating cost (OpEx).
• “Lift and shift” existing applications into a cloud-native container environment — You can migrate existing applications into more a cloud-native container environment. This environment delivers some of the natural benefits of operating system virtualization but also confers the full benefits of declarative-designed modular, container-based software architecture.
• Refactor older software code — Refactoring requires much more work than lift-and-shift migration. Refactoring provides access to the full benefits of a container ecosystem but at a higher cost.
• Develop new cloud-native applications — Like refactoring, this approach gives your organization the full benefits of a container ecosystem.
• Build distributed, location-independent, microservices-based cloud-native applications — Distributed cloud-native microservices are more easily isolated, deployed, and scaled by using discrete container instances.
• Adopt new tools to support continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) — DevOps teams, in particular, appreciate the advantages of automated build, test, and deployment operations so that container images can be handled only once through the entire concept-to-production lifecycle.
• Simplify and automate repetitive tasks and activities — Automated orchestration of frequently executed operations reduces management overhead and increases the agility and time-value of the DevOps process.

Case Studies

Peruvian financial services provider offers innovative digital experiences

Caja Municipal Ica, a Peruvian public-law financial firm, sought to enhance its digital presence to improve services for more than 230,000 customers and attract new business. Now, with a microservices architecture based on Red Hat OpenShift®, its developers can quickly create and launch new, innovative services as the business grows. Customers can reliably access their financial information through a mobile application, rather than visiting a bank branch. As a result, Caja Municipal Ica is positioned as an innovator in the country’s financial services market.

Top-20 pharmaceutical company delivers services 5 times faster with containers

Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the pharmaceutical industry’s top 20 companies, sought to bring new, digital services to its customers in line with industry changes, such as telehealth, electronic health records (EHRs), and more. To support faster, more responsive development while remaining compliant with industry regulations, the company adopted Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise container platform. Combining Red Hat OpenShift with continuous delivery (CD), Boehringer Ingelheim has achieved 5 times faster delivery to the market, enhanced scalability and management with automation, and improved its talent acquisition with enterprise open source success.

Japanese mutual aid organization enhances development with container platform

Japan CO-OP Mutual Aid Consumers’ Co-operative Association (JCIF) is a compensatory insurance organization that pays mutual aid to its members in the event of illness or injury.

Challenge

To improve its services — including policyholder support and applications — JCIF sought to replace its monolithic legacy infrastructure with flexible, cost-effective, and efficient application development.

Solution

JCIF used Red Hat OpenShift to create a Kubernetes-based application environment using Linux containers. The organization worked with Red Hat Support to optimize its deployment, from container creation to performance tuning and log setting. During the initial consultation, system design, and development phases, JCIF also worked closely with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions (CTC), a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner.

Benefits

• Replaced server-by-server approach with container-level flexibility
• Improved time to market for customer-facing websites and in-demand features
• Established flexible scalability to more easily and cost-effectively respond to traffic increases

“In our search for a product that will offer agility and flexibility, we introduced Red Hat OpenShift as our web systems infrastructure, and it performed as expected.”

Ken Kawazoe

Manager, Web Systems Development Department, Development Division,
Japan Co-op Insurance Consumers’ Co-operative Federation (JCIF)

NEC Corporation Onboards Red Hat OpenShift to Streamline Air Travel

By combining NEC’s biometric scanning technology with Red Hat’s OpenShift, we have built an agile and highly scalable platform for the future utilizing open, robust and flexible container services.

TOSHIFUMI YOSHIZAKISENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, NEC CORPORATION

A global leader in IT and networking solutions, NEC provides products and solutions to address a variety of public and private sector challenges, with the company emphasizing public safety solutions, including biometrics, over the past few years. One ID extends biometric technology to provide a solution tailored to the growing need for “fast travel” in the airline industry.

Sunrise Adopts Agile Culture and Accelerates Time to Market by 75% with Red Hat’s Hybrid Cloud Technologies

We were convinced by Red Hat OpenShift as a powerful platform that would enable us to leap into the future. Now OpenShift is a central part of our business IT, and has given us the opportunity to be more flexible and responsive.

ELMAR GRASSERCHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SUNRISE COMMUNICATIONS AG

Sunrise, the largest non state-controlled telecommunications company in Switzerland, offers mobile and fixed line telephony and broadband, including a modern 5G network, as well as live and on-demand video streaming services. To stay ahead of competition and convert the major opportunity that 5G presents, Sunrise is working to evolve its operations through infrastructure, product and service differentiation, and operational efficiency, with a focus on innovation and cross-pollination between its business units. As part of this effort, the IT business within Sunrise initiated a digital and cultural transformation, migrating from legacy architectures to a microservices environment and moving to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology, where teams involved in developing and executing innovation collaborate more closely.

Already using Red Hat open source platform and middleware technologies, Sunrise looked to Red Hat for the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform and for support with the transition to a more agile culture. Red Hat Consulting provided a series of custom workshops and training sessions to help Sunrise to make full use of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technologies based on the needs of the business, which included development of a reusable blueprint for application development.