Azure Red Hat OpenShift: A complete, Out of the Box Application Development Platform
Written by:
- Lyle Dodge, Associate Director, Accenture Microsoft Business Group
- Nicholas Gerasimatos, Red Hat Channel Alliance Manager - Cloud Strategy Evangelist
In this blog, we’ll look at the benefits of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and how the combination of Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure delivers a complete out of the box application development platform available today.
Hybrid cloud and edge computing are transforming and expanding how enterprises use the cloud. Infrastructure operating models in enterprises have made cloud native the new default mode of software development. In these complex types of architectures, Kubernetes has become a favorite choice due to its vendor-agnostic characteristics and advanced infrastructure capabilities.
Kubernetes has made scaled-out applications on multiple cloud environments a reality, but it has also introduced a tremendous amount of complexity into IT departments (1). As a result, organizations often prefer to adopt an opinionated Kubernetes application development platform like Red Hat OpenShift as opposed to building their own container platform.
Why Red Hat OpenShift?
Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform with built in security capabilities and a consistent foundation to deliver applications anywhere, enables software engineers to develop and deploy applications at scale. Red Hat OpenShift is a popular option for on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud container-based architectures because it includes all the components you need to run Kubernetes in production, including the underlying Linux platform, integrated networking, storage, monitoring, logging, installation, and upgrades.
OpenShift has developer-friendly features and functionality that empowers developers and provides a more consistent experience. Regardless of which environment you choose, OpenShift gives your development team a more seamless way to build, test, deploy, and operate their workloads. Plus, OpenShift is built with the integrated security features you need across the application lifecycle and beyond the infrastructure layer.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is a turnkey application development platform jointly engineered, managed, and supported by Microsoft and Red Hat to enable customers to build, deploy and operate OpenShift on Azure. As a native Azure service, organizations can more easily use and integrate with other first-party Azure applications and can utilize either pay-as-you-go or discounted pre-paid pricing models within their Azure agreements. Since both ARO and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are available from Microsoft, customers with Microsoft Azure commitments can save money buying Red Hat products directly from Microsoft.
ARO comes with a financially backed 99.95% SLA and the support and expertise of a dedicated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. This enables customers to offload platform management, from deployment to daily operations, to experts who proactively help monitor, manage, update and secure clusters. This approach enables organizations to decrease their operational overhead when moving to the cloud and benefit from the same tooling and developer experience they had on-premises or with other infrastructures.
How Red Hat OpenShift enables your Cloud Strategy
In a multi-environment architecture and operating model, OpenShift customers can choose to deploy and operate on-premises, on edge, or on Azure. Customers can leverage OpenShift platform features, such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, providing a single pane of glass for clusters across their environments. In addition, customers can deploy first- or third-party applications right from within the OpenShift environment using Red Hat’s integrated commerce platform. In some industries, this provides organizations with an answer to regulators around portability (vendor lock-in), or provides the flexibility to become cloud native on-premises by improving/modernizing the on-prem landscape first and then partially or fully moving most of the workload to Microsoft ARO without rewriting the code.
OpenShift simplifies day 2 operations by being strongly opinionated. This approach can streamline the entire system operations workflow by making it more efficient and consistent, regardless of the environment where the OpenShift platform is deployed. For example, OpenShift’s ability to monitor an application workload and collect the logs in a central place is part of any system that follows the most basic best practices. OpenShift goes beyond these best practice capabilities and covers multiple observability aspects by leveraging popular open-source projects: Prometheus for monitoring and alert management, Jaeger for transaction tracing, Kiali for dashboards and visualization, and ISTIO to implement a service mesh for distributed microservices architectures.
When it comes to security updates, Red Hat engineers actively push security fixes to the open-source Kubernetes upstream repository enabling everyone to quickly benefit from them. Since it might be a while before the next Kubernetes release, the benefit of being on OpenShift is that these security fixes are pushed to customers right away. With Red Hat’s recent acquisition of StackRox, all OpenShift clusters now have enhanced security features baked in.
Red Hat OpenShift provides a seamless developer experience
With OpenShift, you get a full-featured Kubernetes cluster under the hood. Therefore, all Kubernetes-related tooling is compatible with OpenShift. Moreover, Red Hat enhanced the developer experience by providing complementary CLI tooling and a rich web-based user interface that gives control over all the OpenShift platform capabilities.
Plus, using a GitOps model, OpenShift encourages developers to perform all the configuration as code, backed by their familiar Git repositories, to automatically push changes across one or multiple clusters, leveraging their declarative nature to minimize inconsistencies in a hybrid or multi-cloud Kubernetes setup.
How Accenture can help you maximize the benefits of Azure Red Hat OpenShift
As a top Global System Integrator for both Red Hat and Microsoft Azure, Accenture helps organizations maximize the benefits and innovation of ARO, and all Azure and Red Hat services at the same time. Accenture can efficiently modernize existing workloads to run on a stable and operational container platform, leveraging OpenShift’s hybrid cloud platform wherever workloads live.
Accenture has over 1000 skilled container resources, 100+ Certified Kubernetes Application Developers, 50+ Certified Kubernetes Administrators, and 20+ Certified Kubernetes Security Specialists. This depth in container platform skills means Accenture understands the underlying Kubernetes platform that OpenShift is built on, the ins and outs of each Hyperscaler Kubernetes platform, and how to maximize the value of the OpenShift platform.
Accenture Microsoft Business Group
Accenture’s Microsoft capabilities are unmatched in the market today — our Accenture Microsoft Business Group has over 98,000 Microsoft skilled resources and over 37,000 certifications on the Azure platform. Accenture is a 16-time Microsoft alliance partner of the year and has delivered over 35,000 projects on the Microsoft platform. You can learn more about Accenture’s capabilities on by visiting the Accenture Migration to Microsoft Azure site.
Accenture Red Hat Business Group
Accenture’s Red Hat Business Group has well over 100 certified Red Hat Professionals, with deep expertise on everything from OpenShift to RHEL, JBoss, Ansible Automation and more. More information on Red Hat’s partnerships with can be found on the Red Hat partner portal for Accenture and Microsoft.
Accenture Cloud Innovation
Accenture’s advisory practices have the depth of expertise to help our customers take advantage of Azure Red Hat OpenShift in combination with the best of the Azure cloud and the Microsoft ecosystem. Accenture has an extensive collaboration and innovation lab focused on hybrid cloud, helping our customers envision how OpenShift can cross on-premises and multiple hyperscalers with a seamless management platform. You can stay up to date on news from Accenture’s cloud practice on the Accenture cloud computing blog.
