OpenShift

Last updated
OpenShift
Developer Red Hat
Initial releaseMay 4, 2011;14 years ago (2011-05-04)
Stable release
4.20 / October 16, 2025;3 months ago (2025-10-16) [1]
Written in Go, React
Operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS
Type Cloud computing, Platform as a service
License Commercial
Website www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product, OpenShift Container Platform, is a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. OKD (Origin Community Distribution) serves as the community-driven upstream.

Contents

The family's other products provide this platform through different environments. Deployment methods include self-managed; cloud native under ROSA (Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS), ARO (Azure Red Hat OpenShift) and RHOIC (Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud); OpenShift Online as software as a service; and OpenShift Dedicated as a managed service.

The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor container resources and health, manage users and work with operators. Developer views are oriented around working with application resources within a namespace. OpenShift also provides a CLI that supports a superset of the actions provided by the Kubernetes CLI.

History

OpenShift originated from Red Hat's acquisition of Makara, a company marketing a platform as a service (PaaS) based on Linux containers, in November 2010. [2] [3] [4] It was announced in May 2011 as proprietary technology and only became open-source in May 2012. [5] Until version 3, released in June 2015, OpenShift used custom developed technologies. Version 3 adopted Docker as the container technology and Kubernetes as the orchestration engine. [3] Version 4 further changed the architecture, notably adopting CRI-O as the container runtime (and Podman for interacting with pods and containers), and Buildah as the container build tool, thus removing the dependency on Docker. [6]

OpenShift Online v2

Online offered version 2[ when? ] of the OKD project source code, which is also available under the Apache License Version 2.0. [7] This version supported a variety of languages, frameworks, and databases via pre-built "cartridges" running under resource-quota "gears". Developers could add other languages, databases, or components via the OpenShift Cartridge application programming interface. [8] This was deprecated in favour of OpenShift 3, [9] and was withdrawn on 30 September 2017 for non-paying customers and 31 December 2017 for paying customers. [10]

Architecture

The main difference between OpenShift and vanilla Kubernetes is its extension of the platform with build-related artifacts as first-class Kubernetes resources upon which standard Kubernetes operations can apply. OpenShift's oc client offers a superset of the standard kubectl (Kubernetes standard client) capabilities. [11] , including direct interaction with build resources via sub-commands like new-build or start-build. It also provided out of the box an OpenShift-native pod builds technology called Source-to-Image (S2I), though this is slowly being phased out in favor of Tekton, a cloud-native CI/CD framework for Kubernetes.

Other differences include:

  1. An out-of-the-box integrated container image registry.
  2. Unique resources like ImageStreams (a sequence of pointers to images which can be associated with deployments) and Templates (a packaging mechanism for application components).
  3. The new-app command, which initiates an application deployment, automatically applies the app label (with the value of the label taken from the --name argument) to all created resources, simplifying management.
  4. Support for multiple infrastructure platforms, including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, vSphere, and bare metal. [12]
  5. OpenShift’s implementation of Deployment, called DeploymentConfig is logic-based in comparison to Kubernetes' controller-based Deployment objects. [12] As of v4.5, OpenShift is steering more towards Deployments by changing the default behavior of its CLI.
  6. An embedded OperatorHub, a web GUI for browsing and installing a library of Kubernetes Operators packaged for easy life cycle management, including Red Hat authored Operators, Red Hat Certified Operators and Community Operators. [13]

OpenShift v4 tightly controls the operating systems for "control plane" components. They must run on Red Hat CoreOS, enabling automated, reliable upgrades and patches. The compute (worker) nodes can run any Linux OS or even Windows.

OpenShift introduced the concept of routes -- points of traffic ingress into the cluster. This later influenced the Kubernetes ingress concept. [14]

OpenShift also bundles various software components from the Kubernetes ecosystem for enhanced functionality. For observability, it includes Prometheus, Fluentd, Vector, Loki, and Istio (branded as Red Hat Service Mesh, based on the Maistra open source project).

Products

OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift Container Platform (formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise [15] ) is Red Hat's on-premises private platform as a service product, built around application containers powered by CRI-O, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS. [16]

OKD

OKD, known until August 2018 as OpenShift Origin [17] (Origin Community Distribution) is the upstream community project for OpenShift. Built around a core of CRI-O container runtime and Kubernetes cluster management, OKD is augmented by application life cycle management functionality and DevOps tooling. All source code for the OKD project is available under the Apache License (Version 2.0) on GitHub. [18] [19]

Red Hat OpenShift Online

Red Hat OpenShift Online (RHOO) is a public cloud application development and hosting software as a service (SaaS) that runs on AWS and IBM Cloud. [20] OpenShift Online is limited to running containers that do not require root. [9]

OpenShift Dedicated

OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) is Red Hat's managed private cluster offering on the marketplaces of Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) since December 2016. [21] [22] A similar managed service is offered on Microsoft Azure under the name Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO). [23]

OpenShift Data Foundation

OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) provides cloud-native storage, data management and data protection for applications running on the OpenShift platform in cloud, [24] on-premises, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments.

OpenShift Database Access

Red Hat OpenShift Database Access (RHODA) is a capability for managed OpenShift environments (OSD and ROSA) that enables administrators to set up connections to database-as-a-service offerings from different providers. Its initial alpha release included support for MongoDB Atlas for MongoDB and Crunchy Bridge for PostgreSQL. [25]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Release Status" . Retrieved 2026-01-22.
  2. ↑ "Announcing OpenShift". Archived from the original on 2019-09-26. Retrieved 2019-09-26.
  3. 1 2 Joe Fernandes (November 7, 2016). "Why Red Hat Chose Kubernetes for OpenShift". Red Hat Blog. Archived from the original on May 18, 2023. Retrieved August 2, 2021.
  4. ↑ Dave Rosenberg (November 30, 2010). "Red Hat acquires Makara". Archived from the original on 2019-09-26.
  5. ↑ "Announcing OpenShift Origins". Archived from the original on 2023-01-31. Retrieved 2019-09-26.
  6. ↑ Henry, William (February 21, 2019). "Podman and Buildah for Docker users". Red Hat Developer Blog. Red Hat. Archived from the original on May 22, 2023. Retrieved August 2, 2021.
  7. ↑ OpenShift Origin server on GitHub
  8. ↑ "OpenShift Origin Cartridge Developer's Guide". 2016-04-27. Archived from the original on 2016-05-07. Retrieved 2016-04-27.
  9. 1 2 "Migrating Applications from OpenShift v2 to OpenShift 3 – OpenShift Blog". 18 May 2017. Archived from the original on 31 January 2023. Retrieved 30 August 2017.
  10. ↑ "Get Ready to Migrate to OpenShift Online 3 – OpenShift Blog". 25 August 2017.
  11. ↑ Caban, William (2019). "Chapter 2". Architecting and Operating OpenShift Clusters: OpenShift for Infrastructure and Operations Teams. Apress. ISBN   978-1-4842-4984-0.
  12. 1 2 "Kubernetes vs OpenShift: This is What You Need to Know". The Chief I/O. Archived from the original on September 20, 2020. Retrieved August 2, 2021.
  13. ↑ "OpenShift Container Platform 4.15 Documentation", docs.openshift.com
  14. ↑ Kubernetes Ingress vs OpenShift Route, archived from the original on 2023-03-12, retrieved 2021-01-03
  15. ↑ "OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 Release Notes | Release Notes | OpenShift Container Platform 3.3". docs.openshift.com. 27 September 2016. Archived from the original on 29 March 2023. Retrieved 8 May 2019.
  16. ↑ "OpenShift Container Platform architecture". OpenShift 4.11 Documentation. Red Hat. Archived from the original on January 31, 2023. Retrieved August 23, 2022.
  17. ↑ "OKD: Renaming of OpenShift Origin with 3.10 Release – Red Hat OpenShift Blog". 3 August 2018. Archived from the original on 30 March 2023. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  18. ↑ OpenShift Origin on GitHub
  19. ↑ "OKD: The Community Distribution of Kubernetes that powers Red Hat's OpenShift". GitHub . 17 August 2022. Archived from the original on 27 May 2023. Retrieved 15 August 2022.
  20. ↑ Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Red Hat opens new OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service public cloud – ZDNet". ZDNet . Archived from the original on 2023-05-28. Retrieved 2018-05-21.
  21. ↑ Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Red Hat launches OpenShift on Google Cloud – ZDNet". ZDNet . Archived from the original on 2023-04-01. Retrieved 2018-05-21.
  22. ↑ "Red Hat Launches OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform". www.redhat.com. 8 December 2016. Archived from the original on 19 May 2023. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  23. ↑ "Azure Red Hat OpenShift – Kubernetes PaaS | Microsoft Azure". azure.microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 2023-05-09. Retrieved 2022-07-11.
  24. ↑ Fritts, Harold (2 February 2022). "Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Becomes Part of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus". StorageReview.com. Archived from the original on 2023-03-29. Retrieved 2022-12-06.
  25. ↑ "Simplifying Database Cloud Service Access". Archived from the original on 2023-04-02. Retrieved 2021-11-02.

Further reading

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