Case Study: Openshift

7 min readSep 4, 2021

About Openshift

OpenShift. OpenShift is a family of containerization software developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Introduction to OpenShift Applications (DO101) is designed to respond to the need to quickly and easily learn the basics of how to deploy container applications. This course is the first step in the container adoption journey for novice container application developers.

Need Of Openshift

OpenShift includes everything you need for a hybrid cloud, like a container runtime, networking, monitoring, container registry, authentication, and authorization. I explain how OpenShift can do all of that by introducing its architecture and components. OpenShift architecture and components.

OpenShift is a family of containerization software developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — an on-premises platform

Features and Benefits

Open-source standards — Incorporates both Open Containers Initiative (OCI)/Docker-formatted containers and Kubernetes for container orchestration, in addition to other open source technologies. Users are not restricted to the technology or business roadmap of a specific vendor.

Self-service provisioning — Developers can quickly and easily create applications on-demand from the tools they use most, while operations retain full control over the entire environment.

Persistent storage — By providing support for persistent storage, the OpenShift Container Platform allows users to run both stateful applications and cloud-native stateless applications.

Polyglot, multilanguage support — Developers can use various languages, frameworks, and databases on the same platform with ease.

Automation — Streamlined and automated container and application builds, deployments, scaling, health management, and more are standard with OpenShift Container Platform.

User interfaces — Developers have direct access to a rich set of command-line tools, a multi-device web console, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDEs), such as Red Hat CodeReady Studio (aka JBoss ® Developer Studio) and container-native CodeReady Workspaces.

Operational management — Red Hat Monitoring included in OpenShift Container Platform, gives users real-time visibility into their containerized application and infrastructure.

Scalability — Applications running on the OpenShift Container Platform can easily scale to thousands of instances across hundreds of nodes in a matter of seconds.

Robust ecosystem — An ever-expanding ecosystem of partners provides a wide variety of integrations. Additional storage and network providers, IDEs and CI integrations, independent software vendor (ISV) solutions, and more are provided by these third parties for use with the OpenShift Container Platform.

Container portability — Built on a standardized Linux container model powered by Red Hat application programming interfaces (APIs), applications created on OpenShift Container Platform can easily run anywhere that supports Docker-formatted containers.

Use Of OpenShift :

OpenShift provides a common platform for enterprise units to host their applications on a cloud without worrying about the underlying operating system. This makes it very easy to use, develop, and deploy applications on the cloud. One of the key features is, it provides managed hardware and network resources for all kinds of development and testing. With OpenShift, PaaS developer has the freedom to design their required environment with specifications.

Unlike most propriety options, open-source platforms like OpenShift have advantageous developer/user communities that can typically assist in quicker bug fixes and increase functionality. OpenShift also combats many of the challenges that containerization can orchestrate, including:

Difficulty deploying containers across various frameworks, languages, or databases
Issues with ramping container resource usage up and down in response to container use
Issues with tracking dependencies
Difficulty tracking and monitoring container deployment on a systemic level to avoid bottlenecks and maximize productivity
Excessive time required to manage overall container usage across your system architecture
Difficulty and time involved in provisioning containers and performing health management checks
Issues with scaling applications
Inability to run both stateful applications and cloud-native stateless applications simultaneously
Excessively complicated container provisioning procedures

OpenShift allows you to address the above issues by using an open source architecture that enables you to run applications across physical, virtual, public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Any applications originating on OpenShift can run on any environment supporting Docker-formatted containers.

The platform features a robust set of command-line functionality tools as well as a multidevice web console, facilitating container orchestration across the entirety of your environment. Rapid scalability involving hundreds of instances across thousands of nodes — along with automated application builds and container health management — is also supported.

OpenShift Advantages

Better container image management. The ImageStream feature on OpenShift makes it easy to upload and manage a container image without dealing with the registry.

Extensive security features. Because of its strict security policies, OpenShift can identify vulnerabilities and easily redress them.
Excellent user experience. OpenShift offers excellent support to its users in terms of user experience, making it ideal for beginners.

Case Study: Barclays adopts agile DevOps culture to stay competitive

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Barclays, a global financial services provider based in London, faced increasing regulatory pressure and market demands — led by industry disruptors offering modern, digital services. Looking to increase innovation and productivity, Barclays set out to build an Application Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as part of its cloud program. It used Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform and other Red Hat solutions to update its IT infrastructure and adopt an agile, DevOps approach to application development, giving its developers on-demand, self-service capabilities. As a result, the bank improved its efficiency and agility to innovate faster and stay competitive.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial services

Region: EMEA

Location: London, United Kingdom

Company size: 129,000 employees

Barclays stays ahead of the competition with Red Hat and DevOps

Barclays used Red Hat solutions and a DevOps approach to increase innovation, speed, and productivity to stay competitive.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

Challenge: Keep pace with market demands

Facing industry and competitive pressure, Barclays needed to create a more responsive business. “We need to deliver products to market quicker than ever and be more responsive to market trends,” said Simon Cashmore, head of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) middleware engineering at Barclays. “We want to become the bank of the future.” Barclays sought to update both its IT environment and its culture, to take full advantage of the best tools and recruit the best banking talent.

“We want to be more dynamic in the way we produce applications and make better use of our underlying hardware and software, as well as our staff.”

Solution: Modernize technology and culture

Barclays adopted a DevOps approach where technical and business teams work together to quickly meet customer and market demands through continuous development. As part of the bank’s cloud strategy, it chose to replace its traditional middleware for an on-premise aPaaS with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This solution provides its development teams with a more secure, consistent, and scalable platform for application development and hosting. The bank received on-site assistance from Red Hat to design and build the solution and train its teams.

“We saw this project as a journey. Deploying the initial platform was as much about understanding how internal end users apply the technology as it was choosing the technology,”
said Cashmore.

Results: Support a cloud journey

With its new DevOps approach and PaaS environment, Barclays’ developers can work more efficiently to quickly release updates and features. Self-service capabilities have cut provisioning times from weeks to hours and freed up IT staff to work on new, valuable projects instead of routine tasks. These improvements have helped the bank’s internal users — in London and worldwide — work more effectively.

“Now, with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we’re more agile,”
said Cashmore

“We can think of an idea, try it, fail, learn, and make adjustments. Culturally, that’s a big change.” Moving forward, the bank plans to move into public cloud computing and offer the same service across public and private clouds.