We have done various blogs on Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) over the past few years https://www.vamsitalkstech.com/cloud/openshift-v3-paas-for-the-software-defined-data-center-6-7/. OCP essentially follows the standard RedHat model of productizing mature, stable and feature-rich open-source projects and adding additional capabilities to make it suitable for enterprise deployments. OCP also adds long-term supports as well as certifications for RHEL and RH Core OS. RHEL is the most popular Linux distribution in enterprise IT organizations and the goal is to provide a consistent platform for customers to deploy and manage OCP on.
While the majority of OCP deployments run on-premise, customers have long been deploying OpenShift on AWS whether they self-manage it or via OpenShift Dedicated. Operationally, running a PaaS platform such as OCP and managing it on-premise can be quite a daunting challenge. Day 1 and Day 2 operations require a platform and IaC (Infrastructure as Code tools such as Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation etc) knowledge as well as support for operations such as monitoring, upgrades, and patching etc.
With a view to making all of the above easier and offering a managed service, Red Hat and AWS have developed Red Hat OpenShift Service (ROSA) on AWS. The goal of the platform is to allow customers to focus on developing applications that add value to their businesses without spending time & budgets on the undifferentiated heavy lifting to manage OCP and the underlying IaaS.
The key advantages of ROSA are as follows –
- A Managed Service – ROSA is fully managed 24X7X365 by a team of Red Hat SREs. Which means that all Day 1, Day 2 operations as well as cluster monitoring, upgrades are all managed for you. This allows enterprises to cut their operational budgets while focusing on developing their applications. Further ROSA runs within a customer’s AWS account and integrates extremely well with all their existing AWS infrastructure (EC2 instances, Lambda Services, ELBs, ALBs, Databases etc) running in their VPCs.
- Simplified Billing and Provisioning – The ROSA service is now listed on the AWS console along with other AWS services such as EKS, ECS, S3 etc. Customers have a choice of using the console or the ROSA CLI to provision their clusters. And at the end of their billing period, customers get one ROSA bill which has various line items for their underlying AWS resources such as EC2 instances, ELBs, EBS volumes, ROSA etc.
- Joint Support – ROSA is jointly supported by Red Hat and AWS which means that customers now just open up one support ticket to engage Tier 1 and Tier 2 support along with well-defined escalation paths for Tier 3.
- ROSA is the same OCP as deployed on-prem. It provides the same CI/CD pipeline, GitOps constructs as well as logging, monitoring frameworks built on Prometheus and Alert Manager. There is no need for customers to build or add any integrations that they already use with OCP on-prem.
- ROSA enables current OCP customers who operate in highly regulated industries to leverage the strength of AWS in availability and compliance. ROSA clusters can easily be deployed across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) in global Regions. Finally, ROSA running on AWS offers compliance with various industry-standard regulations such as SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI, FedRamp etc.
In this blog post, we introduced and discussed the benefits of ROSA. Based on my daily customer conversations, this should be an exciting offering to customers who like OCP but want a more seamless cloud-based offering. The next blog post will discuss the architecture of ROSA and a reference model for production-grade deployments on AWS.