Azure Red Hat OpenShift — A Cloud Solution Architect’s View
By: Mathijs Lautenbach
Tags: Red Hat Openshift, Cloud Modernization, Azure, Application Modernization, Aro

It can be difficult for organisations to transform Cloud intentions into reality. To guide them safely through their Cloud journey and to streamline the process, many organisations use a Cloud Adoption Framework such as this option for Azure.

Based on my experience of working on Cloud Migrations and Cloud Adoptions with customers in Version 1, typically customers would utilise an Adoption Framework in tandem with Cloud Strategy assessments to identify differences between their current and desired states to define their Cloud Strategy.

Why? Well, having a clear strategy helps put a solid plan in place and we can then build the first landing zones for them.

There are many different options to adopt the full potential of Public Cloud. Some workloads can be identified as suitable candidates for a ‘lift-and-shift’ migration, where these existing workloads are migrated ‘as-is’ to the cloud platform without any transformation.

To fully leverage the powerful features and solutions of Cloud and to maximise measurable business benefits (such as cost savings, increased efficiency and data analytics) ‘lift-and-shift’ workloads sat on Cloud usually wouldn’t be the final stop on the journey. Unless for example, the customer had one simple goal of exiting a datacentre very quickly.

Typically once workloads are migrated to Public Cloud, a Cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure would be used to continue along the Cloud journey to innovate, modernise applications or develop more ‘cloud-native’ applications that tie into the wide range of services that would be out of reach for most organisations in on-premise environments.

But how do these organisations deploy, manage and run the supporting Cloud technology that enables this innovation? There are many technical options available to do this ranging from self-hosted container platforms (like Azure Kubernetes), running PaaS services (Azure App Services) and Azure Container Instances, described in more detail in this very informative blog post from my colleague Joao Goncalves.

Whatever option an organisation decides to run with, there is a common blocker I have observed; specialised skills are required to address challenges such as setting up CI/CD pipelines, integration with other Azure services, day-to-day management and securing of the workloads. Typically these skills aren’t available in-house unless an organisation is at a much more mature point on their Cloud journey.

One alternative option for organisations with limited container experience that want to look after those responsibilities would be Azure Redhat Openshift. This is a fully managed OpenShift service, jointly operated with Red Hat that has been around since Q2 of 2019 to offer organisations the following benefits:

1. A Fully Managed Red Hat OpenShift Service

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is consumed ‘as a Service’, removing the requirement to manage the underlying infrastructure and the need to perform upgrade operations. The OpenShift cluster is deployed in a locked-down Resource group in the customer's subscription.

2. An Enterprise-Grade Container Platform

Out of the box. Azure Red Hat Openshift addresses security and compliance and allows organisations to deploy business-critical applications, offering an industry-leading SLA of 99.95% availability.

3. Innovation Enablement

Azure Red Hat Openshift enables developers to harness Cloud solutions and innovation with:

Built-in CI/CD pipelines providing support for automated builds

Traditional CI/CD tools

Cloud and Kubernetes native tools and integrations

Native integration with hundreds of Azure services such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Cosmos DB and many more

Support for a broad set of tools and languages

Container support for great application portability

4. Easy Setup and Cost-Effective Scalability

With an easy setup process and the ability to scale cost-effectively to meet demand, Azure Red Hat OpenShift allows organisations to free up valuable IT resources and time to enable them to focus on higher-value activities or strategic business objectives.

It’s possible to provision a highly available cluster with multiple application nodes in minutes. When scale or workload demand changes over time, the application nodes can easily be expanded with additional nodes and/or tailored to meet workload-specific demands with a choice of standard, high-memory, or high-CPU application nodes.

On the financial side, billing for the Azure Red Hat OpenShift is handled directly by Microsoft just like other Microsoft Azure Services, there doesn’t need to be a separate Red Hat contract for this collaboration of two vendors.